By Seyi Gesinde
August 5, 2026
There is something curious about the way Nigerians sometimes judge the Church.
When critics accuse a church of wrongdoing, the verdict can arrive before the facts.
When a pastor says something controversial, everybody suddenly becomes a theologian.
When a Christian organisation is accused of misconduct, social media quickly becomes a courtroom, with critics assuming the roles of judge, jury and prosecutor.
But who exactly decides that the Church has failed?
Is every accusation a fact?
Is every criticism a verdict?
Is everything critics call a “mistake” necessarily a mistake in the sight of GOD?
The ancient Greeks understood the danger of assuming knowledge we do not possess. Socrates became famous not because he claimed to know everything, but because he understood the limits of his knowledge.
That ancient philosophical humility remains remarkably relevant in the age of social media, where information travels at extraordinary speed and certainty often travels even faster.
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We see a fragment and confidently construct the whole. We hear an allegation and begin writing a verdict. We encounter one chapter and explain the entire book.
The Church is not ultimately accountable to social media.
It is not accountable to the loudest critic.
Its highest accountability is to GOD.
That does not make the Church beyond scrutiny. It simply means that criticism should not automatically become judgement, and allegation should not automatically become truth.
There is a difference between asking a question and claiming to know the answer. There is a difference between scrutiny and condemnation. There is a difference between what we have seen and what actually exists.
And perhaps that is why there is something particularly curious about what happened in South Africa.
While many are quick to announce what they believe the Church is doing wrong, how many noticed what RCCG quietly did right?
The Church paid $265,854 to help bring 500 distressed Nigerians home from South Africa.
Did you see this too?
The Federal Government has publicly thanked the Redeemed Christian Church of GOD, led by Pastor Enoch Adejare Adeboye, for providing the money for 500 one way tickets for Nigerians seeking to escape xenophobic and Afrophobic attacks.
The government says 1,640 Nigerians have so far been brought home, with government funding covering 1,385 and philanthropic support accounting for 255.
Now pause for a moment.
RCCG is not the Nigerian Government.
It did not create the Nigerian passport.
It did not appoint Nigeria’s diplomats.
It did not create the obligation of a government to protect its citizens abroad.
It has no constitutional responsibility to repatriate distressed Nigerians from another country.
Yet it spent hundreds of thousands of dollars helping Nigerians come home.
And there is something else about this story.
RCCG did not even appear to make a public spectacle of the intervention.
No trumpet.
No grand self congratulatory campaign.
No endless publicity about how much had been spent.
If not for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs publicly acknowledging the intervention, how many Nigerians would have known that RCCG had paid $265,854 to help bring 500 Nigerians home from distress in South Africa?
Think about that.
The Church spent the money.
The government announced the intervention.
The public noticed only because somebody else disclosed it.
How many interventions are sitting somewhere in the shadows, known only to GOD and the people who benefited?
We may never know.
And perhaps that is precisely how some acts of Christian giving are supposed to be.
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JESUS did not teach His followers to turn every act of giving into a publicity exercise.
In Matthew 6, He taught that when giving to the needy, the left hand should not know what the right hand is doing.
The point was not secrecy for secrecy’s sake.
It was the rejection of giving for public applause.
So perhaps there is something profoundly Christian about the fact that RCCG did not announce this intervention itself.
The Church paid.
People were helped.
And the Church apparently did not need a standing ovation.
Yet there is an irony here.
Some antagonists of the Church seem remarkably confident about judging an institution based on what they see, while apparently remaining completely unaware of what they do not see.
They construct conclusions from fragments.
They pronounce on an institution from isolated incidents.
They speak as though their limited view is the complete story.
But if the Church can quietly spend $265,854 helping distressed Nigerians and the public only learns about it because a government ministry mentions it, how much of the Church’s work is simply invisible to those doing the judging?
So here is another question.
How many such things has the Church done that nobody knows about?
How many people have been helped quietly?
How many families have received assistance without cameras?
How many distressed Nigerians have been supported without press releases?
How many acts of compassion never became social media content?
We may never know.
And perhaps that is the irony.
The Church is often accused of doing too much publicity.
Yet here is a case where the public may never have known about a $265,854 intervention if the Ministry of Foreign Affairs had not disclosed it.
Perhaps not every good deed comes with a publicity department.
Perhaps some things are done because they need to be done.
Not because they need to trend.
Because the people being helped are Nigerians first.
The Church is not asking to inspect their denominational cards before buying their tickets.
The plane does not ask whether somebody worships at RCCG.
Human suffering rarely checks religious affiliation before arriving.
Neither should compassion.
That is precisely what makes the gesture larger than the Church itself.
It is Christianity doing something Christianity has always claimed it should do.
The Good Samaritan did not first ask the wounded man for his denomination.
He saw a human being in distress.
He stopped.
He helped.
He paid.
And he left the moral question behind for everybody else.
Perhaps that is why this story deserves more than applause.
It deserves reflection.
Where are the critics?
Where are those who routinely describe the Church through its alleged failures?
Where are those who appear whenever a Christian organisation becomes the subject of controversy?
Have they seen this?
Have they commented?
Have they acknowledged it?
Have they shared it?
Or does the Church become interesting only when somebody has something negative to say about it?
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That would be an uncomfortable standard.
And an unfair one.
Of course, the Church should be scrutinised.
No institution, religious or otherwise, should be immune from legitimate questions.
But scrutiny must remain scrutiny.
An allegation is not a conviction.
A criticism is not divine judgement.
And a narrative repeated often enough does not become the mind of GOD.
The Church ultimately answers to GOD.
Its leaders answer to GOD.
Its actions must be measured against the standards of Scripture and truth, not merely against the mood of social media.
That distinction matters.
Because if we magnify every allegation until it becomes the entire identity of an institution, while shrinking every good deed until it becomes invisible, we are no longer practising balanced scrutiny.
We are constructing a narrative.
And narratives can become prejudices.
Francis Bacon warned of the “idols” that distort human understanding, the assumptions and mental habits that can make us mistake our interpretation of reality for reality itself.
Perhaps that is one of the great dangers of the digital age.
We do not merely consume information.
We organise information according to what we already believe.
We notice what confirms us.
We overlook what inconveniences us.
We remember what supports our argument.
We forget what complicates it.
The danger is not only ignorance. It is ignorance that has become certain of itself.
So here is an inconvenient fact.
A Nigerian church has put more than a quarter of a million dollars into helping distressed Nigerians escape danger.
Not members.
Not necessarily people from its own congregation.
Nigerians.
That should matter.
And perhaps there is an even bigger irony.
Nigeria has spent years debating whether religious organisations contribute enough to society.
Here is one quietly contributing to a national humanitarian problem that government itself is addressing.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs described the intervention as a significant demonstration of compassion, solidarity and commitment to distressed Nigerians, and said the partnership illustrates what faith based organisations and public institutions can achieve together.
Yet the Church itself did not need to make the announcement.
The government did.
That should make us wonder.
How many acts of service disappear because nobody announces them?
How many good deeds never trend because the people who benefited have no platform?
How many interventions are happening quietly while the public conversation remains occupied with controversy?
Perhaps the Church has more stories than the ones we hear.
Perhaps RCCG has done more than the public knows.
Perhaps other churches have too.
And perhaps one of the problems with public discourse is that outrage travels faster than gratitude.
An accusation needs only a post.
A good deed sometimes needs evidence, context, verification and, apparently, a government ministry to tell us it happened.
Yet somewhere on social media, somebody is probably still preparing the next indictment.
Perhaps that is allowed.
Criticism is allowed.
Questions are allowed.
Disagreement is allowed.
But before writing the next indictment, perhaps write this down too.
The Church helped bring Nigerians home.
And perhaps this is where intellectual honesty matters.
A church can be criticised over one issue and commended over another.
A pastor can be questioned about one matter and respected for another.
An institution can have imperfections, real or alleged, and still perform extraordinary acts of service.
Human beings are complicated.
Institutions are complicated.
Perhaps only social media believes everything must be completely holy or completely evil.
Real life is rarely that simple.
The philosopher does not merely ask, “What do I believe?” The deeper question is, “What do I actually know?”
That question should trouble every serious critic, every defender, every journalist and every citizen.
Because certainty without sufficient knowledge is not wisdom.
It is only confidence.
The Church is not government.
The Church cannot solve Nigeria’s security crisis.
It cannot replace diplomacy.
It cannot replace the state.
It cannot become Nigeria’s emergency evacuation agency.
But when Nigerians are in distress and somebody with the means to help decides to help, perhaps the least we can do is notice.
Because there is a strange injustice in a society that is eager to document what it believes the Church has done wrong, but strangely reluctant to document what the Church has done right.
If we insist on scrutinising the Church, let us scrutinise fairly.
If we count allegations, let us also count interventions.
If we demand accountability, let us not make ourselves incapable of acknowledging service.
If we publish every accusation, let us not become allergic to evidence of compassion.
And if we are going to tell the Church that it must look like CHRIST, perhaps we should be intellectually honest enough to recognise the moments when it does.
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Five hundred Nigerians now have a better chance of coming home because $265,854 was put behind their journey to safety.
And the Church did not even need to tell us.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs did.
So perhaps the question is not merely, “Did RCCG do this?”
The bigger question is, how many things has the Church done that we never saw?
How many Nigerians have been helped quietly?
How many lives have been touched without headlines?
How many interventions have gone unnoticed because nobody was there with a camera?
We do not know.
And that is precisely the point.
We do not know.
Perhaps we should be careful about reducing an entire institution to the loudest accusations made against it.
Perhaps we should be equally careful about assuming that silence means nothing happened.
What we cannot see is not necessarily what does not exist. What we do not know is not necessarily what did not happen.
The Church is not perfect.
RCCG is not beyond criticism.
But neither is it beyond recognition.
And if critics are going to tell the story of the Church, they should tell all of it.
Even the parts they did not announce.
Even the parts social media did not trend.
Even the parts they do not like.
Especially those parts.
