Prosperity Teachings Research Articles

Economic influence of prosperity gospel on individual followers in neo-Pentecostal movements in Karingani Ward Tharaka Nithi County, Kenya

The study sought to investigate how prosperity gospel influences the economic aspect of its followers in neo-Pentecostal movements in Karingani Ward Tharaka Nithi County, Kenya. In Kenya, Neo-Pentecostal movements are growing and spreading from urban to rural areas, as witnessed in Karingani Ward, Tharaka Nithi County, Kenya. There has been an increase in self-founded churches, commonly known as charismatic movements, over the past decade. The Functionalism Theory guided the study in analysing the prosperity gospel's influence on its followers' economic aspect. The theory indicates that religion is a social influencer that leads to changes in behaviour and perception or worldview that are essential to economic growth. The study applied the descriptive survey design. Yamane’s formula was applied to obtain a sample size of 288 respondents. In addition, six pastors were selected from the churches; the total sample was 294 respondents. In the six selected churches, a larger population was between (20-50 years); the majority were women and indicated to be small business owners and employed in the private sector. The research instruments utilised were questionnaires, interviews, and focused group discussions. The study's findings revealed that prosperity teachings in Neo-Pentecostal movements positively influenced its followers. Prosperity teaching with biblical grounding had influenced adherents in these movements to have financial, investment, and entrepreneurial abilities through seminars, idea sharing, and continuous assistance from members, which have impacted their followers to experience social status mobility. This paper recommends a future study on how perceived YouTube or social media incomes can benefit all adherents.

Impact of prosperity gospel on the political aspect in selected neo-pentecostal movements in Karingani ward, Tharaka Nithi County, Kenya

This study sought to investigates how prosperity gospel influences the political aspect of followers. The prosperity gospel is a teaching that is highly taught in neo-Pentecostal movements, finding acceptability and adaptability in the world, attracting many in neo-Pentecostal movements, hence, how does the gospel influence adherents' political aspect? Neo-Pentecostal movements have increased in numbers over the past decade in Karingani Ward Tharaka Nithi County, Kenya. The Functionalism Theory guided the study to analyse the influence of prosperity gospel on the political aspect of its followers. The study applied the descriptive survey design. Yamane’s formula was applied to obtain a sample size of 281 respondents. In addition, six pastors were selected from the churches, and the total sample was 294 respondents. The research instruments utilised were questionnaires and interviews. The study's findings revealed that prosperity teachings in Neo-Pentecostal movements had positive and negative impacts on the political aspect of followers, which is, voting and supporting specific political leaders and a given political party. On the other hand, the teaching of prosperity in these movements resulted in disunity in the church, ethnic tension, members leaving the church, and fights extending to communal daily living. The study concludes that the involvement of prosperity gospel preachers in political discussion in church significantly influences the political conviction, choices, voter turnout, and social interaction of members of these movements. Therefore, a policy formulation should be recommended that controls direct clergy influence on politics.

Money That Matters: Coins, Banknotes, and Mediation in Tanzanian Prosperity Ministries

Based on long-term ethnographic research in Tanzania, this article contributes to existing scholarship on adaptations and modifications of the so-called gospel in African contexts. I show how the Prosperity Gospel has taken shape in an environment of intense religious/spiritual/medical competition and, not least, of widespread cultural concerns with the moral legitimacy of wealth generated through alliances with spiritual forces. However, I also argue that a deeper understanding of the ways in which the Prosperity Gospel has become contextualized can be reached by moving beyond a focus on cultural concerns with wealth and paying close attention to the exuberance of meanings attributed to money in its most concrete and tangible form, coins and banknotes, as well as to the religious/ritual practices involving money that such meanings inspire. I pursue my analysis by zooming in on two areas where cultural understandings of money as exceeding its materiality and its use value are prevalent: the use of powers of witchcraft to extract money from others and the practice of bride wealth. Whereas the first has to do with understandings of material money as imbued with spiritual powers, the second can be seen as an example of a gift economy, since money given by a groom to his parents-in-law by virtue of containing parts of his soul or his essence becomes the foundation of a relationship of mutual respect between them. In the last part of the article, I show how both understandings are entangled with Prosperity teachings and inform ritual practices involving material money.

Prosperity Gospel: Effects on Nigerian Christian Church and Society

The paper examines effects of prosperity gospel on contemporary Nigerian Christian church and society. It discussed its historical origin and noted that it was birthed in USA and since the seventies now spreading among Nigerian Christian churches and society like corona virus. The study used historical and descriptive methods in its analysis. It discovered that most prosperity teachings are misused, thus, giving a false impression and interpretation about what the Bible really teaches. Finding revealed that, prosperity teachings in a way gives one a sense of hope, direction and reassurance that the life one lives can get better if one can only have faith in God. Equally, it was observed that the prosperity preachers or churches are quite correct in pointing believers to God and the wonderful promises made in his word in order to get their needs met. However, many of these preachers or churches have misused the gospel for monetization, lust for materialism, crimes and selfish advantages and thereby impoverishing their congregation the more rather than improving their lots. This in-turn has reduced the spiritual and moral capacity of the people in the church and society. The work recommended among other thing that the purpose of gospel preachers today should rather focus on doctrinal issues related to desire for the kingdom of God, soul-winning, salvation of man, hard work and good conduct in the church and society than lust for materialism and commercialization of religious activities.

Between contentment and prosperity: A study of 1 Timothy 6:3–12 in light of the prosperity teaching in Nigeria

The prosperity theology is the teaching that every person is purposed by God to be prosperous in all areas of life with emphasis on financial abundance. Since the early 1980s, the gospel of prosperity has been firmly established in Nigeria. This article examined this theology considering the demand on Christians for godliness with contentment in 1 Timothy 6:3–12. It employed the descriptive approach and the historical-critical exegesis. This study found that the prosperity preachers often support their claims with the Bible, but texts are usually cited without regard to their literary or historical contexts. It also discovered that 1 Timothy 6:3–12 does not teach that Christians should not be rich, but condemns inordinate desire for money because of the evils associated with it. The text supports benevolence from the wealthy towards the needy, but does not make giving mandatory. This article concluded that the prosperity gospel is at variance with the teaching on godliness with contentment. Instead, it encourages greed for money among Christians, particularly in view of the claim that poverty is proof of unrighteousness. The doctrine of giving in order to receive from God contradicts the principle of giving as found in 1 Timothy 6 and other relevant New Testament texts.Contribution: The article is a contribution to Christian ethics with a special focus on Christian attitude to money. It postulates that the prosperity teaching that all must be rich, contradicts the demand on Christians for godliness with contentment.

Emmanuel Kwesi Anim: Who Wants to be a Millionaire? An Analysis of Prosperity Teaching in the Charismatic Ministries (Churches) in Ghana and its Wider Impact. Berlin: LIT 2020, 278 Seiten

Bibliographie: Wogu, Chigemezi Nnadozie: Emmanuel Kwesi Anim: Who Wants to be a Millionaire? An Analysis of Prosperity Teaching in the Charismatic Ministries (Churches) in Ghana and its Wider Impact. Berlin: LIT 2020, 278 Seiten, PERIPHERIE – Politik • Ökonomie • Kultur, Nr. 162+163 (2-2021), S. 366-368. https://doi.org/10.3224/peripherie.v41i2-3.19 ----- Open-Access-Lizenz: Dieser Beitrag ist ab dem 25.10.2021 im Open Access unter der Creative-Commons-Lizenz CC BY 4.0 (Namensnennung 4.0 International) verfügbar. Weitere Informationen zur Lizenz und den Nutzungsbedingungen finden Sie hier .

SUFFERING AND SOVEREIGNTY OF GOD ACCORDING TO JOHN PIPER AND ITS IMPLICATION FOR THE CHURCH TODAY

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to analyze the theology of suffering from a biblical perspective by using literature review as methodology.
 Methodology: One of the foundational evangelical presuppositions for theological research is that Scripture is divinely authored and is therefore without error, and authoritative for our faith and practice.
 Findings: The study found that suffering is biblical and should be expected by all Christians as they are not exempted from it, unlike prosperity teaching. Suffering has the purpose of refining and maturing our faith. Further, it is to display the greatness of the glory of the grace of God. 
 Unique Contribution to theory and practice: Therefore, it is recommended for Christians to depend on God at all seasons by asking for wisdom and grace from him. So in this paper, the relationship between suffering and the sovereignty of God and its implication to the church will be discussed with a particular focus on John Piper's work

The Prosperity Gospel: A Distortion of the Fundamental Evangelical Tenets

Prosperity Gospel is a problematic issue for the Evangelical and Pentecostal Christianity, and it is so in at least two perspectives. First, it influences the teaching of many preachers who employ this approach to capture new believers on the one hand, and it is sharply criticised by many prominent Evangelical theologians who regard it as a serious heresy, a deception of many Christians, on the other. Second, it is a matter of profound theological question raised from the very core of Christian faith and asking how to find a delicate balance between Jesus' calling to bear the cross and his blessing from the Sermon on the Mount. The most frequent framework is the one that considers the prosperity gospel as the distortion of the substantial Evangelical tenets, and that stems from the various ideological and sociological processes in the 19th United States. The article offers a brief outline of the prosperity message and answers the following research questions: What is the prosperity gospel? What are the roots of it? What are the most critical theological points of the prosperity teaching? What charges are raised by the critics from the Evangelical background? The literary analysis of Evangelical literature is the primary method used to solve the problem.

Ethical Audit of Prosperity Gospel

Emerging manifestations in contemporary studies regarding Pentecostal spirituality in Africa reveals two dramatic findings for scholarship. First, success in the Christian world is defined by prosperity gospel replete with economic message that wealth is a sign of God's blessing and a compensation for prayer as well as “sowing of seed”. Second, the notion of an abundant God and the propensity to claim innocence of any motive other than fulfilling God's will for human beings. Drawing upon an extensive contemporary research on prosperity doctrine and based on content analysis, this article examines prosperity teachings and claims and identifies ethical issues that relate to the doctrine. Findings reveals that though prosperity preachers use Bible to support their claims, prosperity gospel does not surmount social misery, poverty and corruption, rather, it entrenches the ills as exemplified in excessive incomes, lavish and flamboyant lifestyles of church leaders at the expense of impoverished church members.

Humility, Integrity, and Simplicity

I is an honor and joy to be invited to participate in this tribute to Jonathan and Jean Bonk.1 It has been a personal privilege to be counted among their many, many friends around the world, especially in the global mission community. I got to know them best through many years of annual visits to the Overseas Ministries Study Center, where they were unfailing in the hospitality extended to me, not only while teaching there, but also when I used it as a home away from home for periods of writing. So it was a particular pleasure for me when Jonathan agreed to be a member of the Lausanne Theology Working Group in the years preceding the Third Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization in Cape Town, 2010. He contributed to several consultations at which we examined the depths of meaning— biblical, theological, and missional—in the Lausanne slogan “The whole church taking the whole gospel to the whole world.” In that way, he contributed indirectly also to the congress itself and to the missiological thinking that eventually found succinct expression in the statement emerging from that congress, the Cape Town Commitment.2 Many of us, including Jonathan, were concerned beforehand that the Cape Town Congress should not be merely a time either of celebrating the forward march of evangelical mission endeavors in the past decades or of compiling statistics, strategies, and plans for great efforts in the future. Doubtless celebrating and planning have their place. But we feared that God might not be as pleased with the state of world evangelicalism as we might be tempted to be pleased with ourselves. We lamented the prevalence of abuses perpetrated in the name of Christ—such as extreme forms of prosperity teachings and the unchristlike lives and behavior of some celebrity leaders. We were suspicious that some of the vaunted statistics of church growth, also the funds that they could generate for all kinds of “ministries,” were essentially “cooked”—unverified and lacking in integrity. We deplored the distorting influence of money and power in relationships between churches and mission agencies across the North-South divide. In short, we were convinced that Cape Town must include an element of self-examination and repentance if it was to be true to the claimed biblical foundations of the evangelical missions community it was bringing together. This concern was accepted by the leadership of the Lausanne Movement in their planning of the congress program, and one of the six congress themes was defined as “Integrity: Calling the Church of Christ back to Humility, Integrity, and Simplicity.” I was invited to give the plenary address with that title. Knowing that those three words will echo warmly in the hearts of Jonathan and Jean, and that indeed they resonate with their Mennonite roots and personal characters, I offer below an edited and expanded version of what I said on that occasion. God’s Mission and Ours

Immense, Unfathomed, Unconfined: The Grace of God in Creation, Church, and Community—Essays in Honour of Norman Young

‘What difference does it make if we believe in God as creator? How does it affect the way people live in the world in the present and face the future?’ (15). The editor of this collection frames the book with these two questions by Norman Young, asked and answered over fifty years in his teaching, research, and ordained life. The collection published here derives from a 2010 Melbourne Conference celebrating Professor Young's work, and is deeply affectionate in tone. The essays are grouped in sections which loosely reflect the ‘Wesleyan’ quadrilateral: the editor builds a picture of the nature and work of grace in Scripture, Christian theological tradition, Methodist tradition, and a variety of experience-related areas. A sense of urgency runs through the collection: Norman Young's questions challenge a global Church in his view out of step with its own history (as with emphasis on individualistic piety or prosperity teaching), or with the dilemmas posed by ethnic conflict, the abuse of the earth, and popular cultures. This collection shows mature scholars grappling with the work of God's grace in full awareness of the tragedies and joys of the new millennium in an international Methodist theological voice.The book is edited with a refreshingly light hand, and makes no attempt to bring the contributions into explicit dialogue. Nonetheless the editing guides the reader into critical conversation with and between contributors' themes. How will the paradox of self-emptying love and ultimate power in Charles Wesley's hymns speak to Christian understanding of the earth as a ‘first sacrament’? (Geoffrey Wainwright juxtaposed with Theodore Runyon) How does the claim for the pre-colonial experience of Christ by first peoples, made in the Preamble of the Uniting Church constitution, relate to the Wesleys' thinking on intra-faith love? (Wes Campbell juxtaposed with Tim Macquiban) We have in this collection a glimpse of the internal intellectual economy of a global Methodist diaspora as it considers the implications of incarnation, atonement, and eschatological hope. This makes the collection a useful reference point for present emphases in North/Western hemisphere and South/Eastern hemisphere English-speaking Methodist theology.By way of answer to the editor's initial questions, the collection offers a rich anatomy of grace and its action: grace is the way God enters the world, in summary. Contributions keep evidence of their origin as spoken papers, as in the wry humour of the reflection on ‘grace and grumbling’ in the late section ‘the life of grace’. This collection is clearly aimed at theologically aware practitioners as much as the academy. The reader is well advised to read the final essay first, in which Professor Young offers a reflective theological autobiography: as he has it, the grace of God is ‘manifest supremely in the incarnation’ and ‘helps me to face the reality of the present with hope for the future’ (365, 366). This gives the entry point to understanding the nature and action of grace reported in the twenty-five essays that precede it. Because grace is as it is, the reality of God's grace for Young will always lead to a cruciform ethics characterized by gratitude, and many of the essays develop this theme.This collection is weighted toward the Australian contributors, with notable North American and European voices, but it would be interesting to see how a wider Methodist diaspora would critically engage the themes in this account of grace. In Young's voice, grace is the call on our lives that comes not just from a ‘desire to flee the wrath to come’ as John Wesley might have had it. Our responsible living has its first motive in gratitude and blessing, not fear, and the dominant account of atonement Young offers is reconciliation. To reword the editor's first questions only slightly, ‘How should we live, given that God entered the world in this particular way, embodied in this particular man's life, death and resurrection?’ It is a worthwhile effort to join the collection's contributors to reflect on the meaning of the incarnation and atonement in English-speaking Methodist tradition at this particular moment of global urgency in the early twenty-first century. Has our tradition enough to say to a world with exponentially increasing population, broken by war, economic collapse, and environmental uncertainty? The resounding voice of this collection is yes.

Posterity or Prosperity?

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, prosperity theologies have simultaneously received a warm reception by some and a critical cold shoulder by others. With emotive responses provoked on both sides, what cannot be ignored is the influence prosperity thinking has, and will have, on the global church. Yet, little to no attention has been devoted to the intersection between prosperity theology and the issues surrounding the ecological crisis, such as climate change, environmental degradation, human greed, and wanton consumerism. Does such an intersection exist? This article explores this question by contrasting prosperity theology’s divine economy and agrarianism’s great economy. In sum, it suggests that the uncritical reception of prosperity teachings—though they speak pointedly to real, felt human needs—can ultimately create ecologically harmful, if not anti-ecological, modes of thinking and living within its adherents.

The prosperity gospel in Ghana and the primal imagination

This paper makes the assertion that despite the significant influence of American neo-pentecostalism in shaping prosperity theology in the charismatic churches in Ghana, it is crucial to note that the primal aspirations of prosperity also continue to play a significant role. Second, the thriving prosperity teaching in the charismatic ministries is largely due to the fact that the charismatics have tapped into fertile ground already nurtured by the traditional concept of prosperity, which is to be understood in terms of wealth, longevity and fertility or procreativity. In the African cosmology, the belief and pursuit of prosperity is paramount. Africans do not 'honour' or accept suffering or poverty, it is a battle they have always sought to fight, and the belief in the gods is primarily to ensure prosperity and well-being. Thus the influence of American-type prosperity teaching only served as a catalyst and also reinforced what was already prevailing in the matrix of the primal world-view. The focus of this prayer is centred on material prosperity, fertility (procreation) and long life (health), which cannot come about without the blessing of the divinities. Harmony with the divinities therefore becomes a prerequisite not only for physical and spiritual protection from evil forces but also for the enjoyment of good health, fertility and longevity.

A Rethinking of Prosperity Teaching in the New Pentecostal Churches in Nigeria

This article, which is based on a research study in Nigeria, evaluates prosperity theology, which has gained much currency all over Africa. The article takes issue with the doctrine because it raises some crucial and somewhat awkward questions for all concerned. The teaching lacks a consensus definition; it is weakly theorized, could be unscriptural and seems oblivious to some significant features in the early church as illustrated in the Acts of the Apostles. The final goal of the article is to suggest a reconstruction of prosperity theology, which will evolve one that is unquestionably scriptural and contextual.

A Historical and Theological Analysis of the Pentecostal Church in Romania

For many local congregations, prosperity theology is controversial ; it is especially promoted by independent churches. Leadership of Classical Pentecostals are opposed to the prosperity teaching but in fact, prosperity theology has come as a reaction against the cultural pessimism of early Pentecostals who cultivated strict perfectionism. Missionary Steve Bradkovich (works in Latvia) comments on that: Attending any Pentecostal church, you can see that after a leader has said 'let's pray' people suddenly start weeping. Why? Because they have been taught to pray in this way. In the Twenties, a great movement of the confession of sins took place which truthfully was Spirit's work but with time it turned into a form of religion.*

Anselm and Hagin: Ontological a rgument and prosperity cult

The teaching of the ‘prosperity cult’ that a Christian has a right to wealth is very much a product of the modem age. Similarly the ontological argument for the existence of God belongs very much to its own era. There is no developmental link between the two, but nevertheless they are connected logically. Both argue from a conception of God as infinite - a conception which assures on the one hand the existence of God, and on the other the receipt of blessings prayed for by a Christian. Although such results may well follow from that assumption, these must require qualification, especially in the light of a dynamic rather than a static world. Both ontological argument and prosperity teaching hold questionable assumptions on the nature of perfection and of comparability. A Christian conception of God must however mean that material blessing cannot be a right in this world as is claimed by ‘prosperity teaching\ simply on the grounds of conception and prayer.