There is a conversation happening in the hearts of millions of Nigerians that is almost never allowed to reach their lips.
It goes something like this:
Why does my pastor drive a Rolls-Royce while I cannot pay my child's school fees? Why did he embrace that governor, the one whose government owes my husband's pension and call him a covenant son? Why does every sermon end with an offering but never with a call to repentance? Why do I feel more afraid of questioning the man of God than I do of questioning God Himself?
These are not the questions of a faithless person. They are the questions of someone whose faith is deep enough to recognise that something has gone dangerously wrong.
The Worship of Mammon in Nigerian Churchesby Joe Brown is the book that finally gives those questions a voice and then goes further. It names the system. It traces the money. It holds the scripture up like a mirror to some of the most powerful religious institutions on the continent. And it does so not with bitterness, but with the precise, urgent love of someone who believes the real Church of Jesus Christ is worth fighting for.
WHAT THIS BOOK IS
This is not a theology textbook. It is not a polite, diplomatic critique that softens every blow with a disclaimer. It is a prophetic indictment, backed by scripture, grounded in documented Nigerian reality, written in the clear, unflinching voice of someone who has been sitting in the pews long enough to know exactly what has gone wrong and exactly where it started.
It covers the seed-faith machine that has turned poverty into a product. The private jet that became a testimony. The prophet for hire who sells political endorsements from the altar. The corrupt governor welcomed to the front row while the widow who gave her last naira sits in the back. The slow, systematic removal of salvation, repentance, and accountability from the centre of Nigerian church life, replaced by prosperity, performance, and the worship of mammon.
It is backed by scripture that the prosperity gospel has avoided for decades, Matthew 6:24, Amos 5:21-24, James 5:1-4, Micah 3:11, Ezekiel 34:2-4. Not cherry-picked. In full context. Uncut.
WHO THIS BOOK IS FOR
This book is for the 25-year-old in Lagos who still believes in God but has stopped believing in the institution that claims to represent Him.
It is for the mother in Aba who has given faithfully for years and cannot understand why the promises from the pulpit have never touched her reality.
It is for the youth pastor in Abuja who knows the truth and has been told to stay quiet.
It is for the theologian, the academic, the journalist who has watched Nigeria's church culture spread across Africa like a franchise and wondered when someone would write the honest account.
It is for every African Christian, in Ghana, Kenya, Zimbabwe, South Africa, and beyond, who has watched Nigerian megachurch culture arrive in their city and felt an unease they could not quite name.
And it is for the pastors, the faithful, humble, underpaid ones, who have been competing against a corrupted model and have been wondering if anyone else sees what they see.
WHY THIS BOOK MATTERS NOW
Nigeria is at an inflection point. A generation of young adults is walking away from the institutional church in numbers that are historically unprecedented. They are not walking away from God. They are walking away from an institution that has repeatedly chosen the powerful over the powerless, mammon over mission, and performance over the Gospel.
If the Nigerian Church does not reckon honestly with what it has become, it will lose an entire generation to cynicism. And that generation will not stay in Nigeria, it will carry that cynicism across the continent and into the diaspora, where Nigerian church models are already the dominant Pentecostal export.
This book is not the problem. The silence was the problem. This book is the beginning of the solution.
