The Prosperity Gospel

What was this meeting?

It's called the International Gathering of Champions, an annual convention of Pentecostalists. It has taken place every year since 1991, and is now one of the largest Christian occasions in Britain. Preachers tell the congregation (who pay £20 for a weekend ticket) how God wants them to get rich and then get richer still. "Get your calculators out, I know this is going to beep your horn," declared one speaker before telling the story of a young man who turned a £14,000-a-year salary into a job at a Swiss bank on £140,000. "We have the answer to every challenge and to every need, including financial ones," says Pastor Matthew Ashimolowo, who runs the event.

Where did the idea come from?

America, of course. Although strands of the so-called 'Prosperity Gospel' have existed for centuries, its modern founder was an evangelical pastor from Oklahoma called 'Oral' Roberts (pictured). After WWII, Roberts developed a theology that encouraged Christians to celebrate Christ’s sacrifice for their sake with success. Material prosperity, he argued, could be proof of God's favour. The philosophy is now regarded as mainstream in the Pentecostal wing of the Christian Church, which has an estimated 250 million members worldwide. In the UK, the Prosperity Gospel is most closely associated with the Kingsway International Christian Centre (KICC), in east London, which has 8,000 members and is the largest Pentecostal church in Western Europe.

So how does it work?

Believers give money to their church and hope that God will reward them many times over. KICC, for example, suggests its members give 10 per cent of their gross income in return for His favour. Oral Roberts called the concept "seed faith", and based it on the words of Jesus in Mark's Gospel (10:30), when He said that anyone who gave up their possessions for God would "receive an hundredfold now in this time… and in the world to come, eternal life". Or as Gloria Copeland, a current American Prosperity preacher, explains it: "Give one airplane and receive one hundred times the value of the airplane. Give one car, and the return would furnish you a lifetime of cars. In short, Mark 10:30 is a very good deal." If the givers fail to reap the dividends, it is only because their faith is not strong enough.

What about the camel and the eye of a needle?

Access to heaven has traditionally been deemed difficult for the rich – see Luke 18:22-25 – and critics of the movement, which include most other evangelical churches, argue that it is just materialism masquerading as theology. Both sides claim the scriptures are on their side, however, even if preachers from the Prosperity school have been accused of some elastic interpretations. In Mark Chapter 10, for instance, Jesus tells a rich man to sell his possessions and give the proceeds to the poor, but Prosperity theologians argue that Jesus was simply telling the man to turn his solid assets into liquid ones. More extreme proponents do not merely ignore the examples of St Francis and Mother Teresa: they condemn them, teaching that poverty is the work of Satan.

Who believes in this stuff?

A recent poll of American Christians in Time magazine found that 17 per cent considered themselves part of the Prosperity movement. More than 60 per cent believed that God wanted people to be prosperous and 31 per cent thought that if you gave money to your church, God would repay you. According to Time, three of the four largest US “mega-churches” (all of them in the South) are Prosperity pulpits. One of the reasons for their success is that their mainstream evangelical counterparts have avoided talking about personal finances or social inequality. The Prosperity Gospel speaks straight to the concerns of poorer congregations. In Britain, adherents of Prosperity theology are overwhelmingly to be found among West African and Caribbean communities. "Poor people like Prosperity," says Stephen Prothero, chair of religion at Boston University. "They hear it as aspirant. They hear, 'You can make it too: buy a car, get a job, get wealthy.' It can function as a form of liberation."

Isn't it just a scam?

The history of the movement is certainly coloured by the conspicuous wealth of its pastors, and some scandals. Jim Bakker, a US Prosperity preacher, came a cropper after allegedly raping his secretary and trying to buy her silence for $265,000. In Britain, the charity that ran the KICC was criticised in 2005 by the Charity Commission for buying an £80,000 car and a £13,000 timeshare in Florida for Pastor Ashimolowo, who subsequently paid the money back. None of this, however, seems to bother the faithful. In fact, says William Martin, a sociologist from Rice University, Texas, congregations want their teachers to thrive, believing their wealth is "confirmation of what they are preaching". The result is that the Prosperity Gospel industry has never been in better health.

So it's growing in Britain too?

Yes, mainly thanks to large, rich churches like the KICC, which has an annual income of £9m, chiefly from donations and the spread of cable TV televangelists into Britain's living rooms. Another important Prosperity church is the Redeemed Christian Church of God, which began in Nigeria and now has 346 British congregations; the largest, in London, has 3,000 members. At least 300,000 people in the UK now attend Pentecostal services each week. The Church of England, meanwhile, has seen Sunday attendance drop beneath one million. ·