“I feel very good when people accuse me of spending church money on private jets” – Bishop Oyedepo

Bishop Oyedepo says he feels good when people accuse him of spending church money on maintaining his private jets.

Oyedepo told Punch why his church is often regarded as the “Church of the Rich”.

He said “It’s for all the people who believe that Jesus already paid for them to be rich. And those who don’t believe, when they come they start believing when they see it happen in a lot of people’s lives. And we are not ashamed to be called the church of the rich. If they call your family poor, will you be excited? Nobody would be excited.

“Even when a family is poor, they hate to be called poor. No man in his right mind enjoys being called poor, and nobody truly wants to be poor, people may pretend. Which is more honourable between being a giver and a beggar? Most of us came in very poor, but the light of God’s word came on us and we walked out of poverty in grand style into wealth and riches.” He boasted.

Explaining why there is so much wealth in the church despite the growing poverty in the land, the General Overseer said, “the kingdom of God is funded by God’s resources. We are not funded by the economy of the world, but by the economy of the kingdom, which has a budget for all of its agenda on earth. We’ve been here since 1999 and we have never had power outage or water shortage. The main players are Nigerians, the builders are Nigerians. There is no building here that any foreign expert took part in. There is no foreign company’s presence here, including the tabernacle. Some of the revered foreign companies here in Nigeria are technicians in Germany, and they are all political contractors, not that they have something special to offer.”

When asked how he feels when being accused of spending church money on private jets, he said, “I feel very good. It’s an opinion. Let me tell you what my understanding of persecution is; it’s simply an opinion harshly expressed. And everybody has a right to his opinion. People who are walking in the truth are hardly bothered when things are said negatively about them because they have nothing to hide. The truth is I have never felt it, some say it’s not human, but I have not. I can’t be wasting my time trying to reply lies because I have too many things to do. They are doing their work, let me be doing my work too and before they wake up in the morning, I’ve done the next one, so, it doesn’t matter. My idea of it is that, in a football match, you have only 22 people playing with thousands of spectators. And that is the way it is in the journey of life. In every field, you find just few players and many spectators, multitudes. If we don’t know where to place opinions, they will displace us.” he quipped