Bishop Nehemiah Mutendi of the Zion Christian Church (ZCC), an indigenous Christian church founded in Zimbabwe nearly 100 years ago, has one message for his followers. It is time to prosper. But he has only one formula -hard work-because “the Lord your God has blessed you in all the work of your hands”.
Though the church, which celebrates 100 years of “true prophecy” this year, is founded on the two pillars of prophecy and evangelism, Bishop Mutendi insists that God cannot bless you if you have nothing.
He cites the example of Jesus Christ who had to ask his disciples what they had to enable him to bless it so that he could feed thousands of people that had gathered to listen to him.
The disciples said they had five loaves and two fish. He blessed them and fed the crowd which turned out to be 5 000 men excluding women and children. After feeding the crowd, leftovers filled twelve baskets.
Bishop Mutendi says even Jesus did not take too kindly to providing free food because in the next miracle he blessed seven loaves of bread and some fish to feel only 4 000 men. There were seven baskets of leftovers.
The number kept on declining until he only sat with his 12 disciples for the last supper.
The ZCC leader is so much against handouts that when he decided to build the first temple for his followers at the church’s administrative headquarters at Mbungo Estates in Masvingo in 2005, he refused any donations. He insisted that his followers had to raise the money to build the church so that they, rather than donors, would be blessed when it was completed.
Though he initially expected to complete construction of the church- one of the biggest in Africa with a seating capacity of 18 000- in one year, it took five years to do so because of the economic hardships that hit the country.
His main reason was that when complete each one who had contributed to the construction would be blessed just like those who had helped Solomon to build the Lord’s temple.
Bishop Mutendi has been consistent and steadfast about his gospel of prosperity.
“We will not stop preaching the gospel of prosperity because this was one of the founding principles of this church,” he told his followers at the church’s holy shrine at Defe, in Gokwe in the Midlands last month.
Defe is the resting place of the church’s founder, Samuel Mutendi, Nehemiah’s farther, who died in 1976 after preaching the gospel for more than 60 years. His followers trek to the holy shrine every year in July to commemorate Samuel Mutendi’s death.
The founding principle is in Isaiah 14 vs 32 which says: “The Lord has founded Zion, and in her the afflicted of his people shall find refuge.”
Bishop Mutendi is quick to add that though Zion was founded as a refuge for the poor this does not mean that they have to remain poor. Jesus said in Luke 4 vs 18 that he came to preach the good news to the poor and to liberate the oppressed.
He insists that it is sometimes necessary to force the poor to extricate themselves from poverty so that they too can become wealthy.
Bishop Mutendi told his followers that it was now time to get rid of the colonial mentality which conditioned blacks to look forward to being employed rather than to becoming employers and creators of wealth.
“It is high time we became masters of our own destiny, that we create jobs ourselves. We do not have anything against whites. No. But what we want now is that when they come to our country they must come to work for us not as our bosses. This is our God-given land. We must utilise it because God blesses what we do with our own hands.”
That sounded like a script from President Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front, but Bishop Mutendi shuns politics because it disunites church members. But he insists that it is every Zimbabwean’s right to vote for a party of his or her own choice as long as politics does not filter into church activities.
When the people have made their choice, Bishop Mutendi says, they, or at least his followers, should be subject to the governing authorities because there is no authority except from God and those that exist have been instituted by God.
In a politically volatile country like Zimbabwe, where religious leaders have openly sided with one political party or another even prior to independence, Bishop Mutendi is worried that he might be misunderstood.
He is so worried that way back in 2003 when a prophet from his church urged church elders to shy away from politics because Mugabe was going to outlast his enemies, Bishop Mutendi said this must not be publicised because it might be misunderstood. Politics had divided some church chapters into two factions, one loyal to Mugabe and the other to Movement for Democratic Change leader Morgan Tsvangirai.
The prophecy was published early this year in a kindle book: When religious beliefs clash with journalism principles, and chronicles how Mugabe survived the Western onslaught over the past decade.
But the church and ZANU-PF share one thing- the revolution. Bishop Mutendi says the ZCC is a revolutionary church but not a revolutionary party. It is revolutionary in the sense that when Samuel Mutendi started preaching the gospel in 1913 he was he was beaten up and arrested because blacks were not allowed to start their own churches and preach the word of God.
Black nationalist movements only became revolutionary four decades later when they too sought to govern their own country.
“Our revolution is like the Chinese revolution,” Bishop Mutendi told his followers. “Our revolution is aimed at fighting poverty, just like China did over 50 years. Now it is the second richest country in the world. We too can do the same thing because the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is behind us. We have already demonstrated to the world that we can accomplish big things by building our own temple. If we unite and work together, it will not take us 50 years to eradicate poverty and prosper.”
The signs are already there. This year, church followers in Zimbabwe alone hired 412, 64-seater buses to travel to Defe. This did include those who used their own transport, those who travelled from South Africa, Mozambique and Botswana, and those who walked to the holy shrine.
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