TB Joshua’s death: the other view

 His demise calls for reflection on individual believers’ personal devotion to God

VICTOR KALALANDA, Lusaka June 9, 2021

TB Joshua

Since its inception, Christianity has been punctuated by what could be termed as moments of profound tragedy, which raise serious questions about how its adherents should best approach the faith.

 One such instance happened in 1988.

Until that year, the great evangelist Jimmy Swaggart, once referred to as “God’s favourite preacher,” had a flawless rise to one of the most glorious religious stardoms the world has ever known.

 At the height of his impact in 1985, he had become not only the most popular televangelist in America, but all over the world, touching millions of lives through telecasts transmitted to over 3,000 radio stations and cable systems every week.

But three years later, when he became embroiled in a highly publicised and juicy, as journalists say, sex scandal, Christians in all ramifications were riveted to the spot and wondered why and how God could allow such a thing to happen.

And now when probably the greatest Christian spiritual leader, Nigeria’s TB Joshua, died on Saturday, the expanse of disbelief in Christendom once again was exposed in a trice, since the broad majority of believers anticipated old age for such an extraordinary minister of the Gospel.

The impassioned reactions of worshippers-turned-mourners on Sunday outside the locked premises of the Synagogue Church of All Nations (SCOAN), the megachurch in Nigeria where TB Joshua would preach most of his sermons, minister healing to the sick and conduct deliverance sessions, spoke volumes about this.

“It’s unbelievable . . . this man [should] please wake up. He has not finished his assignment. All of us are in a mourning mood. Nobody is happy,” said one mourner.

“[He was] exemplary,” another mourner commented, “a practical Jesus Christ in a physical human being in my generation.”

In more dramatic scenes, when widely acclaimed Nigerian preacher Jeremiah Fufeyin asked his congregation to observe a minute of silence in honour of the late televangelist, wild screaming went up in his church building while other church members were knocked down to the floor by emotion and writhed in pain.

With more emphasis provided by Nigerian prophet’s death, what has increasingly become clear in the past is that every time God uses a man to impact generations of Christians, people become so attached to them that they consciously or subconsciously begin to attach immortality or infallibility to their person.

And as a natural thing, while there is nothing wrong with loving a man of God so dearly, it becomes a problem when we begin to perceive God and understand spirituality in their terms.

It tends to be the most probable cause of apostasy or falling away from the faith, and also general indifference to spirituality, when the men we regard so highly succumb to sin or death.

In the case of TB Joshua, a world-renowned faith healer, for example, dying at the relatively young age of 57 after a ground-breaking ministry of performing signs and wonders has left many Christians with unanswered questions: why didn’t God take him early? How come he did not renounce his own death? Will the world now perceive Christianity as weak? If such a powerful man of God can die in this manner, what about us?

All these questions and many others like them have arisen whenever such moments of tragedy, such as those involving the death of a great preacher or their involvement in sin, happen.

Born Temitope Balogun Joshua after reportedly being in his mother’s womb for 15 months, the late pastor was born on June 12, 1963 in a nondescript village called Arigidi in Akoko, Ondo State, Nigeria.

Having cheated death in a bloodcurdling accident during his childhood, when a boulder crashed through the roof of his house, TB Joshua started exuding a sense of numinous power at a young age, ultimately establishing a ministry with only 8 members in response to a divine call he claimed to have received in spiritual encounter during a 40-day fast.

According to the SCOAN website, TB Joshua had gone through a rough patch growing up, dropping out of secondary school in his first year, tending to a poultry farm, teaching little children while attending evening classes and washing people’s legs on the muddy streets of Lagos in Nigeria.

It’s against this background that he had risen to become a globally venerated icon of Christianity, won the respect of presidents, created a top Christian television station and YouTube channel, and provided humanitarian aid to millions of underprivileged people in the form of food, shelter, clothing and scholarship.

And as he carved out a typical storyline of grass to grace and obscurity to fame, like many other great men, myths of invincibility were associated with him—of course, without his approval—and now that he is dead, these tend to trouble religious conscience and the very integrity of popular speculation and imagination.

As such, TB Joshua’s death is an event that should call the body of Christ to a moment of reflection because it proves that any great spiritual leader could die any time and under happy, unhappy or mysterious circumstances, but it is our personal commitment to God that will determine whether we remain standing firm in the faith or not.

Instead of Christians frowning before God, the prophet’s demise, as a direct consequence, ought to be their humbling moment, a time when every believer accepts the eventual occurrence of their own mortality.

It’s also a time when Christians begin to look at amen of God, not with familiarity or contempt, but as means to faith and not as the faith itself.

The ultimate focus for every believer should be on Jesus Christ and this focus should be rooted in a personal devotion to God built through consistency in the spiritual disciplines of individual prayer, fasting and bible reading.

In this way, Christians themselves will exemplify the Bible scripture in 1 Thessalonians 4:13, which says of death that “brothers and sisters, we do not want you to be uninformed about those who sleep in death, so that you do not grieve like the rest of mankind, who have no hope.”

And the greatest way of remembering TB Joshua, in the words of Apostle Frederick Kaluluma of City of the Lord Church, is “to do the works he did and practice the Christian faith he taught, so that we can meet him again in glory.”

And another pastor, Daniel Kaira, says “I think [TB Joshua] is a man who’s worthy of being celebrated because on the point of him being a Christian and a Christian leader, he demonstrated a lot of things [such as] consistency over time: he wasn’t a mystery. He was a man whose life could be traced from when he didn’t have anything and how he obeyed God in fasting to how God raised him to prominence.”

In the final analysis, therefore, Christians should be able to develop their own personal relationship with God that will last long after they have benefited from the impact of great men of God like TB Joshua. At no time should death undermine a believer’s faith.