When the Gospel Became a Product: Reclaiming Biblical Stewardship

Imagine a congregation where the sermon cannot begin until the pastor has promised financial breakthroughs to every person who gives a certain amount. Where the measure of a man’s faith is the model of his car, and the evidence of God’s favour is a house in Lekki or Asokoro. Where suffering is always sin, and poverty is always a curse waiting to be broken by a seed offering. This is not a fictional church. Millions of Nigerian believers have sat in exactly those pews — and many are still sitting there, confused when the breakthrough never comes, blaming their own faith when their bank account does not cooperate with the pastor’s prophecy. The prosperity gospel is not merely a theological error. It is a pastoral emergency. And the only antidote is a fearless return to what the Bible actually teaches about money, wealth, and stewardship.

The prosperity gospel, in its popular Nigerian form, teaches that financial abundance is the guaranteed right of every born-again believer, that giving offerings is a transactional mechanism for unlocking divine wealth, and that material suffering signals a deficiency of faith or an unbroken curse. These claims must be tested — not by personal testimony, not by the biography of a wealthy televangelist — but by Scripture alone. And Scripture does not support them.

The Apostle Paul, arguably the most faith-filled man in the New Testament outside of Christ Himself, wrote from prison: “I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content. I know both how to be abased, and I know how to abound: every where and in all things I am instructed both to be full and to be hungry, both to abound and to suffer need” (Philippians 4:11–12). Notice that Paul says contentment is something he had to learn. It was not a spiritual inheritance delivered automatically at salvation. He learned it through seasons of poverty and plenty — and he treated both as conditions in which God could be glorified. The prosperity gospel makes no room for seasons of abasement. But Paul did. His faith was not diminished by hunger; it was proven through it.

Consider also the warning Christ Himself gave to those who reduce the gospel to material acquisition. In the parable of the sower, Jesus specifically identifies the danger of wealth as a category of seed-choking thorns: “And the cares of this world, and the deceitfulness of riches, and the lusts of other things entering in, choke the word, and it becometh unfruitful” (Mark 4:19). The word used is deceitfulness — not evil, not merely tempting, but deceitful. Riches lie. They promise what they cannot deliver. They whisper of security, dignity, and peace, but they deliver anxiety, comparison, and compromise. For the Nigerian Christian already navigating a high-pressure economy, this warning is not abstract theology. It is a survival instruction. When a theology places wealth at the centre of the gospel narrative, it has handed the enemy the very tool Jesus warned would strangle your fruitfulness.

The biblical alternative is not poverty theology — the idea that Christians must be poor to be holy. That too is error. Rather, Scripture presents stewardship: the understanding that everything we possess belongs to God, that we are managers rather than owners, and that our faithfulness with resources — great or small — is the measure that matters eternally. Jesus made this unmistakably clear in the parable of the talents: “His lord said unto him, Well done, thou good and faithful servant: thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things” (Matthew 25:21). The commendation is not for the size of the return. It is for faithfulness. The servant who doubled two talents received identical praise to the one who doubled five. God does not measure abundance; He measures accountability.

For the Nigerian Christian, this theology of stewardship has immediate, practical consequences. It means you tithe and give offerings not as a transactional deposit expecting a financial return, but as an act of worship acknowledging God’s ownership of all you have. It means you budget with discipline, save with intentionality, and invest with wisdom — because a faithful steward does not squander what has been entrusted to him. It means you resist the cultural pressure, even within church culture, to perform wealth you do not have. It means you can sit in lack without theological panic, knowing that Paul himself was hungry and still considered himself spiritually complete. It means you evaluate a ministry not by the size of the pastor’s mansion but by the integrity of the teaching and the transformation of the congregation.

Stewardship also demands honesty about how prosperity theology has damaged Nigerian Christianity specifically. It has produced a transactional faith where God is treated as a divine ATM. It has enabled exploitation, where desperate believers surrender rent money to manipulative men of God in exchange for prophetic promises. It has created a generation of Christians who know seed-faith formulas but cannot quote the Sermon on the Mount. It has conflated Western capitalist success with the Kingdom of God. These are not small distortions. They are corruptions of the gospel that Paul warned carried eternal consequences: “But though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel unto you than that which we have preached unto you, let him be accursed” (Galatians 1:8). That is not soft language. It is apostolic alarm.

The return to biblical stewardship begins in the mind before it reaches the wallet. It requires a believer who is willing to be unpopular enough to ask hard questions of popular theology, humble enough to admit that some of what they were taught was incomplete or false, and courageous enough to rebuild their financial faith on the Word rather than the word of a prophet. You are not a customer of God. You are a steward of His grace. Live accordingly — with faithfulness, with contentment, and with the eternal perspective that knows the ultimate inheritance is not a plot of land in this world, but a place secured by Christ in the next.