Article

Comment

Community

Development

27 February 2023

5 min read

Religion and prosperity: how Nigeria’s diaspora is changing the West

Superlatives may describe Nigeria, but it is vital to understand what drives its people, especially those abroad.

Chris Wadibia

Chris Wadibia is an academic advising on faith-based challenges. His research includes political Pentecostalism, global Christianity, and development.

Mushin Market in Lagos.

Omoeko Media, via Wikimedia Commons

Superpower superlatives

Nigeria is the economic and human capital giant of Africa. Nigeria has almost 100 million more people than Ethiopia, the country with the continent’s second largest population. Nigeria’s 2021 GDP of $440bn led the continent for the eighth consecutive year. Helped, no doubt by its oil production, the second biggest in Africa. Since gaining independence in 1960, the Nigerian economy has suffered from incessant fluctuations but its population has experienced consistent growth. As of today, Nigeria’s population of 211 million is about two-thirds the population of the United States’ 332 million. All living on sovereign territory one and a half times the size of Texas.

The oil curse

Spotlighting these statistics uncovers another side of Nigeria's place in ‘Giant of Africa’ discourses. With over 300 distinctive ethnic groups, it has one of Africa's highest levels of population density. Ethnic competition for control of state economic resources, mainly oil revenues, has evolved into a leading theme influencing Nigeria's postcolonial development. Nigeria first discovered its oil-harvesting potential in 1956. However, the oil curse, and the high-level corruption that characterises it, would not fully commandeer Nigerian governance until the concluding decades of the 20th century. Some have argued that the curse of corruption grew in these decades into a chief impediment preventing national development. Nigeria is equally blessed and cursed, and this curse affects how it behaves internally.

Transnationalism

High potential Nigeria is hobbled by a curse that also has significant effects internationally. Thanks to Nigeria's large diaspora, these effects impact the UK. It is therefore important to understand who this diaspora is and what it believes. Many have written about the relationship between corruption, transnationalismm, and capital flight in Nigeria; however, another, less researched case of trans-nationalisation has unfolded in recent Nigerian history that has relevance for global economics. Since the 1980s, many thousands of Nigerian Christians have emigrated abroad to the UK, USA, and beyond, regularly citing economic, political, and religious factors as influences behind their decision to leave.

This emigration takes with it a practice that has reshaped not only Nigeria but the destination countries. It has led to the dawning reality among people researching global Christianity that Christendom's geographical locus of power, in terms of total number of Christians and theological influence, is shifting away from the West to the Global South. The faith of the immigrants drives their emigration and results in a variety of economic and social impacts in their destination countries. So, it is vital to understand their faith and its practices. More than any other Christian denomination in Nigeria, the confluence of Christian spirituality, migration, and economics heavily informs the religiosity of Pentecostals, whose churches frequently send them out as missionaries in service of a highly ambitious vision to evangelise the entire non-Christian world.

What drives the diaspora?

Nigerian Pentecostals relocate to the UK emigrate with two main interests: evangelising Britons and building personal wealth. In recent decades, the prosperity gospel has emerged as the defining doctrine of Nigerian Pentecostalism, the country's most politically and economically dynamic denomination. The prosperity gospel lionizes wealth and its linchpin theological premise argues that God wants Christians to enjoy this-worldly lives characterised by material blessings and holistic success. Believers in the prosperity gospel understand material wealth as an important component of their spiritual inheritance and ardently strive to secure material prosperity for themselves and families.

The materially intoxicating nature of prosperity gospel sensibilities have spilled over into other denominations in Nigerian Christendom to the extent that many Nigerian Christians today believe that God wants them to enjoy a life marked by wealth and health. Correlations between belief in prosperity theology and increased individual wealth remain difficult to prove indisputably, but the prosperity gospel's way of inculcating in believers the desirability of material wealth certainly makes them more comfortable working to acquire it, whether in the UK or the USA or elsewhere.

Go global

With upwards of 1.3bn people of Black and African descent living worldwide, Nigerians account for over one out of every six Black and African individuals globally. The instilling of prosperity gospel-friendly values in the minds of globally mobile Nigerian Christians conditions the latter to contribute to the local economies of their new home countries.

Go West

Nigerian-Americans have grown into one of America's wealthiest migrant groups. For decades the typical Nigerian-American child has grown up aspiring to become a doctor, lawyer, engineer, or businessperson, and today Nigerians can be found in senior positions in America's highest-grossing industries. Increasingly, this dynamic applies to the UK.

Nigerians in the UK

Nigeria, once a British colony, enjoys membership in the commonwealth; this geopolitical affiliation makes it easier for Nigerians to relocate to the UK and secure British citizenship. Aware of what they perceive as the ongoing secularisation of the West, many of these Nigerian Christians move to the UK inspired by a vision to re-evangelise the motherland, and this vision has given rise to the emergence of what is sometimes called ‘reverse mission.’

A succession of military dictatorships from 1966 to 1999 compelled many Nigerians to flee Nigeria to the UK in search of a better life. As a result, approximately 250,000 Nigerians live in the UK. Nigerians have evolved into one of the UK's largest and most influential African migrant communities. A disproportionate level of popular and scholarly attention devoted to the presence of Nigerians in the UK focuses on how Nigerian elites continue to buy expensive properties in London and the appreciable number of Nigerian students enrolled at UK universities. However, the landscape of Nigerians living in the UK contains additional dimensions in need of analysis and one of the most under-discussed of these dimensions concerns the influence of Nigerian Christian values on UK economic life.

Economic influencers

Based in north London Brent Cross' district, Jesus House is one of the UK's largest and most popular Nigerian Pentecostal churches. Like many other churches in the UK, Jesus House has joined the Warm Welcome Campaign in an effort to provide warm spaces to members of its community suffering from excessive exposure to cold winter temperatures. Yet, long after winter passes, this warmth will continue playing a valuable role by helping thaw the keys opening the ostensibly frozen doors to the next generation of UK prosperity.

Like in the USA, Nigerians in the UK envision for themselves lives marked by material prosperity. This vision regularly inspires them to pursue lucrative jobs and engage in entrepreneurship. For many UK-based Nigerians, prosperity gospel sensibilities, reverse mission interests, and the aim to build a better life intersect in ways that have constructive, wide-reaching social and economic consequences for the UK.

Sure, the prosperity gospel has its critics and its problems, but viewed positively, it can provide a source of economic energy for countries like the UK.

Inspired by Christian devotion and the belief that despite transient seasons of difficulty, prosperity is a sign of divine favour, Nigerian Christians contribute to the UK economy every day in consistent, substantive, and innovative ways. In a time when homes across the UK remain far colder than they should be, the prosperity-friendly piety of the UK's many Nigerian Christians offers a source of Christian warmth that deserves to be recognised more widely than it is.

Article

Change

Community

Eating

29 September 2025

4 min read

Why cafes are sacred spaces

Socrates had the agora, we have the cafe

Joshua Nurcombe-Pike

Joshua is a church planter and DPhil student at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford.

Cafe culture.

Autumn’s here. I can smell it before I even find a seat. The waft of pumpkin spice lattes hangs in the air of my favourite coffee spot – the unofficial sign, for me at least, that it’s time to wrap up warm.

Personally, I’ll stick to my batch brew coffee, but I get the appeal.

And while these drinks may change with the seasons, the ritual doesn’t. We keep coming back to cafes and coffee shops. To me, it feels as if we’re craving something more than just the caffeine.

Cafes that fail to ride the wave of seasonal trends suffer – as the high street giant Costa found this summer, when it failed to cash in on the TikTok-accelerated bandwagon of matcha lattes as the summer “it” drink and saw profits plummet.

But it’s about more than just what’s on the menu.

Starbucks has just announced plans to close branches across the UK, citing an inability to create the kind of physical environment customers now expect.

Indie cafés, on the other hand, are growing in popularity, with the Observer putting this down to the “lifestyle experience” they offer. This is certainly true, but only half the story. From where I sit, these seasonal drinks appear to be the latest frothy disguise for our very human need for meaningful connection.

Socrates had the agora. We have the café.

Think about it.

Cafes have become shared spaces where people work alone together, catch up with friends, debate, discuss, purchase, and consume. We signal loyalty with stamp cards, publicise our purchases on social media, and even join communities that gather around the cafés – running clubs;, book groups;, new parent meetups.

A sweeping glance from my current table offers an insight into this hive of connectivity.

The walls are home to a temporary art gallery paying homage to local landmarks.

The noticeboard is stacked with volunteering opportunities, mental health classes, indie gig flyers, and an invite to a Halloween party.

A mother attempts to photograph and feed her child a babycino at the same time.

A job interview, or perhaps a painfully awkward first date, unfolds quietly in the corner.

Two young women laugh at last night’s antics.

The barista explains the tasting notes of the latest batch brew to a customer redeeming a fully stamped loyalty card.

An empty chair sits opposite me, waiting for a friend who, I know, will soon be bearing his soul.

It all tells me that cafés have commodified our desire to belong. And we’re more than willing to buy into it.

But I reckon there’s still something missing.

Coffee culture doesn’t just tell us about our habits. It tells us about our humanity. In a world that longs for belonging but can’t stop scrolling, cafés hint at something deeper: that we were made not just for surface-level connection, but for something more lasting.

In ancient Athens, the agora wasn’t just a marketplace or social hub. It provided a context for people to explore big questions of truth, beauty, virtue, and justice. It was the setting for public dialogue and philosophical inquiry. It was noisy, informal, often disruptive but always a space for serious thought.

I’m not suggesting you take a soap box with you on your next caffeine fix. But I do think our modern cafés, for all their cosiness and cinnamon, are agora-like spaces which offer us an opportunity to go deep.

They invite us to pause, to talk, to really think.

Could it be that cafés offer us a place not just to consume or connect, but to consider the unseen things? To get beyond the froth and to the things of real substance?

Over the years, I’ve found cafés can be unexpectedly sacred spaces.

I’ve sat across from friends as they’ve wrestled with doubt, grief, purpose, and belief. And friends have sat across from me as I’ve worked these things through too.

One tells me he’s started going to church, but doesn’t exactly know why.
Another wants to read through a Gospel with me and figure out who Jesus is.
One doesn’t really know who he is any more after a breakdown but is glad for the company.
Another says his doubts about God began when a childhood friend was killed in a car accident.
One wonders if God might be nudging him toward a big move to Cardiff.

None of these conversations happened in a church. They happened here, in spaces designed for comfort but used for something far more courageous.

This isn’t a new idea. Some of the earliest stories about Jesus show him not just teaching in temples, but sitting at tables, sharing meals, asking questions, listening. Real life. Real conversations.

In my line of work, if Jesus does something, it’s advisable to follow suit. And I’ve found doing exactly that immensely rewarding. So much of my own spiritual formation has happened within the confines of a café.

So perhaps the café could be a place where the unseen comes close. Where, over a batch brew or a seasonal latte, you might find yourself not just connected, but known.

Maybe, like my friend, you’re not exactly sure what you believe. Maybe, like many of us, you’re just trying to make sense of it all.

Either way, next time you’re in a café, don’t be afraid to go beyond the froth and get to the stuff with real flavour.

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