PROSPERITY GOSPEL ROBBING AFRICA - OLDRIEVE

Prosperity Gospel Robbing Africa – Oldrieve

By Religion Reporter

Published: February 9, 2014

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The controversial American so called ‘gospel’ message with which some preachers claim that God never prospers a person unless and until they have given a large sum of money, is damaging Africa’s economic progress, philanthropist Brian Oldrieve says.

Speaking exclusively to ZimEye, the Zimbabwean farmer who invests his time freely teaching and training upcoming farmers in the country, poured his heart slamming the American ideology which claims that a person can microwave themselves into vast amounts of money after merely giving out whatever financial resource they have.

Quoting isolated verses extracted from Old Testament Bible passages, some preachers have tended to violate people’s faith as they make them to believe that human beings are mere cursed objects of an angry God who hates them and continues to do so unless and until they have given out a very large financial gift to Him in exchange for special blessings, Oldrieve suggests.

“The prosperity gospel has damaged Africa and is making Africans poorer”, he said during a function in the UK where he had been invited to officiate farming training centres in South eastern England.

The veteran farmer said Africa’s natural resources stand to be compromised by this microwave gospel message saying that although for instance Zimbabwe was stripped of development aid, with good management, the nation had capacity to recuperate itself through productive farming and cease relying on Western countries who removed the aid and tend to suppress productivity through a dependency syndrome.

Oldrieves’ work has for years been to encourage Zimbabweans and the rest of Africans to utilise the natural resources at their disposal in particular the land so that they can create wealth for themselves. His program also involves confidence building where he teaches people to have faith in the land.

Oldrieve who himself obtained fame and recognition from universities worldwide through a groundbreaking scientific method of farming he says God taught him while reading the Bible, said that Africa has enough natural resources to both feed itself and compete with the rest of the world. Dubbed ‘Zero Tillage’, the farmer’s farming innovation is a simple and yet highly cost-effective procedure that does not utilise tilling and the use of chemical components as in professional commercial agriculture; but it however has the potential to produce 400% yields greater than the best commercial farmer can produce. Oldrieve said he learnt this method from studying Bible scriptures. After he gave up a lucrative tobacco farming enterprise in 1982, he was convinced that he had been farming a crop produce that was detrimental to people’s health.
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