SOCIETY:SUNDAY MORNING AT the JFK Industrial Estate, your one-stop-shop for waste recycling, tyre-fitting, drain-cleaning, plant hire and redemption. Most of the shutters are down and the deserted maze of warehouses has the unreal air of an abandoned film set. The only place doing any business this morning is Unit 119A, a loud red hangar of a building where luminous-vested guards are cheerily guiding in the cavalcade of saloons and hatchbacks. Prepare to Meet Thy God, says the poster tacked to the door. Welcome. The Jesus Centre.
Inside, the decor is all improvised grandeur: high walls are draped with white and cream curtains and the elevated stage is bracketed by two slender mock-Doric columns. To the left, a tangle of microphones and keyboards and at the far wall a choir – mostly women, all in hats – leading the swaying hundreds through the warm-up. Above the glass lectern where the pastor will stand is a big screen that beams the congregation’s own reflection across the hall. It transmits the words of the prayers, too, as if there were any need.
By now the Sunday school session (“Lesson 25: Moral Dangers of Modern Dancing“) has finished, the half-hour musical prelude has just about run its course, and the stragglers are pressing urgently through the doors. Ushers dressed in navy and blue show them to their seats. It’s nearly 11.30am, and the clamour is reaching for a higher pitch. “Every day with you, Lord, is sweeter than the day before,” goes the hymn, and with it the keyboards’ loops seem to grow louder and the drum-beats somehow more rhythmic. Some sing or hold their arms aloft; others just stand and clench their eyes shut tight. A taciturn guard taps his foot. By the time Pastor Tunde Adebayo-Oke strides on stage, the hall is as one; thumping, fervent, expectant.
“Hall-e-lu-jah,” he says quietly, each syllable drawn out and the last one rising steeply. His trademark.
“Amen,” comes the response.
“Praise the Lord” “Amen.” “Praise Jesus.” “That’s right,” they murmur back.
“The storm is ov-ah”
“Amen!”
He pauses, letting the echo abate. “But these storms will only be over if we do what is right by God. So it’s not enough to say the storm is over and go out there and try and steal. Greater storms will come. Or to say the storm is over and then get home and abuse your wife. No no no no no. The storm is ov-ah. Amen.”
“Amen”
The Jesus Centre, off Bluebell Avenue in Dublin, is the Irish headquarters of the Redeemed Christian Church of God and the improbable epicentre of a movement whose quiet, steady growth mocks every trend on the graph marked religious observance. The biggest of Ireland’s African-led Pentecostal groups, the Redeemed Church alone has about 72 branches in 25 counties, and last Sunday the same scene was playing itself out in business parks, hotels and scout dens across the country.
When a group of researchers last year went about trying to figure out how many migrant-led churches and chaplaincies there were in Ireland, they were still counting at 360, the majority being Pentecostal churches established in the past 10 years. “We were very surprised. We had no idea,” says Dr Livingstone Thompson, who was involved in the project. “We had a sense of the major groupings . . . but what we discovered was a whole series of small churches that we hadn’t heard of before.”
After the Redeemed Church, there’s the Mountain of Fire and Miracles Ministries (16 branches) and the Celestial Church of Christ (14), all outposts of African mega-churches that tend to draw most members here from African and Caribbean immigrant groups. But true to Pentecostalism’s tendency to sprout constellations of autonomous, independent competitors, some of the dozens of smaller ones – such as Mount Horeb, for Congolese, Rwandans and Burundians in Dublin – were created by newly arrived émigrés themselves. Others are splinter churches set up by erstwhile members of an established rival, and nearly all are registered as limited companies and cover their costs through voluntary donations or tithes.
Ireland is on the coat-tails of a global trend here. From the suburbs of Los Angeles to the streets of Guatemala City, Pentecostalism has been growing quicker than anyone can keep count; many think it may be the world’s fastest-growing religious movement. The Redeemed Church itself is certainly one of the most successful of the new mega-churches. Under the spiritual authority of a “general overseer” based in Lagos, it has 2,000 parishes in Nigeria and hundreds of others in the US, Latin America and Europe. And by fusing its local roots in African spirituality based on healing, protection against malign powers, trance and visionary dreams, with a modern go-getting business organisation, its success is such that its Redemption Camp, a 10 sq km site where an all-night Holy Ghost Service is held outside Lagos every month, has an auditorium seating half a million people.
So strong is the church’s brand in Ireland that, when it held a convention in Ratoath, Co Meath, last July, more than 10,000 people showed up. “Apart from the time when the Pope visited Ireland in 1979, you probably would have not had a larger gathering of Christians in one place in this country,” says Thompson. “If I didn’t see it, I wouldn’t believe it.”
Sitting in his office at the Jesus Centre after the Sunday service, Pastor Tunde Adebayo-Oke exudes the same easy charisma that held the congregation rapt for two hours this morning. He has a rare knack for compelling oratory, seamlessly tying the Biblical to the mundane, reaching the solemn injunction by way of a well-timed comic turn. At one point in the service, when a couple celebrating their 10th wedding anniversary are invited to the stage for a special prayer, he chastises them gently for dancing apart from one another.
“You know, a man went to a restaurant with his wife,” he begins. “His wife was always nagging him – he’s a quiet man. The wife is always saying to him, ‘talk to me, talk to me’. So they’re eating in a restaurant one day, and his wife points and says, ‘can you see that couple? They’re talking.’ The man can’t take it any more. He says: ‘They. Are. Not. Married!’ ” The hall dissolves into laughter. “Well that’s not the way it should be. Brother, when you’re married, your tomorrow will be better than your today. Your love gets stronger daily. Praise Jesus.”
“That’s right.”
Some in his position balance the role with a day job but, as national pastor with overall responsibility for the church’s operations in Ireland, Pastor Tunde has no time for a sideline. There are almost daily prayer meetings to run, social events to host, books to balance, members to visit and some nascent outreach projects to oversee. And like every one of his counterparts, he doubles as a financial adviser and marriage counsellor to members in need. A few days ago, a woman texted to say that her overdraft facility had been withdrawn.
And then there’s the children. One of the first things you notice about the service in the Jesus Centre is the scarcity of young people. When we ask about this, we’re brought through a parting in the cream curtain, then through another door and into a tight corridor leading to a riotous labyrinth of 10 classrooms that between them hold 170 children and their teachers. They’re separated by age-group, the youngest (under two years) honing incipient screaming skills and another (six- to seven-year-olds) practising songs for a performance on Mothers’ Day. In the room marked “third and fourth class”, a teacher and her assistant are on Lesson Three: God the Holy Spirit.
“How do we manage to know him?” asks the tutor, a banker by profession. There’s a nervous pause, heads buried in the Book, before a tentative arm is raised.
“He’s in our life?”
“God bless you.”
“When someone is bullying you at school, do you bully them back?”
“Noooooo!”
Apart from the Sunday school, there’s a weekly prayer club that finds “fun ways of praying” and a “midnight jam” for teenagers every Friday. At about 21, they’ll be ready to join in on the other side of the curtain.
Pastor Tunde maintains that the teachings of the different Pentecostal churches are fundamentally the same, informed by a focus on the Bible and the individual’s personal relationship with God. But there are striking differences in emphasis. At the Jesus Centre, the message is unendingly upbeat. They may hold the line on alcohol (members are advised against), “sexy dancing” (the same: it messes with the mind) and the rest, but, as Pastor Tunde puts it, “we concentrate on the light, because where there is light, you won’t find darkness”.
At a 10th anniversary meeting held by the Mountain of Fire and Miracles (MFM) Ministries in the National Basketball Arena last August, however, there was quite a bit more dwelling in the half-light.
The two-day programme, attended by more than 1,500 people, promised “ultimate deliverance” from witchcraft, and members who had come from across Ireland testified to all manner of miracles. Pastor Joshua Oluborode, from Dundalk, spoke of the man with a hole in his heart who drank blessed water and found it healed, while another woman told of someone who had her womb removed and yet still managed to give birth. Quite a few said they wouldn’t visit a hospital.
More prosaically, explains Pastor Anthony Eziashi, MFM’s leader in Ireland, witchcraft can manifest itself in financial troubles, a stalled career or marital problems, and deliverance can also be a way out of problems such as alcoholism or drug addiction.
“There is witchcraft in Ireland,” he says. “You can’t use any drug to heal alcoholism, you can’t use a drug to stop cocaine. You need to give them help with prayer, and God is the only one that can remove such evil desire. There is no prescription from any doctor for adultery, fornication. The doctor cannot help any man in that. It’s a spiritual problem.” He stresses, however, that the church would never advise against visiting a hospital.
Talk of the recession recurs at the Jesus Centre these days. Pastor Tunde finds that it’s always more difficult to preach the message to people who feel they’re doing quite well. “If everything is in place – you’re financially all right, you have a good job, your health is in order, and we’re telling you about Jesus, for a lot of people, they won’t listen,” he says. “But when there is a recession, when things get a little darker, everyone is looking for an answer.”
His wife Caroline, a Christian counsellor who teaches at the Sunday school, attributes recent growth to the ways in which other institutions have let people down. “The money is failing. They know that when they go to church, God won’t fail them.”
Some of those who make a living from trying to make sense of the remarkable growth of Pentecostalism see money as part of the equation, too. Across the world, Pentecostalism frames the message not as one of consolation but more as a set of moral tools for action – as a means of fixing things, in other words. With this appeal to a sense of personal agency, it has also been adept at adapting to local concerns. In Latin America the radical idea of the “prosperity Gospel” caught the imagination by portraying poverty as a work of the devil, and aspiring to wealth and riches as an indication of the effectiveness of the Holy Spirit.
So, too, in Ireland. One pastor in Navan refers to his “do-it-yourself gospel”, stressing the role of the individual not only in relating to God but in improving himself on this earth, too. Books on entrepreneurialism often fill half the shelves of a Pentecostal church’s bookshop, and most pastors run seminars on getting ahead in business, tapping into the ambition that every migrant has.
But clearly there’s more to it all than this. Aside from any spiritual need that drives such boisterous passion, and the practical support the churches offer members, the communities also play an important role in affirming migrants’ identities at a time when such things are up for negotiation. Combine all of this with savvy use of technology (especially text messaging), a skill for spotting charismatic preachers and a penchant for style (large services have something of the rock concert about them, and where else would you find a church called the Mountain of Fire and Miracles, or Brazil’s Church of Christ’s Spit?) and the overflowing car park at the industrial estate looks a little less of a mystery.
For all that, the growth-impulse that drives the churches in Ireland has to contend with figures that show the annual intake of asylum seekers at its lowest level for a decade, and this will slow the numbers of newly-arrived Africans signing up.
As every pastor knows, future success will depend on their ability to attract more than the one or two Irish members that most of the churches claim, and the outreach projects that many of them run with Travellers, the homeless and the elderly are early, tentative steps towards that goal.
“In the past, the Catholic church sent missionaries all over the world, particularly to Africa,” says Pastor Tunde. “The Bible teaches us the same principle – where the seed goes, the harvest will come. So, in the Republic of Ireland a lot of us have come back as the harvest for the seed that was planted.”
With the service in full flow and his congregation still hanging on his every word, the pastor turns the page and asks them to “thank God for this nation”, and as he does the speech picks up pace and the stylised, surging rhythms reassert themselves.
“If your glory will come down-ah, then oppression will cease,” he intones. “If your glory will come down, then depression will pass. If your glory will come down, then some-how-ah, this recession will blow over . . . Lord, we commit the Republic of Ireland into your hands, and we ask, oh God, that you will touch this land-ah. We ask, oh God, that you will heal this land-ah. We ask, oh God, that you will bring this land back to you.”
“Amen.”