Church In Debt: It’s not wrong for a Bank to lend a Church N9B Once it has the capacity to pay back

Church In Debt: It’s not wrong for a Bank to lend a Church N9B Once it has the capacity to pay back

According to a report, following an allegation that the general overseer of Citadel Global Community Church formerly known as Latter Rain Assembly, Pastor Tunde Bakare is swimming in debt of 9 billion nairas which he is allegedly owing to a bank, Nigerians on social media have formed opinions in respect of the development Speaking on the latest development, Dayo Williams, a journalist with a media outfit in Abuja insisted that there is nothing wrong for the cleric to obtain a loan to build his church. However, the Abuja-based journalist is concerned about how Bakare was granted the loan.

File Photo of Pastor Tunde Bakare

The truth is that we make noise over nothing in this country. Banking is a private enterprise, of course, it’s regulated by the government through the CBN but it remains a private business. You cannot force a bank on how it should lend money, to whom or which entity it should lend money to; business, private, commercial or non-commercial, and even religious institution. What a bank looks at before lending is the capacity to pay back without much drama. If a religious organization meets such criteria, of course, a bank would extend a loan facility to such.

The driving force behind every business is profitability. A bank is a business in operation to make a profit so let’s stop all this noise. Nigeria is not the only place where banks lend money to religious organizations to build. Churches get on the mortgage ladder and keep paying monthly for years. This is what should be encouraged rather than churches given spurious testimony of how they built 70,000 capacity auditorium within 2 months running to billions of Naira yet no one knows where the money came from or how they got it.

In Nigeria, we always reprobate and approbate. We are quick to shout about how we don’t know how these churches make the kind of money to build big auditoriums and the one that lays it bare and is transparent about how they were able to raise money through the banks to build over about 10 years, we still attack them and ask why should bank borrow their money. If the same church put pressure on its congregation to donate or raise special offering through unbiblical means, we are the same people who will be up in arms attacking and condemning the same church.