By Farayi Mungoshi

CHURCHES, like banks, hospitals and pharmaceutical companies have become big business in modern times.
True Bible doctrine is being manipulated by hungry money-mongers, in the process leading people astray.
The truth is becoming harder to grasp by the day as even those in the church are beginning to realise that some things are not really as they seem.
There is a movie, The Book of Eli, set during apocalyptic times when the world had been destroyed by the sun and only a handful of people survive.
We find Denzel Washington putting his life on the line to protect the last Bible on earth.
His enemy had sworn never to stop till he had laid his hands on the Bible, not that he wanted to better his life spiritually, but because the Bible ‘was the greatest weapon’ ever created.
He says the book has the power to control the way people think.
I thought how true!
Historical records show the Church (Vatican) played a big role in the slave trade and the enslavement of black people in Africa and also in the invasion of Africa by whites.
Africa was attacked spiritually.
Just as we are coming to terms with this reality and fighting mental slavery, we find ourselves reliving the whole scenario as churches have now cropped up using the same concepts of mental slavery to manipulate people and con them of their hard-earned money.
It is now black-on-black oppression.
Being a Christian myself, I had to give myself time to think and this is how I realised many pastors are now using the offering basket for fundraising for their well-being and families.
By picking up specific Bible verses as examples, they tell people that unless they part with their money, they will never break free from poverty.
Even when they know the real truth, they remain adamant and will not tell the congregants that all it takes for anybody to break free from any form of slavery, especially poverty, is the state of mind.
All you need to do is believe.
A person who believes he is free and blessed will not operate in the same manner as a person who believes he is constantly wronging God, that his ancestors were evil and hence he/she needs cleansing from evil ways.
When we look at our history and customs, we find we are unlike other nations that worship erected images or statues as their gods or that worship animals.
Ours has always been the unseen God, Creator of Heaven and Earth and all that lives in it, Creator of man.
There were no idols, but somehow the Zimbabwean church got it twisted that our ancestors did not believe in God, that they were idol worshippers.
These to me have become the mechanisms through which many feel they cannot do without their pastor because he/she is the one with the power to set you free.
When I came across information on the Remba people, Zimbabwean black Jews, and began scrutinising customs in the Bible in comparison to the way we live as Shonas/Kalangas, I started viewing everything differently.
There are also Ethiopian Jews.
I am not saying that we are Jews, but long before the Portuguese came in with the Bible and later other colonialists in the 1800s to teach us the way, we already had the Word.
And when you then put Jesus into the picture with the understanding that the Jesus we see on portraits today is not the actual Jesus, neither is his name actually Jesus, but Yashuah, we then get the understanding that something sinister must have happened.
I open myself to know these things so that I may understand.
They changed Jesus’ skin colour to white to make me think that there was something wrong with me.
There is nothing wrong with me, but it saddens me further when my brothers in the church today actually believe there is something wrong with them.
We fear to ask the relevant question and in defence of things we do not fully understand, we say that we are Christians, colour doesn’t matter.
God is a Spirit and has no colour.
We do not bother to question the psychological effect it has on us as a people, neither do we question why they got Learnado Da Vinci to paint another separate image of the last supper when there was one already.
Why would the Church (Vatican) go through so much to change things we call trivial unless they wanted to change a people’s mindset and history.
When you are repeatedly told that God is white, you end up deifying the white folk.
Subconsciously, we have put the whiteman on a pedestal because we believe he is cousin God.
It is sad some pastors in Zimbabwe have picked up from where the colonisers left.
They have turned their churches into ‘little Vaticans’ and are controlling the way people think, telling them what to eat and what not to eat, how to dress and how not to dress.
Some pastors are turning snakes into chocolates and making people eat them while others are making people eat grass.
We also have ‘prophets’ who now do everything (spiritually) based on the amount of ‘seed-money’ a congregant brings.
Without this ‘seed’, or if it is too little, he will shut God’s word from the recipient.
Too many doctrines have cropped up and everything has somehow become one big circus which has led to many people abandoning the church.
The belief in ‘prophet’ or ‘pastor’ more than in God has led many astray, causing divisions among people who profess to pray to the same God.
One particular church tells its female congregants not to come to church if they are on their menstrual periods, neither can they attend all-night prayers because they would be unclean before God.
What if you die while on your menstrual periods, will you go to heaven since you are already unclean?
It is time people stopped believing what they hear and start reading to liberate themselves rather than to expect a pastor to do it for them.
The Bible does liberate a person mentally and spiritually for as long as one does not worship the one bringing the Word, but the one true God.
It is important to see the church as it has become; big business.
The moment you find yourself mentioning your pastor’s name more than God, then there is a problem.
Only a personal relationship with your Creator can save you from these churches.