Everybody knows the story – a supposedly twenty something old dish, lawyer and ‘Christian’ in the fold of COZA church Abuja kissed a pastor or the pastor kissed her, and she says that because she is grief-stricken at her seductive dexterity, she has decided to bare it all in the village square. But she didn’t just tell it all, she bared her wide flung parts as well, and has set tongues wagging again, at the antics of these supposed men of God who take advantage of the gullibility and naivety of the sheep they are supposedly to mentor and pastor. I met one of the pastors recently, and I bolted from that church not because of the flimsy reasons I gave him but because I understand something of the way some of these ‘men of God’ think.
This was how it happened for me: when I was a youth corp. member, I listened in awe to the story of a certain pastor or man of God who had slept with all the unmarried members of his church. Each time he made the attempt – usually at night vigil sessions – the ladies would rebuff and scold him and tell him that they were disappointed in his advances at them. But he usually had his way because he backed up his advances with a very strong passage of the Holy Scriptures of Romans 15 verse 27 – that if I (the pastor) have sowed spiritual gifts to you, is there anything wrong if I reap your ‘carnal’ thing? I have paraphrased the passage for easy comprehension. And so the ladies would let him have his way after he quoted that scripture.
But as many years passed, I never forgot this story and I never forgot that Bible verse. What message it sent was that many of our churches overflow, not with the spirit of God, but with the spirit of gullibility. There are so many precepts and so many misconceptions in the church today that I have decided to address some of them in a book with the working titles, HOLY LIES or MY PASTOR IS A BIG FAT LIAR. Parts of the things I want addressed in that book include the following: Did the Bible say that if a woman wears trousers she would go to hell? Who really owns the trousers – the man or the woman? Did the Bible out rightly forbid us from drinking strong drink? When the Bible says that if a person cannot take care of his own household, he is worse than an infidel, what does it really mean? And is it really true that Adam was created first, and because of that, that establishes the pre-eminence and dominance of the man over the woman?
So, when one day the pastor of the church I used to attend glibly quoted Romans 15 verse 27 to justify his request to be ‘appreciated’ by his sheep, I voted against that request with my legs.
But before I address the Ese Walter something, let me first say that church goers today really do not understand what the church is. The church is not a place for only good people. IT IS A PLACE WHERE BAD PEOPLE GO TO, APPARENTLY TO TRY TO BE GOOD (That’s what Jesus said, that he did not come for good people, but the lost). And you know what? Just the same way as some pastors misinterpret Romans 15 verse 27 to their advantage and exploit their flock and have sex with them, so the personalities in the dark world have taken advantage of Jesus’ statement that they too, witches and wizards, seductresses and their allied groupings are welcome to church as well. So what we have in churches today is a mixed bag, a pot-pourri of the good, the bad and the ugly. In most churches today, you find the Ese Walters of this world who have had a history of abuse, seeking either to find solace or to perpetrate that abuse in church. Put Ese Walters together with a pastor who believes that Romans 15 verse 27 means that he has a right to sleep with members of his church, and you’ll begin to make sense of the goings on in today’s churches.
So when Ese Walters went to town with her story, everyone wanted the pastor’s head. How can…how can a pastor stoop that low to take advantage of a naïve woman in his charge? How can…? But I was not swayed by the Ese Walters story because of a variety of reasons. One, Ese Walters is a grown woman. She is not a juvenile, or a teenager or some innocent woman who was lured the way she wants us to believe. Ese Walters is a lawyer. And because I work in a law firm, I have the benefit of knowing that lawyers are not easy people to manipulate, and even if you are a pastor, you cannot outsmart a lawyer that easily. So my point is this: in that story that she told, she said the pastor asked her to come sit on his laps…and she went. After she did, they romped on his bed and had sex again and again. My dears, think – would we be having this conversation if Ese Walters had declined to sit on the Pastor’s laps and behaved like a Joseph and snatch her bag and gotten the hell out of that hotel room? No we wouldn’t. And what vindicates this position of mine is that there have been others who have come forward to allege that the pastor in question made those advances at them but they took the Joseph option, and didn’t just stop there but left the church as well. But that’s not the case with Ese Walters who is now throwing in the he-manipulated-me clause to try to garner some sympathy from those who are as manipulative as she is.
We all know this – that if you come to equity, you must come with clean hands. Inasmuch as we cannot condone the despicable actions of some of our pastors, we will be throwing the baby out with the bath water if we fail to draw attention to the antics of the Ese Walters in our churches today. Forgive my saying this but Ese Walters is just a stereotype of the average girl in church today. Come to COZA or any church for that matter and you may observe this trend: the finer or the more handsome the pastor, the more the horde of ladies who besiege that church, giving the impression that they just cannot wait to bare their bosoms for the taking, at a touch. And they come armed to the teeth as well angling to ‘work’ in the vineyard with bared chests, leaving their breasts flying all over the place, and with lascivious laps and dewlaps, and skimpy dresses that could derail a pope with his sermon. I have it on good authority from a former member of that church that the so-called ‘dead fish’, the pastor’s wife, mentioned in another strong allegation against the COZA pastor in question once mounted the pulpit and challenged those competing with her for her husband. ‘If I die today, and if after four months my husband decides to marry any one of you here, that person she marries after me will die as well’, she said.
I write stories for a living and therefore, if someone were to give me the job of reconstructing or to re-write that story Ese Walters told us, I would first of all try to establish the relationship that may have existed between the two. The feeling in my gut is that Ese Walters was the pastor’s girlfriend. They had a steaming hot romance. And I verily believe, from the kind of pictures we’d seen of Ese Walters on the internet, that this Ese Walters may have tried to blackmail the pastor into leaving his ‘dead fish’ of a wife for her, and would tell the world about their romance if the pastor did not do as she wanted. Then there’s the likelihood that he called her bluff and she went ahead to spill the beans on their affair. The motive, Ese Walter’s in this case, would be to damage the pastor’s reputation and make it irredeemably irreparable. Either way both are reaping what they sowed, and believe me, God’s not mocked by these demons posing as angels of light.
