The clergyman admitted that his ministry suffered huge financial setbacks due to his de novo gospel.
Controversial Nigerian pastor and founder of Abel Damina Ministries International, Dr Abel Damina has opened up that his church suffered financially after his church members stopped tithing.
He said his preaching against tithe made members to stop remitting tithe to the church. As a result of that, his church suffered financially.
In a video clip currently making the rounds on social media, Damina was heard saying that when he changed his style of teachings particularly on tithe, members stopped giving money to the church.
The situation, according to him, led to the shutting down of the Kingdom Live Network Television, Christian satellite TV channel.
He said the church was unable to power the generator during services, stressing that some church staff were laid off because of the financial constraints.
Damina opined that when he started his new style of the gospel, “All of you here, you started dropping change from Keke Napep. I’m not putting it on you but at the same time, I’m rebuking you.
“It means in the first place, you were not giving to God, you were rather giving to yourself because the reason why you were giving was for devourers not to come and not because you loved God.
“Because if it was God you were giving to and you discovered that there is no problem that will happen, you will still be giving. But you were giving because of fear that if you don’t tithe, it will be tight for you.
“Because of that, you were religiously bringing tithe.
“You were never in love with the purpose of God. You were only in love with your selfishness and if you are still giving like that, I put it to you straight not behind you that you are a selfish person.
“You have not understood the riches of God’s grace.
“At a time, all the finances stopped and we were just having little money barely enough to buy half of the diesel to run our generator for services.
“So we could not pay for Kingdom Live Network anymore, so even our staff salaries, we could not pay so we started thinking, should we drop all the staff but if we drop all the staff, ministry will not go on. So mama now started calculating because things were really going bad and really tough.
“So mama said we are not impressing anybody, let’s shutdown the TV station, if God makes money available in the future, we go back.
“So we shutdown the TV and we came to the office, mama said we should look around if there is any staff that we can do without, we can send them parking. So we started doing all of that. Things were really bad. We decided not to go on vacation”.
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