Evarline Okello breaks down in tears when she tells me she is hundreds of dollars in debt, after paying a pastor to pray for her.
She lives in a small shack in Kibera, a vast slum in the Kenyan capital Nairobi, and can no longer support her four children.
Evarline hasn’t earned anything in months, she tells me as we talk on the phone.
So, he tells me that when he went to a pastor whose prayers could improve his life, he asked for $115 (15,000 Kenyan shillings).
This is known as a “seed offering”: a financial contribution to a religious leader, with a specific outcome in mind.
Evarline borrowed the money from a friend, who took out a loan on her behalf.
He had been told that this pastor’s prayers were so powerful that he would see a return on his money within a week.
But the miracle never came.
In fact, things got even worse, she says.
The loan installments that your friend took have skyrocketed due to non-payment interest.
Now he owes more than $300 and has no idea how he’s going to pay it back.
Her friend has stopped talking to her and she still doesn’t have a job.
“Things have become so difficult that I have lost all hope,” he says.
doubled unemployment
Kenya has been hit hard by the cost of living crisis.
Food prices rose nearly 16% year-on-year to September 2022, according to Kenya’s Office for National Statistics.
World Bank figures show that the number of Kenyans out of work has more than doubled in the last seven years.
“People are very desperate,” says Gladys Nyachieo, a sociologist at the Kenya Multimedia University.
‘Supernatural Solutions’
This has increased the desire to find supernatural solutions, he says, and now many are willing to pay for a miracle.
Even if they have to borrow the money.
“People are told that God doesn’t want them to stay poor. So they ‘plant a seed,'” he tells me.
The practice stems from what is known as the Prosperity Gospel, which preaches that God rewards faith with wealth and health.
Believers are encouraged to show their faith by giving money and it is said that God will return it increased.
It has its roots in the United States and began to gain followers at the beginning of the 20th century.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Nigerian herders traveled to the United States to get a closer look at the system.
In the early 2000s, his popularity spread across Africa, fueled in part by German-American evangelists like Reinhard Bonnke, drawing huge crowds from Lagos to Nairobi. That growth in popularity continues today.
Nyachieo also points to another factor that tempts people to borrow: the loan offers that appear regularly on Kenyans’ mobile phones.
“People just apply and get the money,” she says.
That’s what happened to 26-year-old Dennis Opili.
After more than three years of looking for a job and feeling very discouraged, he asked a friend for help.
“He recommended a church that you go to and they pray for you. You give a certain offering, they pray for you, and you can get a job,” says Dennis.
They told him to make a donation every Sunday for three months and he gave about $180.
When her savings ran out, she borrowed about $120 from cash-lending apps and friends.
“I believed what the pastor told me, that I could get a job. So I didn’t have a problem with the loan, because I thought I could pay it back eventually.”
But when no jobs turned up, Dennis began to suspect he’d been duped.
He was soon hounded by loan companies to make him pay up.
“Sometimes I was just sitting somewhere, relaxing, thinking about other things. Then someone calls you, wants their money back, and you don’t have anything to pay them with,” he says.
“I was scared because you don’t know what action they might take if you don’t pay them. You don’t know if they can sue you or if they can take you into police custody.”
Fortunately, Dennis has found a job, which has allowed him to repay some of the money, both to the loan companies and to his friends.
“I still believe very much in God,” he says.
“All I have to be a little more careful.”
pressured to give
But it is not only in Kenya where people go into debt in the hope of a miracle.
A woman who used to attend a Nigerian church in the US says she and her husband were pressured to donate and were even expected to make “seed offerings.”
“Sarah” asked me not to use her real name or to say which state in the southern United States she lives in for fear of intimidation from the church or her lawyers.
He says both parishioners and local pastors of his former church were expected to give a “tithe” of 10% of their monthly income to fund the church and its leadership in Nigeria.
A practice that goes by the name of “first collaboration”: a complete payment package for the first month of the year.
Local leaders were given monthly goals, he says, which required them to pressure the congregation to make “seed offerings.”
Members were told that they would be blessed by the senior pastor in Nigeria.
Sarah says she saw people paying for offerings with their credit cards at church services.
“I remember one time in church a lady said, ‘I’ve been paying my tithing, but I don’t have enough money at the end of the month.'”
The pastor’s response, Sarah says, was to tell people that giving was more important than paying rent.
And he claims that anyone who asked why miracles didn’t happen got the answer: “You didn’t pray enough, you didn’t plant enough seeds. You didn’t have enough faith.”
She says her husband was pressured to leave her because she was asking questions, but in the end they both left the church.
So why do others stay in churches of this type?
Jörg Haustein, associate professor of World Christianity at Cambridge University, says it’s possible to understand why people keep donating when “promises aren’t kept.”
For the middle classes and socially mobile, as most members of Sarah’s church are, Haustein says the Prosperity Gospel offers “an air of economic success and social advancement that people find attractive.”
last resort
But it can also appeal to those living in poverty, he says.
“A church that says, ‘We know you’re hurting and we have a practical, achievable solution for you,’ will be more attractive than one that preaches elusive systemic change.”
But, I ask, why do people keep donating even when it means going into debt?
“It’s a bit like playing the lottery when you don’t have money, isn’t it?” Haustein asks me.
“It’s something that seems remotely affordable because you can borrow a few hundred Kenyan shillings on a phone to invest and see if it helps.” she says.
“Of course, there is also an air of despair, it may be one’s last resort.”
Back in Kenya, Evarline says the experience hasn’t made her abandon her faith.
“I wouldn’t say that the church is bad. The church is good. It is the pastors who are doing wrong. They are the ones who are asking for money.”
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BBC-NEWS-SRC: https://www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias-64915106, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-03-23 11:50:06
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