‘It’s time for churches to rescue falling homes’

[Mirror]

Senior Pastor and founder of Brooks Christian Worship Centre in Ibeju- Lekki, Lagos, Chris Mboho, has tasked churches to hold programmes that can help in uniting homes and strengthening marriages as the Nigerian society is in dire need of unity, love and discipline at the home front.

He spoke at the inaugural worship at the newly consecrated Brooks Christian Worship Centre, in Ibeju Lekki, recently. The church, he said, has the mandate of raising some 500 worshippers in the locality in six months, while 10,000 lives will be affected for Christ by 2023.

Harping on the need to reverse the loss of values in many families in the country, Pastor Mboh stressed that "the homes need urgent help." His church, he noted has led by example in this regard, having organised breakfast for couples, providing occasion for interface, crisis resolution and love sharing.

"The breakfast with couples will help in modelling homes. It will afford occasion to interact with those whose marriages have some cracks. We believe the fellowship will help them to go back and remodel their homes. We will have breakfast with entrepreneurs, which will help them build their businesses, sometimes from nothing, while the dwindling ones will be rebuilt," says Mboho, who is also vice-chairman of Brooks Microfinance Bank and an entrepreneur of many years.

Speaking on the essence of the Christian religion, Pastor Mboho noted that the greatest burden of life was that of evangelising the world. "The burden to achieve in life is not the real burden. The real burden is that of getting souls saved. Our burden for now is to evangelise this region and the communities here," he said.

Admonishing the people of the area to join forces with the new church to make Christ known to the people, Mboho said, "Make this your home church. We shall take you to heaven. We shall teach you how to prosper.

We are changing the spiritual atmosphere of this area." Brooks Christian Worship Centre appears to be a unique religious concern for some other reasons than its approach to worship and evangelisation. It is the idea of using various platforms to help the people achieve their particular goals in life. "We will use several platforms to achieve relationship with several groups of people.

For instance, our breakfast with journalists and other media professionals will help in carrying our message out. We will know many of them in the industry and work with them to propagate the gospel.

The excited pastor also to declare that Bankole Bus Stop, where the imposing church edifice with a generous space for car park and other uses, would henceforth be known as 'Church Bus Stop'.

Mboho said the siting of the church at the location was purely the work of God, and that Lagosians in general and residents of Lagos Island and Lekki communities in particular, now had a true worship and life changing centre they could call their own.

The expansive church auditorium will wait for months before it can be filled. But that first service was attended by quite a good number of people comprising residents of Bankole Town, friends and relations of the Mboho family, Christian faithful from many church denominations in Lagos and Akwa Ibom states as well as parts of the country.

Mboho has been a long standing choirmaster, lead vocalist and instrumentalist for many churches over the years. He led one of the worship sessions before preaching the word of God, taking the worshippers to a state of frenzy as he raised song after song, including the timeless one, "My life time, I will give God my life time." Some visiting pastors also took the gathering in one activity or the other before the day's sermon, which Mboho delivered.

They included Ikechukwu Awa, Victor Udo, Fabian and Stephen King. Awa, who led in a session of worship, told the people about the various forms of worship in the house of God. "Worship transcends just gathering and raising hands to sing. Evangelism is worship. Setting out to minister to dying souls is worship.

When you exhibit some compassion for the dying, you are worshipping God," he said. He observed true worshippers, who God was seeking for, were scarce in today's Christian setting. Udo too gave a brief exhortation: "This is not a mega church. It is no place to come and see the pastor but Jesus. Jesus is not in the sepulcher but here with us. May God help us to go out and tell neighbours that we have found a place of worship," he told the people.

He then turned to Mboho and said, "Pastor, never you worry, Jesus is with you", before stepping out to play the drums. Desire Nwenike was on the piano. In his sermon which followed the bible reading from Exodus 2: 11-14, Mboho said Moses, who later led the children of Israel out of the land of Egypt, had carried the burden to liberate his people from the Egyptian bondage, right from his youth.

This, he said, caused him to kill the Egyptian lad who was having a scuffle with a youth from Israel and made him to flee the palace of Pharaoh, where he was getting a prince's treatment into the wilderness.

Source: 'It's time for churches to rescue falling homes'

[Folami David]

Churches have always done this so it's not something that they would just start to do. The church has always totally been against it.