Chapter 11  

Made in Nigeria

The more I read, the more I understood: the face of Christianity was changing. Long ago the first Christian missionaries had trickled into the headwaters of the Niger River in twos and threes, clinging to British trade ships and braving malaria to spread the good news to the so-called Dark Continent. But now, just over a century later, private jets left Murtala Muhammed International Airport in Lagos on a daily basis, ferrying Nigerian evangelists toward waiting crowds at churches in Europe, the United States, and elsewhere in the increasingly secular West. Of all the “mushroom churches,” as Pentecostal denominations were dubbed by Nigerians, Pastor Enoch Adeboye’s church seemed to be growing the fastest. There were six thousand separate congregations in Nigeria and over three hundred in North America. Reporters hadn’t been able to verify the church’s claim that six million people had once attended a single service in Lagos—but if it was true, that made it the largest Christian gathering in the world.

When I found out that the Redeemed Christian Church of God had spread all the way from Nigeria to Houston, I woke up early one Sunday morning and pulled out various dresses, checking hemlines and necklines until I found something that seemed modest enough to wear to a service. The Pavilion of Redemption rented a thousand-square-foot storefront space in an industrial part of southwestern Houston, about a half hour from my inner-loop apartment. The neighborhood was dotted with gas stations, cash advance depots, and stores advertising prepaid cell phones. As I slowed down on the largely empty highway and searched for the address, I noticed a Korean Pentecostal church and a Spanish-language Pentecostal church occupying the same block. Finally, somewhere off Bissonnet and Southwest Freeway, I spotted the logo of the Redeemed Church—a purple circle with a small white dove at its center.

When I opened the door of the storefront church, the tiny, carpeted room was filled with men and women and children, most in traditional Nigerian dress. Someone had used plastic columns and artificial plants and curtains to set a kind of stage apart from the rest of the room. I tried to hide in the back, but a stern teenage boy in a pin-striped suit escorted me to the very front row. Family after family came over to greet me before the service started, asking my name and what I was up to in Houston. The worship service began with a squeal of music—guitar, a keyboard, and tambourines. If it wasn’t for the talking drums—hourglass-shaped drums used for traditional Yorùbá songs—I could have been in the church I grew up in.

The pastor was a slight man in an ill-fitting suit, but his voice was like a thunderbolt. He changed tones easily, moving from gentle to fierce as he prayed over the congregation, and then picked up his gentle tone once again to announce that there would be no sermon today, as it was the first Sunday of the month. Instead, the service would be devoted to testimonies of the ways the Lord worked in our lives. He warned the congregation that this time was meant to be used solely for testimonies, rather than songs. “If you want to sing, then join the choir!” he said sternly.

For over an hour his parishioners came up to the altar, one after another, young teenagers in fashionable Western clothes and plump grandmothers in dashiki. Everyone started the same way, by praising the Lord, and then launched into stories of how God had touched them. The first person was a delicate-looking teenage girl with wide brown eyes. She announced that by the grace of God she had just graduated from high school. Then came a woman who talked about accidentally leaving her wallet on the hood of the car, going to her job as a prison guard, and then coming back out and finding to her delight that it was still on the hood. “It was God!” she exclaimed loudly, and the whole congregation clapped and whooped.

Multiple people thanked God for not getting a ticket when a police officer pulled them over, two more recent graduates thanked God and their families, and a shy man told of how God came to his rescue when he was trying to turn a rented moving van around in the mountains of West Virginia and got stuck. Another man told the story of finding a wallet and driving to the address listed on the license to return it to a white American woman, who initially refused to open the door to a Black man. “Thank God for not making me a thief!” he said.

Afterwards, while members of the church milled around, squeezing toddlers’ cheeks, packing up instruments, and swapping Tupperware containers of hard-to-find Nigerian culinary essentials like yam flour and gari, the pastor listened to me prattle on about my research and then flashed a smile, waving away my attempts at an explanation.

“You are welcome here,” he said. “All blood runs red in the kingdom of God.” And then he invited me to the Redeemed Church’s weekend-long Holy Ghost convention the following month, where six thousand Nigerian Christians from all over North America met on a plot of land outside of Dallas for a prayer and miracle service.

It hadn’t really made sense for me to go. The convention was in the middle of June, during a heat wave that was epic even for Texas. My ancient Volvo lacked air-conditioning and leaked oil on long road trips, and I could barely afford the gas, much less a hotel room. But for some reason I still dug out my credit card and paid the registration fee.

When the day finally came, I made my way out of Houston with one eye on my oil gauge, whispering a half-ironic prayer that everything would work out. The moon was only a fingernail when I arrived in the tiny town of Floyd, in East Texas, but as I approached Redemption Camp, the flood lights illuminating the parking lot lit up the sky to near daylight. Just past a low-rent trailer park called Mockingbird Estates, a long line of traffic snaked past the sprawling cemetery of a hundred-year-old white clapboard church. As the deeply grooved dirt road doglegged to the right, I braked slowly so as not to spit gravel on the small, hand-lettered sign in front of the church: “Floyd United Methodist, a Church for the Future.” And then in smaller type: “Rev. Bill Shaddox.” I wondered what the minister thought of his new neighbors. Rev. Shaddox also probably believed that God’s hand was alive in the world, but he was probably well aware that if he went to his bishop saying that God had spoken to him and given him a message, the bishop would think the time had come to pack him off to the retirement home.

A whistle blew and a teenage boy in a bright orange vest waved me forward. A hundred yards farther up, dun-colored trailers and modest ranch-style houses gave way to lush cornfields and trees tented with kudzu, and Redemption Camp finally came into view for the first time. I had expected an enormous megachurch, but there wasn’t much to see—just a vast expanse of asphalt dotted with stadium lights and an enormous white canvas tent perched on a concrete foundation. The tent looked empty and unoccupied, but as the line of traffic crept closer, the piercing noise of the cicadas gave way to snatches of hymns, the deep-throated trills of a preacher’s voice booming from a speaker inside the tent and low murmur of amens coming every minute or so, like a drumbeat. Just past the parking lot, rows of picnic tables were set up and women in traditional Nigerian dress sold jollof rice, bean cakes, and peppered chicken at steep prices. Families in African garb—shiny fabrics of orange and red and purple topped off with towering headdresses for the women—and families in Western church clothes crowded around the tables drinking Coke and Fanta from glass bottles.

I followed a crowd of people into the tent and found a seat on a folding chair toward the back, so far from the stage that I had to squint to see beyond the blurs of color. On the projector screen above the stage was a gravelly voiced white woman with thickly applied makeup and a Southern accent. She looked to be in her early fifties. Like so many other Pentecostal pastors, Sheryl Brady’s life was her testimony, and she spent the first portion of her sermon establishing her credentials. She spoke quietly and seriously of pain and torment. She had dropped out of high school at fifteen, cut down by a series of three losses. Her father had died of a heart attack, and her sister had died of hepatitis, and then her mother had been in a terrible car accident. Sheryl married at the age of seventeen, shy and quiet, and had three children before she was twenty. For years she lived from paycheck to paycheck, left out of God’s promises, unsure of his plan for her life. Not until her forties did she become a pastor and a conference speaker. Her destiny, she said, had been locked up inside her, and it was only through her faith in God that she was able to draw it out. Now she stood in front of us, an intimidating, perfectly coiffed presence, a lady preacher who shouted like an old-school revival minister.

She read from that chapter from the Book of Luke—the one where Peter, one of Jesus’s disciples, went fishing with Jesus. Jesus called him his rock, but Peter was just as much of a doubter as Thomas. Even after seeing miracle after miracle—loaves to fishes, water to wine—he just couldn’t open his mind up enough to take in the true nature of the kingdom of God. In this particular story, Peter had been fishing all day and had caught nothing at all. He was back on the shore, cleaning his nets, when Jesus beckoned him out again. He probably hadn’t wanted to go, but he listened to Jesus and let down the nets. He caught so many fish that his nets nearly broke.

“Look under your boat,” Pastor Sheryl exhorted the congregation. “If you look under your boat, you will see the hand of God holding all those fish back. Jesus was there that day to teach Peter that being a professional fisherman meant absolutely nothing. God is in charge. It doesn’t matter how much you study, how much you prepare. Doors will not open for you unless God ordains it. You won’t catch a single fish unless God wills it.”

Toward the end of her sermon Pastor Sheryl ran her eyes over those many thousands of people and got quiet. Too quiet. She asked us if we were tired, worn out by work and family responsibilities. She looked at us hard and dared us to say it wasn’t true.

“Well,” she said, “what do you have to show for all that work? Do you have any power? Do you have the ability to heal? Can you lay hands on your body and cast the sickness out? You are closer than you think you are. You have these gifts. Just look under your boat. What does the Bible tell us? Not by might, nor by power, but by the Holy Spirit. You are closer than you think you are to that power,” she said, and a hush went through the congregation. “That’s why I came to Floyd, Texas,” she said in a voice as low and throaty as a lifelong smoker’s. “To tell you that you are closer to that power than you think you are.”

In a strange coincidence that my mother would have immediately labeled a sign, the first person I met when I pulled up at Redemption Camp again the following morning was the brother of James Fadele, the pastor who had helped establish the United States branch of the Redeemed Church. Pastor Fadele had been charged by Pastor Adeboye with turning what had been a few years ago a sorghum and wheat field into the denomination’s North American headquarters. Thanks to his brother’s introduction, within twenty-four hours I found myself sitting in Pastor Fadele’s palatial home as the stout pastor explained how he found himself in the position of bringing God’s word to the heart of East Texas.

“It doesn’t come all at once,” James Fadele told me, hopping back and forth between tending to his daughters and helping a visiting pastor from Delaware set up a website for his church. He was trying to explain how God’s blessing worked. “If it did, God knows we’d run from it. God dips you in, little by little, to see what you can stand.”

Pastor Fadele had grown up in the same family compound outside of Lagos where Pastor Adeboye had grown up, but unlike Adeboye, his family was Catholic. “Well, not exactly,” Pastor Fadele said, correcting himself. His father had attended Catholic services, but he refused to officially convert to Catholicism because it would have meant abandoning two of his three wives. As a child, Pastor Fadele was a good student and a devout Christian, winning a scholarship to an American university. After graduating he took a job as an engineer and then racked up a number of advanced degrees while he tried his hand at various businesses: first detailing cars, then running a Wendy’s franchise.

Once, on a visit to the US, Pastor Adeboye encouraged his friend to start a church, and after initially making some excuses, Pastor Fadele started a small congregation in the basement of his Detroit home. Around that same time, Adeboye had received word from the Lord that Texas was destined to be the North American headquarters of the Redeemed Church. The prophecy was confirmed when a white farmer approached a small group of Redeemed pastors as they sat in a restaurant in Dallas. The man told them that years before, God had instructed him to purchase a hundred acres of pastureland in Floyd. God told him that the land didn’t belong to him, but rather a group of “church people.” And then the farmer offered to sell it to the pastors for the same low price he had originally purchased it for.

Soon after he had purchased the land, Adeboye appointed Pastor Fadele as the head of the Redeemed Church’s North American division, and Pastor Fadele approached his new mission in the same way he had tackled his business ventures. Within a year, construction had started on the plot of land that would slowly become the mirror image of that eighteen-thousand-acre plot of land in Nigeria, just north of Lagos, where a million worshippers gathered every year for the church’s annual convention.

Pastor Fadele told me he had been the one who urged his boss to invest in technology, including a state-of-the-art website that live-streamed Pastor Adeboye’s sermons during their Holy Ghost Services in both Lagos and Texas. It was on that website, back in Houston, that I had first been seduced by the church’s mission and vision: “to make heaven” and “to take as many people with us as possible.” They pledged to plant churches within five minutes’ walking distance of every city and town in developing countries, and a five-minute driving distance of cities and towns in developed countries.

“You Americans don’t talk about that,” he said, removing his delicate glasses to run a handkerchief over them. “You talk about pearly gates and eternal rewards. But Africans believe that we can build a piece of heaven on earth, in our daily lives. Teachers can build heaven at school. Parents can build heaven for their children. And churches can make their congregations a place where God lives and breathes. In Africa, we believe that we can call heaven down to meet us. God wants us to be whole. He wants us to prosper. We don’t have to wait until we die to live in glory. We can do that here on earth.”

I asked Pastor Fadele about his reception from the white community in Floyd. I myself was dubious. Not that long ago, the road connecting Floyd to the county seat had a banner over it that boasted “Blackest Land, Whitest People.” Floyd was settled by hardy pioneers from the Deep South, lured west by the rich Texas Blackland Prairie. They’d brought their conservative brand of Christianity with them, as well as their slaves. Many of the Black residents of Floyd could trace their lineage back to the days when cotton was king and slave labor was the cheapest way to get that cotton out of the ground. Like most other towns in this part of the world, the history of Hunt County was rife with lynchings and other hate crimes. Just six years before the Methodist church up the street was founded, a mob of two thousand white residents overpowered a group of officers and seized a young Black man who had been accused of assaulting a white woman. The next morning they burned him alive in the south side of the town square. Years later, the white residents of Floyd seemed to have nothing but suspicion for their Nigerian neighbors.

“I don’t like to be called a racist, but I don’t like to be overrun, either,” Luanne Moody told a reporter from the Dallas Morning News who knocked on the door of her mobile home in Floyd seeking her opinion of the church. “I don’t have any problem with black people. . . . I just feel uncomfortable in large numbers of them.”

“I’m not a racist,” echoed her neighbor, Tina Causey, a sixty-nine-year-old house cleaner, when a reporter from the New York Times came calling. “I just don’t like a majority of anybody.”

“We’ll give them some time,” Pastor Fadele laughed, smiling so wide that his dimples showed. “Right now they’re peeping out the windows, asking each other, where did all those Africans come from? Where did they get those clothes? But then they’ll hear the music, they’ll feel the Spirit, and they’ll come. And we can’t wait to have them.”

Pastor Fadele rummaged through his briefcase and found the program for the convention, and flipped it open to the governor’s letter welcoming the church members to the convention, thanking them for their service, and wishing them success as they worked to lay a strong spiritual foundation for the community. The Hunt County judge wrote a letter as well, offering his prayers that the conference be both divine and sanctified, and asking the Lord to shower the group with peace and holy tranquility. Maybe Pastor Fadele was right. There weren’t many other white people at the convention, but the church hadn’t been here long. I’d read an article about a church in London, founded by a Nigerian pastor, who regularly hosted four thousand people for its Sunday services.

When I was done asking my questions, Pastor Fadele wanted to know why I’d come to Redemption Camp and why I was so interested in the way they worshipped in Nigeria. I stuttered out an answer, telling him that I had grown up in the church but had gone away from it, and now I was curious about the faith again.

He shook his head knowingly. “God is stirring your heart,” he said, and asked me if I’d ever considered traveling to Nigeria. “You won’t know what God is doing in my country unless you stand with a million Nigerians at the Holy Ghost Service,” he said. “I have a feeling that if you will go there, you will come back changed.”

I’m sure my neck flushed, the way it always does when I’m overcome with some strong rush of emotion. I hadn’t thought of going to Nigeria until Pastor Fadele said those words, but as soon as that idea was out there in the world it became my idea, and the path immediately unfurled in front of me. I’d find the money. I’d go to Nigeria and immerse myself in the faith I had left as a child.

Months later, when I lobbied my graduate school advisor to change my thesis to an exploration of Nigerian Pentecostalism, I’d make the case that there was a story here, a story that I—being a former believer myself—was highly qualified to tell. I’d position myself as a researcher, an intellectual, not a spiritual seeker making a religious pilgrimage. But even then I sensed that there was something else going on, something that had to do with that wonder-working power that I had sung about as a child. That inchoate thing that surged through the congregation when the worship service had reached its peak, that sudden fierceness in my mother’s voice when she prayed over a fever, binding it up and sending the spirit of sickness straight back to the Devil. That strange, upside-down sort of power that I had so craved as a girl. The power that stemmed from obedience and transcended race and class and status. I felt that old longing swell up inside me—a longing to join up, a longing to submerge myself into the body of Christ and forget myself and my own desires.

At nine o’clock on the final night of the revival, praise choirs from congregations all over the country poured in from all sides of the tent. Pastor Fadele took the stage and introduced his mentor to the gathered crowds. “Here is Brother Enoch Adeboye,” he shouted, “Made in heaven, born in Nigeria, exported to the world!” At the sight of the General Overseer of the church, the man they affectionately called Daddy G.O., the tent erupted into an ocean of sound. Pastor Adeboye was a tall man with a broad forehead and a ready smile, and he wore a bright blue pin-striped suit with a dark-colored bow tie. As he preached the music slowly swelled up behind him, keeping step with his throaty, British-inflected voice as he called heaven down to meet us. Again and again he talked of power—the electric pulse that lived in each of us, divinely implanted there by God, doomed to go unused unless we activated it. He promised that if we took full advantage of that power, every evil thing in our life would be neutralized and we would come into the full manifestation of what we were intended by God to become.

Every few minutes Pastor Adeboye interrupted his sermon with flashes of prophecy that God had given him. There was someone among us tonight who had a bad back. God was about to set that person free. Another person had been out of work for many years. A job would come to them very soon. “Those of you who have any form of sickness,” he said, “tonight God will set you free!” I found myself listening carefully every time he prophesied, half-expecting to hear him name my problems. There is someone here tonight who walked away from God long ago. Turn her around and set her on the right path.

As Pastor Adeboye’s sermon wound to a close, the music climbed to a crescendo. That was when he started whispering into his microphone, luring lost souls. That was the moment when he stepped on the gas. Trumpets and piano notes guided his voice like an arrow into a place beyond the brain. Gray-haired grandmothers began kicking off their pumps in a Pentecostal fury and danced across the floor, children threw up their hands to God as if they had suddenly been unshackled. Pastor Adeboye’s voice sharpened and crackled and he pleaded with us all to come back to God and cast off our evil, doubting ways. He reminded us of everything the Lord had promised. The poor will be rich, the meek will inherit the earth, and the lost will be found. Those who were slighted and disrespected on earth would receive their just reward. Pastor Adeboye said that God had arrived before us at this campground and had been waiting for us. “Now the two of you are about to meet!” he shouted.

Later that night, I’d sit in my car for hours as dawn cracked open over the Texas countryside and the long, rumbling pack of cars wound their way through the dirt roads of Hunt County until they reached the interstate. Back at my motel, I’d nod to the elderly proprietor when he glared at me—no doubt a loose woman coming home from a nefarious liaison. I’d pull the blinds closed and curl up on the double bed, opening my laptop to capture all my impressions while they were still fresh on the surface of my mind. I’d write about the scene as if I was outside of it, unaffected by it.

But there in the tent, I’d watched uneasily, holding my pen tightly. I hadn’t counted on the music and the way it swelled open a hollow place deep inside my chest. When people started rising around me like prairie dogs popping up out of their holes, I stayed seated until I felt a hand on my shoulder. The woman next to me, a young mother whose baby son was bound on her back in a colorful kanga, met my eyes and beckoned me up. My throat seized up, and I started to wave her away. But it was one-thirty in the morning, and the woman had the same sweet half-smile my mother had, so I rose obediently, my pen and notebook clattering to the floor.

She and I were two small bodies in the midst of thousands, swaying in a sea of buzzing voices. I could feel all the faith and passion that I’d had as a girl, right there beneath the surface of my skin. My brain reminded me that I didn’t believe in any of this anymore, but when the music tugged at me, I didn’t fight it. I lifted my face to the sky.

For the first time in years I heard the raw, raucous beauty of those strange heavenly languages, swelling to fill all the space available in that tent. I couldn’t understand a word of it apart from a few scattered phrases, Holy and Jesus, but it didn’t matter. I knew they were calling on the Lord in tongues, singing their love for him and calling on him to fulfill all his promises. It would have been so easy to open my mouth and join those other babbling voices in a mass of praise, but my mouth stayed closed. Instead I breathed all that frantic worship in and held it inside my rib cage. My neighbor squeezed my hand and I squeezed back. Then she lifted both our hands to the sky, as if to get a little bit closer to the place where she thought God’s power was.