Founder and presiding Bishop of Living Faith Church Worldwide, a.k.a Winners’ Chapel International, Bishop David Oyedepo, on Sunday banned his followers from naming the church after him as the church belongs to Jesus, not him.
Bishop Oyedepo said while preaching that breakaway churches don’t thrive stated: “After I go at a very ripe old age which I know God has the plan for me, let no man here name anything here after me because the owner never dies.”
Oyedepo, who noted that he is not a church giver, warned against immortalising him in the church.
According to him, “don’t try it, it’s not God’s will it’s not God’s plan. People die before they share their will in any term but this man never dies. So who will now give you the will to read?
“Lawyers, do you read the will when the man is still alive. You can’t divide anybody goods till after his death and Jesus the owner of the church ever liveth. So where will you divide” That time won’t come.”
Oyedepo said he once received a request from a resigning Pastor to gift him a church branch, which he declined, explaining that the Winners Chapel Ministry would have been lost forever if he obliged to the pastors request because the church doesn’t belong to him.
“One of our pastors resigned in those days and I said if there’s anything in getting started in your ministry, he said I want you to give me the church that I’m pastor. I said it’s not my own.
“You have no power to give what is not yours. I can’t give you the church it’s not my own. I told him to ask for any other thing, I’m not a church giver. I would have lost this ministry forever,” he said.
