Immanuel

Matthew McNaught

• Publisher: Fitzcarraldo Editions
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781910695685
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Biographies de sciences sociales

At what point does faith turn into tyranny? In Immanuel, winner of the inaugural Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize, Matthew McNaught explores his upbringing in an evangelical Christian community in Winchester. As he moved away from the faith of his childhood in the early 2000s, a group of his church friends were pursuing it to its more radical fringes. They moved to Nigeria to join a community of international disciples serving TB Joshua, a charismatic millionaire pastor whose purported gifts of healing and prophecy attracted vast crowds to his Lagos ministry, the Synagogue Church of All Nations (SCOAN). Years later, a number of these friends left SCOAN with accounts of violence, sexual abuse, sleep deprivation and public shaming.In reconnecting with his old friends, McNaught realized that their journey into this cult-like community was directly connected to the teachings and tendencies of the church of their childhood. Yet speaking to them awakened a yearning for this church that, despite everything, he couldn't shake off. Was the church's descent into hubris and division separable from the fellowship and mutual sustenance of its early years? Was it possible to find community and connection without dogma and tribalism? Blending essay, memoir and reportage, Immanuel is an exceptional debut about community, doubt, and the place of faith in the twenty-first century.

IV. BROTHERS AND SISTERS

I first experienced the phenomenon of disciple-speak in late 2010, in a rented lecture hall in Birkbeck college, around the corner from Russell Square tube station. A few weeks before, I’d read Dan and Kate’s email announcing their reasons for leaving SCOAN. It had left me determined to see the Synagogue Church for myself, and the London branch – which would soon be closed – was only a two-hour train journey away. I sat in the hall as a tag-team of young, white disciples took their turn to preach to the predominantly black congregation. Each one strode across the stage, leading the crowd in a call and response, channelling TB Joshua in every move and phrase.

On my way out of the meeting, I spoke briefly to Dan’s mum Susan Winfield, who was sitting near the back. I told her that I’d read Dan and Kate’s email. I asked her if she was worried about Kate’s accusations of sexual abuse, given that three of her children remained disciples. She told me that it was completely normal for every genuine move of God to face opposition. On the train home, I wrote about the service in my diary. Susan’s cold, strained smile and the briskness of her speech brought the word ‘brainwashed’ to mind, but even then, I sensed the metaphor was wrong. Talking to Dan and Kate would confirm this. Nothing was scrubbed or removed. The blankness of disciple-speak did not reflect an absence. What was going on beneath its surface?

A few months after my visit, in the comments section of the TB Joshua Watch blog, disciple-speak was a common topic of conversation. What happened to people when they became disciples? The discussions on the blog shed some light on the question, but it wasn’t until years later, through conversations with Dan and Kate, that I began to get my head around it.

We knew that TB Joshua Watch had reached the attention of the Synagogue Church when the copycat blogs started appearing. First it was watchtbjoshua.wordpress.com. Then came Watching TB Joshua, Watched TB Joshua, and other variations. Apparently written by disciples, most of these blogs pumped out large amounts of pro-SCOAN content, as if to bury any unflattering search results in an avalanche of puff.

I’d started the blog in January 2011. I wrote a couple of posts that summarized the troubling side of SCOAN and linked to some existing critical accounts online. I sent an email to a number of old church friends with the link. Soon after, my brother Ian offered to help out. He was a practising Christian, so could address theological issues with more authority than me. He was also better with technology. He overhauled the website, set up social media accounts, wrote posts on idolatry and healing theology. The daily visits rose into the dozens, then hundreds, and eventually thousands. Lots of people were googling TB Joshua.

The blog was, according to the counter-blogs, founded by former disciples engaged in a bitter vendetta against the Man of God. It was a reasonable assumption, but besides not being an ex-disciple, my own interest in TB Joshua was limited at the time. I was repelled by him, and wanted more people to know he was a charlatan. This was an odd, accidental hobby rather than an all-consuming passion. The blog brought its own rewards. It was nice, for one thing, to have a shared project with Ian. He was one year older than me, but our lives had diverged: he’d got married young, had two kids and moved abroad for work. We’d always got on well, but we rarely got around to talking without an excuse. We set up alerts to keep on top of SCOAN-related news. We sent ideas for articles to each other, and edited each other’s drafts.

We learned that TB Joshua’s notoriety extended beyond his claims of healing. His prophecies often made headlines. In 2012, he prophesied that an African head of state would die within sixty days. In a later video, he appeared to name a specific date. When the Malawian president, Bingu Wa Mutharika, died of a cardiac arrest on this day, he was succeeded by Joyce Banda, a devotee of TB Joshua who’d visited the Synagogue Church several times. In the Malawian press, there was speculation as to whether Joshua’s prediction was coincidence, divine anointing, or some kind of insider knowledge.

Many of the prophecy videos were easy to debunk. Whenever there was a major terrorist attack, plane crash or celebrity death in the news, Emmanuel TV would release a video – clearly heavily edited – in which Joshua appeared to predict the event during a church service. By watching the footage of the full service, often available online, we could find the bits that had been cut: the details that deviated from the event that TB Joshua claimed to foresee. These prophetic patchworks were created with such efficiency that on one occasion, a single prophecy was chopped up to make two different videos, each with its inconvenient bits removed: one claiming Joshua had predicted a flood in Indonesia, another a typhoon in the Philippines.

In the comments sections of the posts, a cast of regular characters emerged, often writing under pseudonyms. There were a number of ex-Immanuelites. There were wives worried by their husbands’ obsession with TB Joshua, and concerned friends and relatives of disciples. There was Mr Terrific, a passionate and foul-mouthed critic of TB Joshua who’d been involved with SCOAN in Ghana. There were a number of former disciples. Some, like Dan and Kate, were thoroughly disenchanted. A few were more ambivalent, their comments wrestling with contradictions. ‘Doesn’t God move through imperfect vessels?’ wrote one. Another regular ex-disciple, writing in a broken English that was hard to place, veered from acute insight to florid delusion, from scepticism to credulity, as if she was still only half-free from TB Joshua’s spell.

I’d go on the blog a dozen times each day, checking page views, moderating and responding to comments. I’d sit in a café and work on posts before work. What made it fun was the sense of amateur sleuthing, the attempt to figure out how SCOAN worked. With the help of regular commenters and contributors, we wrote about the deceptions of the healing ministry, about SCOAN’s ways of making money from visitors, like the ‘free gift’ of anointed water given only to those who’d bought expensive merchandise or otherwise contributed money. The relative ease with which these mysteries were solved raised another, more profound question. What kept disciples faithful to a ministry that relied on such crude deceit?

Discussions in the comments section were joined by SCOAN supporters. Some were trolls, damning us to hellfire in all caps. Two regular names, writing in what seemed to be Nigerian-inflected English, defended SCOAN persistently but more or less respectfully. Another, a self-described disciple going by the name of Radicalised, was more elusive, writing a comment then disappearing, ignoring follow-up questions. I spoke to Ian about Radicalised. They had a Lagos IP address, and clearly had inner knowledge of SCOAN. They also seemed to know who we were. We were certain that he or she was an ex-Immanuelite, though had no way of knowing which one.

The presence of Radicalised was exciting. If disciples were commenting, this meant they were probably reading the posts. Perhaps the pressures of church life made it easy to turn a blind eye to troubling facts about SCOAN. On the blog, they were all collected in one place. There was proof of fraudulent prophecies. There was a clip from Emmanuel TV of children singing a song of praise to TB Joshua – ‘everything about him is good’. There was another of a SCOAN attendee calling TB Joshua the ‘Jesus of Today’. It was difficult to imagine how anyone raised as a Christian could see all this, and not have their faith in SCOAN shaken.

‘The first thing you do when you arrive as a disciple at SCOAN,’ wrote Giles, ‘is get shown your bedspace. The males and females are accommodated in two huge separate rooms full of bunk beds. You could fit at least fifty beds in each room. Ablutions would be six toilets, six showers and a couple of sinks. Your luggage would have to fit in any way you could – under the beds, in between the beds or in my case, along the one side of the mattress while I slept on the other side.’

Giles appeared in the comments sections of the first few posts, a British ex-disciple with a good eye for the detail of disciple life. When we emailed him asking if he would write something longer, he obliged. He wrote about the correction meetings, in which disciples would report each other for missteps. He wrote about addaba – the state of ostracism imposed by TB Joshua if an accusation stuck. He wrote about his experience of being kicked out of SCOAN. In 2006, after being granted leave to attend a family reunion, he was denied an invitation to return. He called all the numbers he knew, wrote emails asking to be allowed back, but was met with silence. ‘I was living in the south of London in a flatshare where everyone seemed to get drunk and high all the time, working in a minimum wage job,’ he wrote. ‘So, I ended up doing what most guys would have done if they didn’t know what to do with their lives. I joined the Army.’

Giles’ rejection by TB Joshua didn’t shake his belief that he was a great Man of God. When Giles was a disciple, his mum was diagnosed with cancer. She’d gone to SCOAN, where she was proclaimed healed. She’d refused chemotherapy but had kept getting sicker. When he visited her after leaving SCOAN, he sprayed her with TB Joshua’s anointed water. It was only in Afghanistan that TB Joshua’s hold on him began to slip.

After joining the Royal Engineers, Giles was sent to Helmand province, where a massive operation was underway to recapture Taliban-held territory. He was a sapper in the Counter-IED Task Force. His unit’s role was to move out ahead of the advancing troops, identifying and destroying IEDs. He brought a bottle of anointed water with him, and sprayed everyone in his unit at the beginning of the tour.

His mum died when he was in Helmand. Two close friends in his unit were killed by roadside bombs. ‘Turns out anointed water isn’t IED-proof,’ he wrote. During this time, Giles read the Bible every day. He’d wake up reciting psalms out loud – though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me. He realized that the love and solace he felt from these words was unlike anything he’d known at SCOAN.

Giles’ account initiated a new phase in the blog. Other ex-disciples came forward, and wrote testimonies of their own experience. The blog became more than just a catalogue of TB Joshua’s dodginess. Some days it felt like a spontaneous community, a place in which people could talk about experiences that had been life-changing, sometimes traumatic, but too bizarre for most people to understand. In the comments section, a mixture of ex-disciples and outsiders attempted to make sense of things that seemed, to me and many others, incomprehensible. What was it that kept people in SCOAN for so many years, in spite of the privation, the absurdity and abuse?

Giles’ story contained a fascinating specimen of disciple-speak. Towards the end of his tour of Afghanistan, he began to receive emails from a disciple called Angela. The Synagogue Church, after ignoring him for years, was suddenly keen to make contact again. In Angela’s first email, she warned him to dismiss any accusations he might hear from Dan and Kate, who’d recently left the church. ‘I just want to tell you that the allegations are all false – there is no truth in them. You should not allow it to disturb you but treat it as the rubbish it is and discard it.’

Giles waited until he’d left Afghanistan before replying. ‘I still don’t know why my opinion is so important,’ he wrote. ‘I’d been told to leave when I was a disciple, and ostracized until I did. No-one was interested in contacting me or my brother when my mum was dying and we were trying to get through. No-one seems to be interested in the fact that I have just spent the last six months fighting in Helmand, and am now trying to adjust to normal life. No-one is interested in Kate and Dan’s welfare either. All the phone calls and emails I’ve been getting are to do with defending the ministry’s honour and winning people back to SCOAN.’

The disciple’s reply came a few days later:

Hi Giles,

The internet here is a bit crazy and not consistent at all! Hope things are going well on your end. Just wanted to encourage you to examine all things in the light of God’s Word. Remember, we all came to Lagos because we wanted to learn God’s lifestyle – not that we live it already. If we behaved perfectly, acted perfectly, reacted perfectly, why would we want to go to Lagos to study God’s Word and character? We are all coming from somewhere – but by God’s grace we will become who God says we are.

Sister Angela

What was puzzling about disciple-speak was how ineffective it was at persuading, or communicating anything of substance. The slightest display of empathy or acknowledgement – sincere or otherwise – would have surely done more to reassure Giles. But this jumble of pre-fabricated phrases, delivered with a vacant cheeriness, had a chilling effect: like being visited by something not-quite-human.

Disciples didn’t pick up this way of talking overnight. In his early months at SCOAN, Giles’ commitment to the ministry co-existed with a certain independence of mind. ‘I’ve always been a bit gobby,’ he told me, in a later conversation. He was often criticized by a number of zealous female disciples, Kate and Mary Winfield among them. It struck him as phoney to call them sister, he wrote, ‘unless I feel loved like my real sister loves me’. He called them by their first names only, and for a while, he got away with it. Dan also described feeling uncomfortable about the way people called TB Joshua ‘daddy’. He resisted using the word himself at the beginning – though it was explained that this kind of thing was normal in Nigeria. Addaba changed everything. The unpredictability of the attacks in disciple meetings, and the pain of the public shaming that followed, meant that disciples looked for easy ways of staying relatively safe.

Giles’ first stint in SCOAN came to an abrupt end because of a kitchen dispute. Unknown disciples had been drinking from his bottle of chilled water in the communal fridge and putting it back empty. He left a note on the bottle: Don’t drink! Contains my yucky saliva! The bottle disappeared, then the note appeared in a disciple meeting, wielded by a disciple as evidence of Giles’ bad behaviour. TB Joshua was outraged. The other disciples latched on to his disapproval, directing a litany of other complaints against Giles. Even the previously friendly ones added their own accusations. He was called to see TB Joshua after the meeting, who told him to pack his bags and leave.

When, after much pleading in the weeks that followed, he was given a second chance and invited back to Lagos, he decided to do it right. He called everyone sister and brother. He learned to deliver TB Joshua-approved teaching. He peppered his everyday conversation with Quotable Quotes, the words of TB Joshua that they were made to study and memorize. The change was dramatic. People used to leave the room when he entered. Now they welcomed him into conversations. He was given responsibilities: the youth work, the newcomers’ department.

Giles learned that speaking like a disciple was as much about what he didn’t say. Disciples couldn’t criticize the prophet or SCOAN in any way, but it was also taboo to speak of any other Christian leaders favourably. Conversations about seemingly innocuous topics were also out of bounds. He recalled how as a new disciple, he’d ask others about their family, their hobbies, their churches back home. He was met with stern responses: ‘That’s not important.’ ‘I do not discuss my past.’ Later he understood. Life at SCOAN was about pressing forward. Such small talk was seen as unserious. They were there to serve God, to learn from their mentor TB Joshua.

Giles’ discomfort at addressing fellow disciples as ‘brother’ and ‘sister’ revealed a deeper truth about SCOAN. It was precisely those fraternal, horizontal bonds that disciple-speak denied them. People would spend years living together – sharing meals and dorm rooms, travelling the world – and yet barely know each other.

During Dan Winfield’s first year as a disciple, his mum and aunt Madelaine came to SCOAN for a week, along with a group of British visitors. At the time, foreign groups would be given a short talk by TB Joshua early in their visit. This time it was different. TB Joshua had called Dan into his office with two other disciples, and told them to deliver a talk based on his teachings. He’d given them precise instructions about how to introduce themselves.

Dan was first to address the group. ‘My name is Dan,’ he said. ‘By the grace of God I am an evangelist-in-training under my Father in the Lord, Senior Prophet TB Joshua. Before I came to SCOAN, I was a sinner. I thank God for the life of my Father in the Lord, TB Joshua. Before coming to SCOAN, I didn’t know Jesus, but now through my mentor I have come to know Him.’

Later that day, Dan’s mum came to him in the computer room in a state of agitation. Her sister Madelaine had been concerned by what Dan had said. Dan had been raised as a Christian, and had chosen to be baptized as a young teenager. He’d just denied his previous faith, giving TB Joshua all the credit for his salvation. Madelaine thought this was a sign that SCOAN was a cult. Dan’s mum didn’t know what to think.

Dan was taken aback. He listened to her, and gently tried to reassure her that it wasn’t a cult. She calmed down. Several other disciples in the computer room witne...

Table of contents

• PRAISE
• TITLE PAGE
• CONTENTS
• PREFACE
• I. EVERYONE NEEDS TO BE DELIVERED
• II. HISTORY MAKERS
• III. THE GIFTS OF THE SPIRIT
• IV. BROTHERS AND SISTERS
• V. VISIONS
• EPILOGUE
• AUTHOR’S NOTE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• COPYRIGHT