When those entrusted with moral guidance and the welfare of the community lose their focus, they can inadvertently compromise the very societies they are meant to protect.
The recent conduct of Pastor Odekunle Epaphras, General Overseer of Comfort Life Mission International, has crossed that line.
What began as a troubling claim that Christians, rather than Muslims, are the rightful sacrificers of rams during Eid‑el‑Kabir—has metastasised into a series of reckless, divisive and plainly false pronouncements that threaten social peace and amount to a grotesque abdication of pastoral responsibility.
Religion demands humility, restraint, and an appreciation of the fragile pluralism that keeps our streets and neighbourhoods intact.
Pastor Epaphras’s public rhetoric fails to meet the standards of legitimate theological discourse or prophetic critique.
Rather than offering constructive insight, his assertions actively undermine interfaith relations by promoting material triumphalism and by weaponising sweeping, criminalising generalisations against an entire faith community.
Furthermore, prioritising the riches of clerical figures over spiritual stewardship reduces faith to a tool of social division and material vanity.
The danger here is not merely intellectual sloth; it is practical. Nigeria is a diverse nation where interfaith relations are already frayed by politics, poverty, and occasional violence. When a person standing on a pulpit addresses crowds and brands an entire religious community as criminal, or claims moral or economic supremacy, he does more than offend: he risks turning suspicion into hostility, words into attacks, and rhetoric into reprisals.
That is not the work of a shepherd. It is the work of an arsonist handing out matches.
Equally troubling is the evident shift in emphasis from spiritual matters to worldly status. Sermons that dwell on private jets, material superiority, or the supposed criminality of another faith are sermons about self and spectacle, not salvation.
If Pastor Epaphras is intent on building a congregation whose identity is measured by wealth and social display, he is manufacturing insecurity both within his church and beyond it.
A clergyman wields moral influence; with that influence comes a responsibility to heal, to educate accurately, and to dissuade violence and hatred, not to inflame them.
There is also a civic duty at stake. Claims that portray an entire community as criminals or that assert a sectarian claim over religious rites warrant more than moral condemnation: they require official scrutiny. Security agencies and the relevant regulatory bodies should investigate such public incitement and assess whether these utterances breach laws on hate speech, incitement to violence, or public mischief. An invitation to inquiry is not an attack on religion; it is a measured step to protect public order and to remind public figures that freedom of expression is not a licence to provoke conflict.
Finally, leaders within the Christian community must be clear and courageous. Silence in the face of such statements is complicity. Senior pastors, denominational bodies, and interfaith groups should speak out not to intimidate but to reclaim moral authority and to affirm that religion in Nigeria must be a force for reconciliation, not division.
Pastor Odekunle Epaphras is entitled to his beliefs and to the right to preach. He is not entitled to traffic in slander, to foment enmity, or to substitute spectacle for spirituality. If he truly cares for souls, including his own; he should retract these statements, apologise publicly to those he has maligned, and recommit his pulpit to messages that build bridges rather than burn than burn the bridges. If he refuses, the state and the church must act to protect the common good.