Nigerian Church Leaders and the Burden of Upholding Integrity: A Search for Mind Decolonisation

Abstract

It is no news that Nigerians are struggling with issues of integrity both in private and public realms. This paper has held the Nigerian church and its leaders accountable for this life-taking abuse of integrity that has eaten deep into the fabric of the society, where anything goes provided it yields instant material dividends. This paper seeks to address what Nigerian church leaders, who have divine mandate to promote integrity, done to sustain the practice of integrity in Nigeria. While many Nigerian scholars like Caleb Oladipo, Peter Akinola, Matthew Kukah, Benson Igboin and Asonze Ukah, just to mention a few, have written prolifically to address this situation blaming certain sections of church leadership. This paper departs from their perspectives in that it focuses mainly on the role of the church leaders generally. This study is aimed at advocating for Christian leadership that promotes integrity. The study is limited to Nigerian church leaders. No society progresses without the practice of integrity. The study has discovered that many church leaders have kept colonial mentality, prophetic compromise, and promotion of selfish interests, which militate against the practice of integrity. To achieve the purpose of this study, the researcher has used documentation (qualitative) to collect data, while the textual analysis method is used to analyse collected data in order to respond to the research question.