THE Serving Overseer of the Citadel Global Community Church, Pastor Tunde Bakare, says Christians are paying the price for decades of erroneous teachings about politics.
The former All Progressives Congress presidential aspirant made this known in a statement today on the party’s Muslim-Muslim ticket.
Bakare, though, said his position has always been in favour of statesmanship.
But the clergyman said what is “happening today is the price we are having to pay for the years of failure of the church to strategically participate in the political process”.
Bakare, however, charged fellow Christian leaders to approach the issue in question and the broader context of the 2023 elections with civility, clarity and with continued hope in the possibilities of a united Nigeria.
“As Christian leaders, we must also realise that the church in Nigeria is today paying for decades of erroneous teaching that posited that Christians have no business in politics. What is happening today is the price we are having to pay for the years of failure of the church to strategically participate in the political process,” the statement partly reads.
“The antagonism that was meted to some of us who have ventured from the pulpit to the podium, even from amongst our fellow Christian leaders, was always a pointer that a day would come when the church would face a rude awakening of the consequence of passivity, apathy, non-participation and an anachronistic adherence to the Aaronic priesthood, especially long after the author and finisher of our faith had moved on to the Melchizedek priesthood. Failure to admit this would amount to hypocrisy.
“Going forward, ahead of 2023, we must learn from our mistakes. Christian leaders must, at this point, bring the candidates and their running mates to the negotiation table — doing so with an open mind and based on a clearly articulated charter for nation-building and national development. Such strategic engagement would be reminiscent of the interventions of the Save Nigeria Group (SNG) in 2010 when it engaged the presidential candidates on the basis of the SNG Charter, A Contract to Save and Transform Nigeria. In this regard, Nigerian Christian leaders must provide answers to a cogent question: What kind of nation do Nigerian Christians want?
“Guided by the answers to this question, Christian leaders must, at this point, convene a strategic concourse to define the minimum standards across sectors of governance below which no Nigerian, Christian or Muslim, must be subjected. The SNG Charter and the Nigerian Charter for National Reconciliation and Reintegration which was unanimously adopted by the delegates to the 2014 National Conference, can be a springboard for such sector-by-sector deliberations. This must be done between now and September when the campaigns will officially commence. The Charter may be launched in Abuja and may be termed The Abuja Declaration for Nationhood.
“Thereafter, Christian leaders must then carefully engage each presidential candidate and running mate based on that Charter and provide a unified direction to the body of Christ in Nigeria having assessed each presidential/vice-presidential ticket based on key performance indicators around the Charter. This would be a more mature, structured and strategic way to respond to the situation as against the emotional reactions that have dominated the polity since the choice of a running mate was made by the APC presidential candidate”.
