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

Awe and wonder

Comment

Holidays/vacations

Monastic life

Psychology

9 July 2025

5 min read

You can find the awesome in the everyday not just on holiday

The sources of awe are not scarce, but we do overlook them

Henna Cundill

Henna is a researcher with the Centre for Autism and Theology at the University of Aberdeen.

Awesome in Singapore.

Swaroop Satheesh on Unsplash.

Are you starting to think about holidays? Have you heard yourself trotting forth the old clichés?

“We’re looking forward to getting away from it all.”

“We’re planning something special to take us out of ourselves.”

“Well, it might not be that relaxing with the *kids/dogs/relatives* – but a change is as good as a rest!”

Even if going for the budget-friendly ‘staycation’ this year, there is something about stepping out of our everyday busyness and chores that we find distinctly appealing. We hope that a change of routine, if not a change of place, will afford us some kind of renewal. On holiday we are freed to move to the edges of our lives, even if we can’t escape them entirely, and gain the view from the terrace over the box-hedge-maze of all things quotidian.

But would it help us to visit that terrace a bit more often? This has long been the recommendation of scientists, poets and prophets alike. Most recently, a 2025 study from Yale University researched experiences of “awe” in the everyday. They recruited Long Covid patients and instructed them over a three-month period to slow down several times a day, paying attention to something that they valued or found amazing, whilst breathing and noticing any tangible responses or reactions in their body. The researchers called this process “awe”: Attention, Wait and Exhale. Amongst the participants in the study, the practice of AWE induced a measurable improvement in mental health.

Of course, there have always been people who pause multiple times per day to turn their thoughts away from the mundane. In the Sixth Century, an Italian monk known as Benedict devised a “rule” for those living the monastic life, wherein brothers were required to pause for prayer eight times in every 24 hours – including in the middle of the night! This connected the members of the order not only with God but also with each other. Even if a brother found himself temporarily outside the cloister, going on a journey or working with the poor in the wider community, he was still expected to “join” his community in prayer at the regular hours, stopping whatever he was doing to pray in solidarity.

There are still Benedictine orders today, and others who seek to “pray the hours” based on brother Benedict’s rule. But for most of us, our lives are far from this monastic ideal of community and regularity, even if we do practise the Christian faith. Within a busy schedule, stopping once or twice per day to pray can be a challenge, let alone eight times and regardless of convenience! No matter how much the scientists tell us that it will lift our spirits and do us good, such timefulness is the medicine that the modern life denies. But perhaps this is where the poets can supply deficiencies?

In her great work, Aurora Leigh, Elizabeth Barrett Browning once wrote:

“Earth’s crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God;
But only he who sees takes off his shoes—
The rest sit round and pluck blackberries.”

It’s a brilliant reminder that sources of awe are not scarce, even if we are prone to overlooking them. In speaking of “he who sees” Browning suggests that there are some people who see the world in a way that anticipates moments of wonder, and that such people are willing to “take off their shoes”. This is an allusion to the story of Moses in the Bible, who, when he encounters the miraculous mystery of the burning bush in the desert, is commanded by God to take off his shoes because the ordinary desert has now become sacred and holy ground – a place of awesome encounter.

Perhaps we should take our cue from brother Benedict, and simply stop and kneel where we are, by the side of the path, in amongst the box-hedge.

This type of atunement is available to any of us, no matter how full the schedule. Even as I write – and you read – this article right now, any of us might pause to take in our surroundings and be able to find something to value and find amazing, a little bit of heaven crammed into earth. It might be a large thing, like the view from the window, or small thing, like the curling steam rising from a cup of coffee on the desk. Anything can become meaningful if we choose to observe its meaning; anywhere can become holy ground if we make it a place of encounter with all that is awe-inspiring and that transcends our daily lives.

What stops us, I wonder? Is it that for me writing this article, and for you reading it, this is just another task that we feel we must finish so that we can hurry along to finishing something else? We must keep pressing on, threading our way through the box-hedge-maze today, because the time for visiting the terrace is not now, it’s later – in a few weeks’ time, when the schools break up and we can finally “get away from it all”.

Perhaps we should take our cue from brother Benedict, and simply stop and kneel where we are, by the side of the path, in amongst the box-hedge. If we look closely, we might even notice that it is made up of a thousand million tiny leaves, each with its own little leafy life to live, each patterned with tiny, intricate veins. Beautiful, and for no obvious reason. Most people will never notice this – but we have seen it now. In the middle of all things quotidian, here is a common bush, and it is afire with God. There is nothing to stop us noticing this, and when we have done so, we can get up, take off our shoes, and continue to walk.

Support Seen & Unseen

Since Spring 2023, our readers have enjoyed over 1,500 articles. All for free.
This is made possible through the generosity of our amazing community of supporters.

If you enjoy Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?

Do so by joining Behind The Seen. Alongside other benefits, you’ll receive an extra fortnightly email from me sharing my reading and reflections on the ideas that are shaping our times.

Graham Tomlin
Editor-in-Chief

Pledge now