Editorial
See Something, Do Something
The most daunting challenge now facing the PCC’s new Moderator, the Rt. Rev. Miki Abia, is what do with the KPs – the sacred cows his predecessor surrounded him with before leaving. Their job is to foster their grandmaster’s agenda and keep the new man running in the orbit they traced for him. But the whole Church hangs its hopes on Miki’s integrity and his determination to put an end to all their anarchic designs. Miki is by nature taciturn and unpredictable, and many optimists already credit him with decisiveness. Others suspect he is one of the grandmaster’s disciples and cannot muster the courage to upset his apple cart.
And he has just about a month to prove them right or wrong. All eyes are riveted on his May staffing decisions to know if he is made of the stuff to take the PCC out of the woods.
There are many Fonki policies crying out to be reversed, many wounds waiting to be healed, but most especially many square pegs that must be taken out of the round holes Fonki put them into.
Truth House is committed to giving Moderator Miki every support by way of information, to enable him kick the bulls out of the Church’s china shop before they wreak irreparable havoc.
Beginning with this issue of True Talk, TH intends to turn the spotlight on some of the intolerably abusive behavior of some of these pastors and Church workers who have enjoyed total immunity under Fonki. For them it can no longer be business as usual.
Any Christian of the PCC, who is a victim or firsthand witness of any abuses by these or other Church officials, is encouraged to get the information to TH for action. Don’t become an accomplice by your silence.
At Rev. Miki’s induction, his predecessor enjoined him to “be the change you want for the Church”. You too can be part of that change by saying something or doing something when you see something going wrong.
Giving Thanks or Paying Tax?
Cameroonians complain that the only thing their government has not yet slammed a tax on, is the air they breathe. But even that government has not yet levied a tax on funerals. However, that should change really soon, as some so-called pastors in the PCC are teaching the government that funeral services are a wellspring of tax revenue.
What happened last weekend in Douala certainly made the Late E.T. Egbe turn in his grave. An extortionist relieved his granddaughter, Marie, of over half a million CFA for wanting to give her dear mother a decent Christian burial.
Her extortionist of a pastor, a man who clearly should have no business with a clerical collar, took advantage of her pain, and especially of her gullibility, to demand…. wait for it… 650,000 CFA from her before he could accept to conduct a funeral service for her late mother. He said 500 000 of that sum was for the funeral rite while 150 000 would go to fares for officiating pastors.
What could this be other than armed robbery using the pastoral cassock as a disguise and the Cross of Christ as an arm?
And this bloke is no greenhorn in this thievery. Alarm bells had already clanged from Kumba where he regularly charged 350,000 CFA, and bereaved families who could not afford it were denied funeral rights for their loved ones. In the face of the scandal, a pastor in neighboring Ikiliwindi and another in Kang Barombi had to defy this local chieftain’s edict by causing the corpses to be ferried from his congregation to theirs for burial.
And the bloke has left a trail of scandalous antics wherever he has been in the past ten years, as part of what he dares to call his “ministry”. Nsimeyong congregation has barely recovered from the 7 million rip off. And it took the recent exposure of the KP cult for people to begin to see how anyone could get away with all the crude arrogance and permissiveness that are now his well-known trade mark.
Look, we don’t blame people for traits of character they may have inherited from their parents, or for the parents’ colossal failure at raising them in the straight and narrow. However, we are duty-bound to protect society from anyone whom even pastoral training cannot straighten. A bull in a china shop is no spectacle to fold our arms about.
We now learn that behaviour like that of this individual was actually incubated in the seminary where a group of classmates reportedly vowed to make the church their milking cow if ever they came to power. And that moment for them seems to have come ten years ago when one of them was elected head of our Church. Under his patronage many of them took unprecedented liberties with Church money and wrought havoc in congregation after congregation, with conduct that is anything but pastoral – from using the pulpit to insult people to engaging in fist fights with their parishioners. And when everybody expected them to be severely disciplined, their patron and grandmaster promoted them or assigned them to more lucrative stations. That’s how come this thug was able, despite his incurably catastrophic stewardship, to land himself successive postings to Nsimeyong, Bonaberi, Kumba Town, and Bonamoussadi. And this immunity fires his arrogance, as he would announce to whoever cares to listen, that if you go to the Synod Office with a report against him, you will wait outside for hours while he is inside discussing the complaint with the grandmaster over a cup of coffee. It also fires his worship of the grandmaster to the point he publicly swore to die defending his name.
Even without the mindless excesses of pastors like this, the lack of Christian compassion in our Church has been raising eyebrows. The church itself has been progressively sliding back to the sale of indulgences that Luther led the protest against.
In doing that, the Church has shielded itself with 1Thessalonians 5:18 (“in everything give thanks”) and 2 Corinthians 9:7 (“God loves a cheerful giver”). Now these unscrupulous pastors have latched onto it and taken it to another, more personal level. And by taking excessive liberties to satisfy their cupidity they have pushed Christians to the limit, causing them to start questioning even the very essence of giving and hence to stint their material support to the church.
Take note that the pews are getting too woke to be taken for granted. The Church needs to look itself in the mirror and adjust to stay relevant and viable.
Paul’s exhortation to give thanks in everything implies gratitude for all the underserved favour God sends our way – childbirth, marriage, promotions at work, success in school, prosperity in business, bountiful harvests etc. It must not be an excuse for the Church to wring money out of struggling families especially when they are bereaved.
In fact, given the financial stress that comes with the death of a loved one, that ought to be the moment for the Church to show its human face by supporting the bereaved family in whatever way it can. How does it sit in the conscience of the Church as a family, that we keep funeral offerings that could have helped bail out a desperate bereaved family, or worse still that we give them a basket, during the funeral service, to bring in a family offering? The claim that it is a free will offering is hollow. In most cases they are simply complying with an established tradition, be it cheerfully or reluctantly. We can only be sure it’s cheerful giving if, sometime after the funeral, the family comes back in thanksgiving. What we are doing now makes it look more like paying taxes than giving thanks.
That needs to change and any pastor who is interested being a tax collector should be encouraged to take off his/her cassock and apply to the Ministry of finance. And any young seminarian dreaming of becoming a tax collecting pastor should switch schools from Kosala to ENAM.
Come to think of it, does the Church need these taxes to be financially self-reliant? Did the Basel Mission have to resort to these means to survive and even fund us offshoots like the PCC? Truth House will seek answers to these questions in good time, as we explore existing and possible ways and means.
For now our focus is on the Church’s compassion, or the lack of it, towards its members in times of need, especially widows and orphans.
The Church’s Burden of Care
A young Presbyterian widow in Douala was fighting back tears as she recounted what she called her predicament at the hands of the Church under the outgone Moderator. Her story was, at the same time, sad, embarrassing, and infuriating for any listener with a sense of fairness.
TT will spare you the sordid details for now, first because we need to hear the other side, and we know the other side will not deign to talk to TT. All we can do is ask whether the building in this picture, which is now PCC property in Bamenda represents a burden on our Christian conscience as a Church. If it does, we can trust the new administration to make things right and not push a Christian widow to the point of seeking redress from secular hands.
We also trust that the Church will soon even things out between its care for pastors’ widows and other Christian widows.
It is also time we stopped neglecting other needy children in our Church while making scholarship funds exclusively available to pastors and their children.
Noise from Ntahghem
As for the inconsequential prattle that came out of Ntaghem on Good Friday, TH finds it completely dismissible. We mention it at all not because of its content – there was none- but because of what the context exposes about the prattler himself.
That was Good Friday, a day when there should be no space on any Christian mind for anything but this picture. (Insert pic of Christ in the Cross) A day when the lectionary of our Church provided for nothing else but reflections on the painful assassination of the man because of whom we can call ourselves Christians.
A day when anyone calling himself or herself a pastor would have purified themselves through prayer and fasting in order to be a credible vicar of Christ.
On that day the individual who passes for a parish pastor in Ntaghem chose to water down the sermon preached by the associate pastor with an out-of-context rant.
In a piteous display of spiritual bankruptcy he erupted in a long, vacuous tirade in which he tried desperately to induce hate against Truth House, describing parishioners associated with it as rascals.
You don’t need to know this bloke. Just listen to that rant and you will know that a congregation as mature as Ntaghem deserves better. And that seems to be the core of the problem facing the church now. A lot of half-baked pastors are now scared of losing positions to which they were appointed on no merit other than their subservience to a cultic patron. And they are right to be scared now, because Truth House is committed to dismantling that fabric of patronage and seeding a new culture of transparency and merit.
One warning, though: your smart campaign against TH is dead on arrival because we have nothing to hide. Our activities are all documented and open to public scrutiny and the pews are woke enough to tell who is working for them and who against.
