The pain of inventing Pentecostal unity
Because our Pentecostal preachers cannot exorcise their demons of self-exhibition and self-praise, the curious spectator can feast.
If small, the preacher will own a shabby little church, or stride up and down the streets, or disrupt many a quiet public bus journey. Invariably, he will elevate himself by insisting in your face that you are rotten. Presumably, he must be holy. You go down, he goes up.
If successful, he will brag that he is rich because he is holy; not because he has conned his foreign backers and manipulated local followers.
Self-exhibition means that if a pastor owns a television or radio station, he will be personally on air for several hours a day.
But do not entirely blame them. Very likely, the Pentecostal preacher has a brain engineered for pursuing cult status. As a consequence, he must find brains to ‘wash’. By deception, by hook, or by crook, he must get fanatics who follow him.
To disinterested observers, the street preacher is a petty public nuisance, and the mega church preacher’s earth-shaking loudspeakers give him a higher annoyance rating. But the preachers see things differently. In his weird fashion, the preacher is affirming that he is a higher human being whose presence must be acknowledged, and whose voice/sermon must be heard.
‘Pastor’ Tom, Dick or Harry’s mafuta (oil), water and rice or personalised miracle requisition cards; all these are fake neo-pagan prescriptions for supposed miracles targeting gullible followers.
With no use for standard hymn-books, the pre-event media hype for New Year prayers in Namboole often features sexy rhythms from Gisu circumcision songs. And like many prayer performances by other Pentecostal preachers, the event itself is designed to end in a high emotional intensity that mimics an exaggerated erotic climax.
Tuning into any of their broadcast stations for a day, one is astonished by the emptiness of content, the naked lies and plain trash churned out by preachers who do not own a station, but who pay to perform-cum-self-advertise on air, helping to keep the stations financially viable.
In turn, the lesser preachers have their so-so followers, who they bleed for tithes, kusiga (sowing) and other forms of exploitation. They are novices and gamblers also dreaming to hit the big time one day and become very rich.
This stepped order of leeches in Ugandan Pentecostalism does not translate into a hierarchy working for one, two, three or even a hundred organisations.
Every holy wolf is for himself, feeding on his enterprise and whatever touch of originality he is gifted with. Or else it would not be Ugandan Pentecostalism.
That is why when Joseph Serwadda and his associates recently went to Kagadi and Entebbe to install bishops, they were confronted as ‘bayeekera’ (terrorists) and intolerable ‘demons’, Dr Serwadda himself reported during one of his programmes, Balancing the Boat.
For a Victory Church bishop is a pretender to spiritual and administrative authority, but with a dubious diocese.
With thousands of rogue Pentecostal outfits around the country, the geo-faith fabric of a bishopric-based administration for them would be a nightmare to be resolved by another God; not Abraham’s, who is probably already tired of all these fat little egos.
Intriguingly, rather like the Movement political schemers who said, ‘tubeggyeko’ (let us get rid of those who do not support us), the preachers who want power to control the Pentecostals are talking of ‘schisms’. But how can we talk of schisms before the anarchic outfits perform the miraculous task of becoming one organisation?
Mr Tacca is a novelist, socio-political commentator.
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