Lagos

In Nigeria pastors are multimillionaires and churches are as large as football stadiums. A report from the most religious country in the world

If you want to experience the biggest Sunday church service in the Christian world you have to get up early. Four at the latest, the porter in my hotel tells me. By the laws of reason, I then decide he’s exaggerating. The service begins at seven and it’s only 50 kilometres from the centre of Lagos and its 17 million souls to Winner's Chapel in the Nigerian marshland they call Canaan Land. I leave at five o’clock, soon to learn that Nigeria does not follow the laws of reason.

Shortly before seven, I’m still stuck on the northern edge of Lagos, wedged between skinny cows, rusted taxis and a fleet of white buses responsible for the shuttle service to Canaan. The caravan of pilgrims struggles at a snail’s pace through loamy potholes and puddles knee-deep with brown muck. Then, a minivan tips over and for half an hour, nothing is moving at all. At about nine I finally roll onto the parking lot in front of the gigantic pink-coloured pagoda structure. Somebody puts a sticker on my windscreen that says "I'm a winner" in red on white.

When I enter the church, more than 50,000 believers are rocking to the beat of a guitar-heavy gospel medley. Then the prayer leader’s prayer leader steps onto the star-shaped stage and reads off the choice of relevant merchandising items. There are blue and white t-shirts with polo collars for 750 naira, or about five euro. The version with a round collar is available for 500 naira. "Advertise Jesus!" the preacher calls into the clip-on microphone attached to his designer suit. My neighbours’ bibles are covered with stickers: "I'm a winner."

According to a study by the Bertelsmann Foundation, Nigeria is the most religious state on earth. Ninety-nine percent of its 140 million inhabitants describe themselves as religious and 92 percent as deeply religious – regardless whether they live in the Islamic north or the Christian south. All over the country, a spiritual marketplace of commercial houses of God, religious institutions and television preachers is booming. The most popular is the Christian, charismatically oriented Pentecostal Church, which the Winner's Chapel also is part of. It owns an airfield, its own printing house, schools and universities and even sells its own mineral water. Its members not only pray to God, they sell him. The core of their faith is the conviction that you can read the degree of a person’s chosen status from their prosperity. Nowhere on earth are God and money as close together as here.

The acolytes in Winner's Chapel are now passing out white envelopes emblazoned with the church logo. The banknotes go into the envelope and the name of the donator is written on the outside. The man seated next to me tells me that he put 300 naira in the envelope. That’s the standard here. If this is true, then the church makes a good 100,000 euro per week from this collection. Who gets the money, I ask. It is for God, says the man next to me.

After another collective dance interlude the entrepreneur, multimillionaire and bishop David Oyedepo mounts the podium. "Obedience is the key to the world of the blessed," resounds from the gigantic system of speakers suspended upside down from the ceiling like strapped sinners. Again and again I hear: "You shall serve - he shall bless." Bishop Oyedepo sets the beat with his woody voice and 50,000 believers join him as if in a trance. You shall serve – he shall bless, that must be something like the master key to the kingdom of the blessed.

While Christendom in Europe seems to have had its day, it appears to just have begun flourishing in West Africa. In Nigeria the Christian faith only really began to spread on a grand scale after the nation’s independence in 1960. At first, traditional Catholic and Protestant missionaries dominated the scene. Today, the Pentecostal movement is giving Christendom in Africa’s most highly populated country a second surge while threatening the existence of the established denominations.

Of the approximately 56 million Christians, 18 percent live in the conviction that there are no coincidences in life, that God can be directly experienced and paid and consequently that only those who purchase a ticket on time will get to heaven. Theologians explain the attraction of the Pentecostal churches with their occult parallels to traditional African natural religions, with their entertaining character and their promise of tangible divine encounters.

This promise is worded most concretely by Bishop Oyedepo’s toughest market competitor, the self-anointed prophet TB Joshua. On the website of his Synagogue Church of All Nations you can click on a menu leading to the submenus "HIV-AIDS healing," "Cancer healing" and "Baby miracles." Under the heading of "Prophecy" there are 22 attacks and assassination attempts, conflicts and natural catastrophes all over the world, which the Prophet allegedly pronounced in his Sunday sermons. They include the Bangkok riots, the murders of 300 Muslims in Jos and the emergency landing of a Boeing 747 in Manila. Under the heading "how to visit us" there are online forms sorted by diseases, with which you can sign up for a miracle healing. Since I wear glasses, I fill in an Eye Problem Form. It takes three weeks before I receive a reply: "Hello in the name of Jesus, Please inform us when you would like to visit our church."

Two days later, I am waiting at 12 noon at the gate of a fancy baroque building in the middle of a slum. A young, spotty, barefoot Englishman receives me. He tells me his name is Chris and that he is my "connecting agent." Chris leads me into the centre of the temple, which, in addition to the colourfully decorated nave, houses rooms and apartments for 500 visitors, television and sound studios, an open-plan office for the press department and a supermarket with a corner bistro. Chris requests that I take a seat here; he’ll be back in five minutes. Five minutes become an hour and a half.

The market shelves contain Noah’s Ark picture books, cornflakes, shaving cream, toilet rim hangers, TB Joshua posters and biscuits. A flat screen TV is hanging on the wall and the church channel, which is on Nigerian television around the clock, is running. TB Joshua is making wheelchair users dance, is bringing the half-dead to life and driving the devil out of an Aids victim with a laying-on of hands.

In the next programme two reporters visit a bed-ridden old man. He says that he is 200 years old, he’s not doing well; he’s poor and alone. The reporters give him a sack of rice and 1,000 dollars – with greetings from the prophet. "I will pray for the television crew and its partners," the old man cries.

Chris returns. He tells me that TB Joshua has agreed to an interview, however, I will have to be a bit more patient. "The prophet is still on the mountain," Chris explains. On the mountain? There aren’t any mountains in Lagos; the city is as flat as a table. Chris smiles: "Oh, of course I don’t mean a physical mountain, but a sort of spiritual mountain of prayer."

Then Chris disappears again and I spent another five hours in front of the miracle TV, watch barren women deliver babies in front of the altar and possessed girls vomit live worms, until finally, at about seven in the evening, TB Joshua has left his imaginary mountain of prayer and bids me to an audience.

Chris leads me into a small office with three televisions, nine telephones, a tennis bag and an electric chicken roaster. Above the chair behind the desk hangs a certificate indentifying TB Joshua as the winner of the 1999 Exorcism Contest. A church television crew sets themselves up in front of me and starts to film me while I’m waiting. After another ten minutes, the prophet bounds into the room. He is wearing worn blue track trousers and is barefoot. "Good to see you here. What can I do for you?"

TB Joshua has a gentle, almost eunuch-like voice, which breaks to the rhythm of his sentences. I ask him when he decided to become a prophet.

"It was never my own will. It is God who selects his prophets," replies the prophet. "The road of the prophet is full of thorns, serpents and scorpions. No one can choose it but God." As I write down his reply on my pad, TB Joshua taps frantically with a pencil on the desktop. Tap, tap. "Anything else? Do you have any more questions?" Tap, tap, tap.

I ask him about the exact procedure of a miracle healing, about his concrete visions for the prophecies of plane crashes and about the most important catastrophes of the coming week, but find that the prophet always gives me the same answer, no matter what I ask. "These are not my acts, but the acts of God. I am only an instrument in the house of God." Tap, tap, tap.

Only once does TB Joshua sway from his usual scheme of reasoning – at the question what can be done to prevent HIV infection in a land marked by Aids like Nigeria: "We are by the glory of God. And the glory of God can never be corrupted. We must flee from corruption. We are by the glory of God. And the glory of God can never be corrupted. The glory of God can never be corrupted, for we are by the glory of God."

I make one last attempt to learn something tangible. I ask how he financed the construction of the huge church. The conversation ends abruptly. The prophet shakes my hand and says: "I hear you are flying back to Germany next Friday. Have a good flight."

I drive back to my hotel and immediately look up the day on my airline ticket.

It’s a Sunday.