Pentecostal Christianity is a top Nigerian export

(The Christian Science Monitor) The roads that wind north from Lagos, Nigeria, toward the headquarters of the Winners’ Chapel megachurch are lined with businesses such as Amazing Grace Hair Salon, No King But God Driving School, and My God Is Able Furniture Makers. And wedged between these businesses are the churches themselves, hundreds of them, in sweltering tin shacks or rooms above a gas station, in the parking lot of half-finished shopping malls or perched on stilts atop Lagos’s viscous lagoon.

Canaanland, the Winners’ Chapel headquarters, spreads across 10,500 acres. It includes not only the 50,000-seat Faith Tabernacle but a company town complete with schools and a university, a bottled-water processing plant, restaurants, shops, and residential neighborhoods. Every weekend, busloads of Nigerians wearing vividly patterned tailor-made suits and dresses pour through its gates for the Sunday service.

“The next two months will be the greatest two months of your life to date,”  David Oyedepo, the church’s leader, told the crowd at Faith Tabernacle on a recent Sunday morning. His voice carries through the packed chapel and out to an overflow area, where thousands of additional worshipers sit on plastic chairs, fanning themselves. “Your struggle has finally come to an end!”