How The Prosperity Gospel Found Its Perfect Platform
(ANALYSIS) “Depression is deflated today. The remaining days of your life, you won’t smell sickness or disease!”
The camera zooms in on Bishop David Oyedepo’s smiling face while the crowd is breaking into ecstatic roars. Uplifting piano sounds accompany his assertive voice that cracks when it swells to its full volume. Pearls of sweat run down his cheeks, touching his white, buttoned suit that stands in perfect contrast to the red platform elevating him above the crowd.
Sitting behind the screen of my laptop, it is hard to escape the impression that he is staring directly at me. The unambiguous comment section does not seem to, either.
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They read, “Amen, in Jesus’ name” and “More grace, Man of God.”
Sighing, I lean back and watch the camera effortlessly fade over the thousands united at Faith Tabernacle in Nigeria to get a chance to glimpse the bishop himself. Countless messages appear as I continue scrolling: How does he do that, I ask myself, how does he convince people watching from who knows where that he is talking directly to them?
Oyedepo has special access to God — or so he claims. Calling himself “the richest pastor of the world,” his property includes four private jets, two universities and a publishing house.
He founded Winners’ Chapel, a neo-Pentecostal church claiming over six million members worldwide and frequently claims to have brought the Prosperity Gospel to Nigeria. Initially revolving around a small congregation in Lagos, the church rapidly grew in the euphoric post-colonial climate of the 1980s and ‘90s, with an emphasis on self-determination and economic autonomy that greatly favored the upcoming neo-Pentecostal movement.
His promise? To provide believers with “an unlimited supply of money”, health and overall well-being through “covenant faith”, obedience and sacrificial giving.
The law of reaping and sowing.
“Your giving is not helping the pastor or the church, rather, it is establishing a great future for you,” he said.
Part of the success of prosperity preaching in the global South lies in this appeal to those marginalized by economic uncertainty and social transformation. Prosperity preaching promises more than wealth. It offers believers a sense of agency in communities marked by economic uncertainty and social transformation.
He constructed the idea of an alternative economy in which prosperity can be manifested through belief. He insists on the availability of supernatural abilities, the ever-present possibility of sudden breakthroughs, and the operation of spiritual laws that transcend those of socio-economic status. The rhetoric of Oyedepo is one of immediacy: you can partake in divine blessing today. His promises always extend to the believers’ now and are shaped by a perpetual availability of divine intervention.
Poverty then, is “a curse and self-made, a willful act of disobedience to the law of abundance.” Central to Oyedepo’s version of the prosperity gospel is that he himself embodies the promise of redemption he makes: through his “prophetic” presence, he claims to provide believers with direct access to the divine. This means that believers must in turn find ways to access him or his representatives – a task that has become increasingly more difficult with the spread of Winners’ Chapel.
The global rise of neo-Pentecostal ministries such as Winners’ Chapel has coincided with and in many ways been influenced by the emergence of social media. Already accustomed to incorporating new technologies into their services, Oyedepo and his team quickly began using social media networks strategically to extend their influence.
In many ways, prosperity preaching appears uniquely prepared for the age of social media. Its theology of immediacy, visibility, transformation and direct participation mirrors the very logic upon which contemporary digital platforms operate. Social media platforms allow believers all over the world to encounter “prophetic” preachers such as Oyedepo and thereby partake in their professed supernatural abilities.
For Oyedepo, social media platforms are not just tools for communication. Rather, they provide him with an opportunity to recreate a direct encounter with his audience. In fact, he frequently goes as far as to claim that his “prophetic blessing” can extend through digital platforms to reach those interacting with his posts. This assertion is concretized in a carefully curated aesthetic that seeks to create a sense of immediacy between Oyedepo and the viewer: short, assertive sentences directly addressed to an ominous “you,” close-up shots of his shining face, soothing piano music in the background.
The camera shows Oyedepo as he wants to be seen: spreading an aura of presence directly addressed to you. If you want to encounter him, you have to do so on his conditions.
For prosperity preachers, algorithms themselves are enchanted, reaching those waiting to receive their blessings. What emerges via those platforms, then, is a networked congregation that understands itself to partake in Oyedepo’s presence in the same way as the congregation physically assembled at Faith Tabernacle in Lagos.
Their claims to his interventions are visibly illustrated by the crowded comment sections under his posts filled with affirmations of Oyedepo’s promises, showcasing a posture of receptivity. By interacting with his posts, users strive to recreate the dynamic of naming and claiming so central to prosperity preaching.
Beyond the increasingly familiar figure of the pastor-as-influencer, what we encounter in prosperity preachers is the figure of the pastor-as-platform, Their central promise is that digital spaces can fully transmit their “prophetic power.” Believers then only have to claim that power as theirs – and can partake in it from anywhere and anytime.
Oyedepo is hardly the only prosperity preacher to discover the possibilities of engaging social media audiences. Yet his ministry illustrates why neo-Pentecostalism has proven particularly successful in the digital age. Neo-Pentecostal ministries have not merely adapted to social media. In many ways, they anticipated it. Their emphasis on immediacy, visibility and transformation mirrors the very logic through which digital platforms thrive.
When millions of users comment “Amen” beneath his posts, they are not merely consuming religious content. They are participating in religious practice itself. In that sense, prosperity preachers should not be seen as odd figures operating with premodern beliefs. Rather, they reveal what becomes possible when charismatic Christianity fully commits to the platform logics of the digital age.
Jonathan Bühne is currently studying religious studies in Leipzig. He grew up in Tenerife and Germany and spent a year in Kyrgyzstan after graduating from high school. In addition to his studies, he works as a journalist, editor and author.