WINNERS CHAPEL (a.k.a. Living Faith World Outreach Centre) (Religious Movement)

David Oyedepo, a trained architect, started his ‘Prosperity gospel’ based Living Faith World Outreach/Winners Chapel in 1981 in northern Nigeria. He moved to his native Yorubaland in the south-west and in 2000 erected a 50,000 seat auditorium called ‘Faith Tabernacle’, which he designed himself. With five halls radiating from the centre in a star-shaped building, this is one of the largest church buildings in the world, situated in an impressive complex of modern buildings at the 300 acre ‘Canaan Land’ in Ogun State, outside Lagos, Nigeria, including a Christian university and a children’s school. Oyedepo, ‘Presiding Bishop’ of the organization called the Living Faith World Outreach/Winners, has planted churches all over Nigeria and throughout the sub-Sahara. In 1998 he claimed to have 200 churches in Nigeria with over 400 pastors in forty African nations. Oyedepo’s preaching is dominated by the success and prosperity themes of the so-called ‘prosperity gospel’ (see Prosperity Theology and Health and Wealth) familiar in US Pentecostalism. His members are promised health and wealth in return for their faith and their contributions. Regular slick conventions are a feature of this movement with visiting guest speakers usually from other parts of Africa, and the church prides itself in being an all-African church. One of the fastest growing churches in Kenya is the Winners Chapel in Nairobi, which dedicated a building in 1998 for its 3,500-member congregation after only one year of existence. This congregation was started by Dayo Olutayo from Oyedepo’s church in Nigeria, who arrived in Kenya in 1995. The media advertising hype for the dedication service in Nairobi gushed, ‘Winners Chapel, Nairobi was built entirely debt free. No loans of bank borrowing and certainly no begging trips to the West!’ The organization had two other ‘Winners Chapels’ in Kisumu and Mombasa. Similar Winners Chapels exist in several other African states.