The following are the views expressed by Olufemi Oguntokun in the July 10, 2026 episode of the On the Lord’s Side Podcast — Christian perspectives on news and current events.
ON MONETIZING THE GOSPEL
Good morning to you once again. It is Friday, the 10th of July 2026.
I want to begin by inviting you to engage with an audio clip of a statement credited to a Christian preacher — sent to me by my sister and fisher, thank you very much. In it, a pastor announces to his church that the live stream of their services will no longer be open to the general public but restricted to members only. In his words: “For those of you watching on social media, this will be the last time we stream our services to you live like this. To participate in our live services, you have to become a member of our online community. This is not an open group, and it is not a free group; there is an access to come in. The registration or subscription is just one SP a month, or ten SPs a year, and you can get access for yourself, your family and friends. Our live services are for family members; for those outside, we’ll have curated programming. Imagine what we can do when 100,000 of us come in and put our resources and our faith together — we’ll do so much more for the gospel. To be part of the members-only community, type BLX on the chat platform now.”
When I first heard the opening, I thought perhaps the church had come to understand that some of its teachings are not meant for the whole world — that there are heavy, biblically grounded teachings you might want to preach to your congregation without broadcasting to everyone, to avoid scandal or people cutting a portion out of context. Those are real concerns in the social-media age, and I always admonish myself, when I come across a short clip, to seek the full context and to check whether the speaker has explained or debunked it. But the full length of this clip reveals that it is all about money. Pay one SP, become a member, and you get access to the live stream. “SP” is a digital-currency unit — a tokenised currency owned by Pastor Chris Oyakhilome, designed for the church community and the LoveWorld nation — which you can convert to naira. According to the platforms, one SP is roughly 1,750 naira, or about 2,050 by other calculations. And you can tell from the way the preacher styles his hair that he is affiliated with Pastor Chris Oyakhilome’s ministry.
Somebody might say, “If access to the live stream costs about 1,750 naira a month, that’s no big deal.” But understand the mathematics — and note that the pastor did not say the church needed money to fund the stream. He said, “Imagine how much more missionary work we can do if we all contribute.” When I listened in full, I began to think even more deeply about the state of Christian ministries in the digital age. One of the malaises afflicting the Christian community worldwide is that we continue to look to the world to learn how to organise ourselves, manage our affairs, and conduct mission — we ask, “How are they doing it out there?” and import the world’s strategies. In some cases that is not bad in itself, but we too often forget that we were told, when the charge was given to us, how to conduct ourselves. We have the rules right there in the Bible, and one of them is the principle of giving freely. “Freely you have received, freely give” — that is a core principle of mission, spoken by Jesus when He commissioned His disciples: “Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, drive out demons. Freely you have received; freely give.”
But when the church looks out into the world, what does it hear? The voices of commercially minded people saying, “You’ve got to monetise whatever you have; if you have anything of value, monetise it.” They say it to professionals, to people with a decent social-media following: “If you create content people watch, find a way to monetise it — don’t just give it all out freely.” And many in the Christian community find that argument compelling, because we can always rationalise: “If income comes from what I’m doing, I’ll plough it back into the mission and do much more.” It is a legitimate opportunity — you break no state law, no moral law — so monetise it, and your heart justifies it: “I’ll plough it all back and do so much more.” Exactly what that pastor said. We look outside the church, see people making fantastic money off the internet, and apply it to ourselves — forgetting that we are a peculiar people, called to be different, and that if you claim to do your Master’s work, you must do it the way your Master asked.
That is the most important reason churches must ensure that access to sermons, to the proclamation of the Word of God, is free — free, free, free. Every Christian ministry and preacher must be most reluctant to charge any fee to bring people in to hear the Word or to worship God. Off the top of my head I cannot think of any grounds to justify it — though let me be careful and allow that perhaps there are nuances here and there — so I repeat: a Christian church must be most careful about charging any fee to invite people to hear the Word, to worship, or to know more about the Lord. When He commissioned the disciples — a commission we must receive for ourselves — He said, “Freely you have received; freely give.” And the One who commissioned us also gave us rules: in Matthew 10:9, “Do not take any gold or silver or copper in your belts.” The disciples would naturally be concerned — “If I leave home in Galilee for who knows how long, I want money in my belt to sustain myself.” But Jesus said, take nothing — no gold, no silver, no bag, no extra shirt or sandals, not even a staff — “for the worker is worthy of his keep” (Matthew 10:10). Meaning: the One who has employed you will sustain you. We have inverted it, telling ourselves, “I’ve got to provide for myself, we’ve got to monetise this.” We are people of the Book, duty-bound to our Lord — not only Saviour, friend and brother, but Lord, the One who rules over us. So if we do His work, we must do it His way.
The second reason to resist this monetisation race is that it leads Christians and ministries to do all sorts of things for the sake of getting and staying monetised, and increasing the revenue from their content. You must know how cutthroat the social-media market is — how many things compete for attention every waking second, hundreds, perhaps millions of pieces of content. If even ten people listen to you organically — an audience you have not paid for — you should be delighted. Because people do all sorts of shenanigans to get views, or to get the algorithm to count views. Have you heard of phone farms — houses in China and other Asian countries with a thousand internet-enabled phones and Gmail accounts, that you pay to play your content over and over? If I publish on YouTube and want to rack up 10,000 views immediately, I pay them, and their phones play it repeatedly. YouTube says it has robust systems to detect this, so it is not always the case that 10,000 real human beings watched — be wise as serpents; know what is going on. And you find Christian ministries and churches that want to monetise and maximise revenue getting drawn into these shenanigans — which is essentially lying. Because, as I always say, once you take one step down the slippery slope, you take another to stabilise yourself, and then another.
Worse still, monetisation leads you to say things only for the sake of getting people to watch — the most dangerous aspect of all. You begin to gesticulate, create scenes, and say things all because you want many people to see what you posted. I came across a video recently and called my wife over: a preacher wanted to say something, but the camera — operated from a distance to cover the whole church — had not zoomed to his face. So he said, “Can you see the cameraman is not looking at me? The camera is not on me,” and when it zoomed in, he repeated the line. I asked my wife: why did he invite the camera back to him? Because he knew that line would sell on social media, would gain traction. And at that point there is only a thin line between being your Lord’s servant proclaiming His message and serving your own interest.
So anyone in the LoveWorld community who wants to pay one SP to keep watching that ministry’s live streams is at liberty to do so. But I hope Christians and ministries who have satisfied themselves that “it’s okay to monetise our content” will think about it more deeply: first, that the One who commissioned us said, “Freely you have received; freely give”; and second, that those who embark on monetisation get drawn into shenanigans, some bordering on sin, some on unfaithfulness to the One who commissioned us. That is why many Nigerian Christians continue to applaud Pastor Nathaniel Bassey. His songs, produced as a gospel minister, are on paid music platforms, and he earns income from selling his music — which is legitimate, being the product of his intellectual work. But the Hallelujah Challenge, the worship programme he hosts, which attracts huge viewership, he has refused to monetise, even though it is the type of content eligible for it. People wonder why. I hope it is because it simply does not sit right with him — because for any Christian, it just cannot sit right to monetise a programme where you gather people to pray and worship God, and then derive pecuniary gain from it. And if it sits right with any Christian, that Christian should open the Bible again.
I am open to different views, but even from afar you can see where it leads. There is a particular pastor in Nigeria said to be the highest-grossing YouTuber in the country, and many point to the fantastic work his foundation now does. But anything can be rationalised — do the most egregious thing, and you will find a way to rationalise it. For those monetising Christian content, the rationalisation is always, “The money we make, we plough back into the ministry.” There is Someone who will do an audit — and He won’t tell you when. Those who persuaded themselves they would make the money and plough it back will, I fear, not pass that audit.
ON “CANCELLING” MOSES AND ELIJAH
Next, a mind-boggling statement credited to a preacher. The person who posted the clip on X captioned it: “‘Lord God’ refers to angels or demons. Moses and Elijah are the two major problems in the Old Testament, so God had to cancel them.” That is what this preacher is said to have taught. In a midweek service, a congregant stood up and asked about a book — “The Revelation Generation,” written by the preacher’s “father in the Lord” — noting a part where “the Lord God” supposedly does not always mean God. The preacher responded, in essence: “Lord” in the Old Testament is not necessarily God — sometimes it refers to angels, sometimes to demons; to find out who “this Lord” is, check the character, because Jesus came to show us the character of God, and Jesus is God. He argued that the law was “given by the administration of angels,” that Jesus said no one has seen the Father except Him, and that Jesus is “the sole expression of God.”
Then he made his central claim: “Moses was not one of the prophets. Moses was their Jesus — a god to the people. Why do you think God buried Moses? He wasn’t a regular guy like Obadiah, Nahum or Micah. The people said, ‘We don’t want God, give us Moses,’ so God gave them Moses and the angel, and Moses and the angels were running things. God is orderly: you want this, He gives it and steps out — like a landlord who needs your permission to enter the house — so God is not responsible for everything happening in the world; He left it to us.” He went on: “They were all baptised unto Moses, as we are baptised into Christ. Coming out of Egypt was like our salvation. But God made sure Moses didn’t reach the Promised Land, to show that the law cannot deliver the inheritance — only Joshua, whose name is Yeshua, that is Jesus, could. Two major problems in the Old Testament: Moses and Elijah. God buried them Himself. Moses is as powerful as Jesus in his miracles — Jesus fed 5,000; Moses fed millions with manna; Jesus walked on water; Moses parted the sea and people walked on dry ground. If you are looking for miracles, you will miss God and see Moses. The problem with us is we think miracles validate the move of God — no, it is the revelation of Jesus.”
I am almost certain some listening to that were nodding in agreement, and others wondering what on earth was being said. The danger with teaching that is not biblically or theologically sound is that it confuses, because it mixes elements of truth with greater lies. And, with all respect, this is neither biblically nor theologically sound. First, the claim that in the Old Testament “Lord God” sometimes refers not to the Lord God Almighty but to angels or demons is simply false. There is no place in the Bible where “Lord God,” or its equivalent, refers to anyone other than the Lord God Almighty. Yes, Sarah called her husband “lord” — but that is not “Lord God.” To say “Lord God” sometimes means angels or demons is a misrepresentation of the Bible that turns things completely on their head.
As for Moses, there is no place in the Bible where the children of Israel regarded him as God. Do not be sucked in by flowery language. Is there any passage where Israel worshipped Moses or treated him as God deserving of worship? They said, “Moses, God is too powerful for us; you be our mediator — you speak to Him and then to us.” They did not say, “We will worship you.” In fact, they were so rebellious that they questioned him every time he came with “This is what the Lord wants”; they were a stiff-necked people. So to say the miracles God did through Moses were so compelling that they began to regard him as God is not true; it is false. And to say God barred Moses from the Promised Land because he had become a god to the people is also false — because the Bible tells us the real reason. When the Bible has answered the question, why supply an alternative answer? God said, “You did not honour me in the sight of the people; I told you to speak to the rock, and you struck it.” The suggestion that “Moses did something so fantastic, bringing water from the rock — a greater miracle than Jesus feeding the 5,000 — that he was becoming a problem, a god to Israel” is a misrepresentation. He never became a god.
And to say Moses and Elijah became problems God had to get out of the way — go to the New Testament and read the Transfiguration, where the Lord God Almighty, sending people to minister to His own Son, sent Moses and Elijah, the very two this preacher says God had to cancel. What is the takeaway? Each Christian must know God for himself. My people perish for lack of knowledge. Had the congregation been people who had read and understood the Scriptures, they would have had questions, not just applause. That is why the Bereans were commended as more noble than others: after hearing Paul preach, they went home and searched the Scriptures, and if they found no justification for his preaching, they would come back and say so. That is what we should be. Search the Scriptures on the things I say too.
This is a sign of the times, and the root cause, I think, is the desire of some preachers to distinguish themselves by the novel things they say — the “special revelation,” the new interpretations — because people celebrate hearing “things they have never heard before.” But what God wants us to proclaim are the same truths proclaimed from time immemorial, recorded in the Bible. The power is not in us; it is in the gospel itself. Paul said, “I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God” — not the way we present it, not our flowery language. That is why some preachers, unlettered and not even articulate, go about proclaiming Christ, and the power of the gospel follows their ministry. The power is not of us — what are we? The treasure is in earthen vessels, jars of clay. Paul said, “I did not come to you with lofty speech, but proclaiming Christ crucified according to the Scriptures — that He died and rose, full stop.” So all of us doing the Lord’s work must be most careful not to misrepresent what the Bible teaches. If the Bible has given an answer, that is the final word; what we should pray for is grace to understand it. So, to answer the questioner: there is no place in the Old Testament where “Lord God” refers to anyone other than the Lord God Almighty, and Moses and Elijah did not become problems God had to cancel. Moses did not enter the Promised Land because God said, “You did not honour me before the people,” not because the people worshipped him. Even Bible 101 would answer that. The problem is people do not want to study the Bible; they just want to listen to preachers and go their merry way.
ON THE TEACHERS WHO WARN US ABOUT PAUL
This leads to the third engagement, and to the tweets of the week — I think every Friday I will identify tweets that stay with me. A user, MJ on X, wrote on July 7: “The false teachers that Paul warned us against are now warning us about Paul.” I hope you have come across teachings and sermons like that.
Begin with Paul himself. In Galatians, in the Corinthian letters, in the letters to Timothy, Paul repeatedly warned against false teachers — for just as they afflict the body of Christ today, they afflicted it in the first century, and Christ Himself warned of wolves in sheep’s clothing. And now, false teachers are warning us about Paul. I once had a friend attending the church of a pastor who had reservations about Paul. People say Paul is a problem for modern Christianity, that we must find a way to take him out of the equation — “Paul was just writing his own opinion.” Why? Because Paul stands in the way of where the cultural elites want Christianity to go. Many rightly observe that if you removed all of Paul’s writings from the New Testament — Romans, Corinthians, the letters to Timothy — Christianity could be moulded into something radically different. The doctrine of faith alone was developed in Paul’s letters; so were the doctrines on how to order our churches; and the clearest admonition against homosexuality in the New Testament is in the epistles. So the cultural elites say, “Let’s get Paul out of the way; don’t take him too seriously, he was just writing his own mind.”
One person commented that it is a guilty conscience — they hate the truth, and Paul exposes them. Another called it a profound truth, noting that the so-called “gay Christian” community dislikes what Paul says about them, so they warn us about Paul: “Paul was unstable, Paul was in prison, not a man to be taken seriously.” And somebody pointed to Acts 19:15, where the evil spirit answered, “Jesus I know, and Paul I know, but who are you?” — validating Paul as a servant of God. So when people say, “Don’t always take Paul seriously,” recognise it. And it is not only the openly rebellious who do this; even people trying to be faithful are sometimes persuaded to think, “Paul said it, but that’s not what it meant,” or “let’s just ignore what Paul said.” Some go as far as saying, for the New Testament, “let’s focus only on the red-letter portions” — the words of Christ Himself. But think consequentially: if you elevate the red letters above everything else, what you will soon find yourself proclaiming is that not all Scripture is inspired by the Holy Spirit. If you believe, as a foundational matter, that all Scripture is inspired by the Holy Spirit, you will not elevate even the red letters above the rest. We rise or fall by affirming that the entire Scripture is inspired.
So why do these false teachers warn us about Paul? First, sexual ethics and gender: Paul unequivocally teaches that homosexual practice is sinful, that marriage is a lifelong covenant between one man and one woman (Ephesians 5) — while the cultural elites champion fluid gender identity, same-sex marriage, and sexual autonomy as liberation. And note: Paul does not merely condemn the sinner; he calls the unrepentant to be washed, sanctified and justified. Second, Paul teaches faith alone, not works, not self-actualisation — human boasting is excluded — whereas the elites prefer therapeutic self-esteem, moralistic therapeutic deism, and righteousness via social-justice activism: “What are you fighting for in society? Do that, and we’ll regard you as godly.” That has misled many churches into asking, “What’s the point of gathering to pray and celebrate our salvation if we’re not changing anything in society? Find a cause — gender, fighting some politician you deem sinful.” But Paul rubbished all of that: no one is saved by aligning with the right causes; justification is by faith alone. Third, Paul insisted on the authority of Scripture and apostolic teaching, and warned that even if he or an angel preached another gospel, let them be accursed — whereas the elites prefer an “evolving revelation”: the God of the Old Testament, then of the New, then of “our own testament.” Fourth, Paul teaches the headship of the husband, complementarity and church order — not the subjugation of women, for the head’s greatest duty is to love, which balances it, but an order the elites will not affirm. Fifth, Paul teaches human sinfulness — “we were dead in trespasses,” “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” — whereas the elites locate evil in systemic injustice, trauma, victimhood and patriarchal imbalance, not in the human heart. Each of us is a sinner who needs a Saviour, and we do not want to hear it. Sixth, Paul teaches that the end will come with accountability before God, not merely by environmental disaster. And finally, Paul teaches separation from worldliness — “Come out from among them and be separate” — whereas the elites want a Christianity that commingles with the world.
So I go back to that tweet: the false teachers Paul warned us against are now warning us about Paul. When anyone comes to warn you about Paul, telling you not to listen to Paul, that person is telling you not to listen to the Bible, not to listen to the Holy Spirit.
ON ZERO CHURCHES IN SAUDI ARABIA
Finally this morning, a claim I came across on X — an infographic about the number of churches in Saudi Arabia. My first impulse was to doubt its accuracy. The graphic traces the number of officially recognised churches in Saudi Arabia from 1920 to 2025: 1920, zero; 1925, zero; 1935, zero; 1945, zero; 1960, zero; all the way to 2025, zero. I ran it by an AI platform, which confirmed that Saudi Arabia has had zero officially recognised churches from 1920 through 2025 and still today, because Saudi law and policy explicitly prohibit the public establishment of non-Muslim places of worship. Private worship only. It is estimated there are more than two million Christians in the country — mostly expatriate workers from the Philippines and India — who worship privately in homes and compounds, but this is not the same as official church buildings, and it carries risk if it becomes too public. There are some ancient church ruins, like the Jubail Church from around the 4th century, but these are archaeological sites, not active places of worship. No modern public churches have been allowed.
Pause on that: there was a time in the 4th century when there were Christian churches even in present-day Saudi Arabia. And digressing further, realise that many now-predominantly-Muslim, Islamic nations were once predominantly Christian. People point to these countries and then to Nigeria, saying we should watch the trajectory — and I pray that will not be our lot, in Jesus’ name. Saudi Arabia’s constitution and regulations rest on a strict interpretation of Islamic principles that prohibits public non-Muslim worship. There are counterpoints: some point to Indonesia, predominantly Muslim yet allowing churches — but Indonesia has always been the exception (I recall studying this in law school: about 90 per cent Muslim, yet churches take root). The UAE has positioned itself as cosmopolitan, for commercial reasons. People point to the Vatican — no mosques there, and there should be none, though many were saddened recently to learn that some Islamic scholars were allowed into a Vatican library and permitted to pray in a corner, a story we engaged with some time ago.
I think it says a lot that, in its fidelity to Islam, Saudi Arabia will not allow any church to be built or to operate officially. People want there to be Christian nations that hold the line like that, and at one point they point to European countries of rich Christian history and say, “Perhaps you should not have allowed mosques to be built and Muslims to come in.” Well — perhaps. But the growth of Christianity does not depend on using the law to exclude other nations. Christianity thrives by bringing people close to Christians and, by the witness of those Christians, converting them. The shame is that in once-predominantly-Christian nations that later allowed adherents of other faiths in, the Christians did not evangelise them; not proud of our own faith, we were ashamed, and allowed them to sit tight. So much so that, by some accounts, the most popular name given to babies in the United Kingdom in 2025 — as in 2024 — is Muhammad, meaning the Muslim population is growing faster than Christians are reproducing in the UK. Many say it is just a matter of time before the UK becomes predominantly Muslim; some have worked out the statistics and claim to know exactly when. That is difficult to wrap one’s head around.
This much we know. First, anything you do not want to take root, do not allow into your heart, your home, or your country. That is the practical wisdom here. Those Islamic countries that do not want Christianity will not give an inch — because once you give an inch, the thing you did not want takes a mile and keeps expanding. Many who have been overrun by what they did not want made the mistake of saying, “You can come in, but just this much, and no more.” That is not how it works. So Saudi Arabia knows exactly what it is doing: it does not want a Christian population, and it will not allow a single Christian church. This is not to say the private churches in Saudi Arabia are not thriving — there are many thriving Christians holding services in secret, which is acceptable to God. But we can learn a wisdom lesson: the things you do not want to take root, do not allow in at all. Do not say, “Just a little space, just come in but don’t speak too loudly.” Once you allow anything in, it grows, and it takes far greater effort to root it out — sometimes becoming practically impossible. May God teach us to apply our hearts to wisdom, in Jesus’ name, amen.
I want to thank you very much for staying with me this morning on GospelBells Radio, On the Lord’s Side — Christian perspectives on news and current events. I hope to be with you again on Monday by the grace of God. Whatever you do today and this weekend, please remain firmly on the Lord’s side. God bless you. You are listening to GospelBellsRadio.com, the Christian internet radio with a mission to engage the culture with the mind of Christ. Keep listening, and invite others too. God bless you. Engaging the culture with the mind of Christ.
