Thousands of people began to arrive at the Nigerian megachurch just after dawn on a cool morning, looking for love and tips on how to avoid “dating devils.”
The “singles’ summit” is one of several offered by hugely popular Pentecostal churches in the west African nation, where marriage is a cornerstone of society to which most people aspire.
With the relentless hustle and bustle of city life and challenging economic conditions in a period of recession, there is often little time to seek love.
Photo: AFP
The Mountain of Fire and Miracles Ministries aims to change all that at its vast Prayer City complex.
Its Gen218 program — named after the Bible verse in Genesis where before making Eve, God says: “It is not good that the man should be alone” — promises to teach participants tricks for picking the right partner and avoiding pitfalls.
The lucky ones might even find a boyfriend or girlfriend.
Michelle Michaels, a 37-year-old public servant in a brown striped dress, was among the crowd at the summit one Saturday last month.
“It’s more about getting it right,” she said. “Marriage can be a disaster. The rate of divorce is very high nowadays and I don’t want to be part of it.”
With an astonishing maximum capacity of more than 200,000 people, Prayer City bills itself as a “non-stop” venue facilitating “aggressive prayer.”
At 8:30am, the singles’ summit was well underway, with a dapper singer belting out soft rock ballads.
By 10am, many were crying. Some were sprawled motionless and facedown on the floor in apparent rapture.
The summit had in fact not even started: Superstar pastor Daniel Kolawole Olukoya’s appearance was still four hours away.
A range of churches offer singles’ summits, but the substance is more or less the same.
It includes frank advice about the realities of married life, while divine guidelines are prescribed such as abstaining from sex until marriage, along with a lot of praise.
“The singles are not only going there to hook future sanctified partners, but also to acquire the spiritual endowments and secular skills on how to become future rich husbands and wives,” said Nimi Wariboko, a professor at Boston University’s theology school who studies Pentecostalism.
“The summits are also places of pleasure, spaces where one can intensely party in the name of worship and experience huge emotional release without guilt,” he said.
While the church might appear conservative in some ways — specifying that women must cover their hair on religious premises, for example — it is liberal in others.
The Mountain of Fire and Miracles Ministries condemns forced marriage, child marriage, polygamy and inherited marriages, which see a widow passed on to another family member and are still common in Nigeria.
In this way, the church helps guide young professionals as they adapt their traditional customs to modern life.
“There has been an evolution from arranged marriage to marrying for love, and of course a shared love of Jesus Christ is a way of legitimizing a choice of who to marry,” Brown University anthropology professor Daniel Smith said.
However, Olukoya still emphasizes patience, since hasty vows can result in an unhappy marriage to what he calls a “baby husband” — someone who “loves his mother more than the wife” — or an “acidic wife” — a woman whom, “when she talks, you feel like committing suicide.”
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