Can Pr Ndyanabo kill Pentecostal Kung fu-kiNigeria ways?

They are everywhere; pastors without qualifications and bishops without dioceses. The more self-aggrandising operators pose as apostles and prophets.
To describe them more accurately, they are performing artistes. Their chosen craft, the kind of work in which they feel a strong inner urge to engage, is preaching.
If they insist that this strong (inner) urge is a (call) from an (external) autonomous God, they are probably dreaming. A delusion.
If I may generalise, far more than the priesthood in other Christian organisations, the typical Ugandan Pentecostal preacher sets himself up as a specially empowered intermediary between God and the believers in his church.

When a Pentecostal preacher ostentatiously frees his followers to worship anywhere else they choose, he is secretly praying that they stay, on the ground that he is a liberal man.
Increasingly, the intermediary has devised seven-day traps to keep the devotee dependent on manipulation.
To the devotee, the intermediary gradually becomes indispensable. Essentially, a cult leader.

Like witchdoctors’ clients, when the intermediary’s power fails to deliver miracles, desperate devotees crisscross the land in search of other intermediaries whose reputation as demon exorcists and miracle workers has now caught their imagination.
I often refer to Uganda’s Pentecostal practices as expressions of neo-Christian paganism; not in jest, but because in the hands of the Pentecostals (Balokole), Christianity has degenerated into pagan religious forms.

To many untutored devotees, this sounds absurd and verges on blasphemy. They have been conditioned to regard their emotionally over-charged backward world as the ultimate experience of God’s presence on earth.
I write from the perspective of an incurable sceptic. But Pastor (and Bible scholar) Patrick Ndyanabo Sekitooleko, has been knocking down the fraud, hypocrisy and biblical ignorance that reign among Uganda’s Pentecostal preachers.

Hosted on Impact FM and Dream Television at 7am on weekdays for some weeks now, Pr Ndyanabo is probably turning over (and overturning!) rather more than the Victory Church moguls who control these stations bargained for.
From the noisy prayer exhibitions and extortionist greed to the fake-magic oils that are being indiscriminately poured or smeared on the bodies and even on the material possessions of devotees to bring good luck, Pr Ndyanabo has spared very little of all this crap.
A tour of Uganda’s Pentecostal practices is a journey through the world of idolatry, talismans and fetishism coated with Jesus.

The joke, which as a joke is bigger than a whale; the irony is that our Pentecostals abandoned and regularly castigate the traditional churches partly because those churches have preserved some of the rituals and symbolism from their ancient heritage, only for the same Pentecostals to fall into the double embrace of Mammon and African paganism.
Incidentally, to clear a possible misunderstanding, Ndyanabo’s motive is completely different from mine. While I would not lose any sleep if Pentecostalism died in the poison of its confused excesses, Pr Ndyanabo is out to save the amorphous multi-interest anti-denominational organisation(s) through a more enlightened understanding of the Scriptures.

He cannot succeed. As artistes, the preachers are performing for a living. The audience that exists and is willing to pay wants a kind of kung fu-cum-kiNigeria magic and praise-God experience on their worship outings. What use is a pastor who is not a demon killer and miracle worker?
At the broadcast outfit where Pr Ndyanabo is hosted, over three-quarters of the religious output are steeped in the cheap mistaken biblical interpretations he condemns. Remove the trash, and many in the mass audience will leave and return to the old churches.