An Open Letter Ahead of the Forthcoming Episcopal Meeting
To the House of Bishops, Church of Nigeria (Anglican Communion)
My Lords Spiritual,
As you gather for the forthcoming Episcopal meeting, the faithful of the Church of Nigeria are watching, and so is Heaven. We write not as adversaries of the episcopate but as its grieving children. The purple you wear was consecrated to signify sacrificial servanthood. In our day it has too often been degraded into the vestment of empire.
From Lagos to Ilorin, from Akure to Awka, the same lament is whispered in vestries, spoken in parsonages and wept over in the pews. Church land is quietly sold. Discipline is bargained away. Bishops who demand absolute obedience from their priests refuse to obey the very Church that consecrated them. This letter asks one searching question: will this meeting confront the rot, or will it seal another unholy alliance to protect it?
The word of the Lord through Ezekiel has never sounded more terrifyingly current:
“Woe be to the shepherds of Israel that do feed themselves! should not the shepherds feed the flocks?” (Ezekiel 34:2)
The same prophet warned that God Himself would require His flock at the shepherds’ hands (Ezekiel 34:10). This letter is written in that spirit, as a solemn warning before the divine reckoning.
Mammon Enthroned in the Sanctuary
The land of the Church belongs to Almighty God and to generations yet unborn. It is not the private patrimony of any bishop, his wife or his cronies. Yet across our provinces, the faithful report that church land is being sold, leased and converted to private gain.
In a diocese in the South-South, members allege that hectares of church land along a major expressway were sold, and no one has had the courage to challenge it. Reports from Benin City tell a similar story: that a bishop and his associates sold portions of church land in the heart of the city, and that a senior diocesan legal officer resigned because he could not in good conscience continue to serve amid those sales. On another occasion, a bishop is alleged to have used intermediaries to corner church land under the pious pretext of acquiring a burial site for his late wife. In yet another diocese, members allege that a bishop’s wife was busy selling plots belonging to the Church.
The avarice does not stop at land. In Lagos, bishops are said to amass wealth in cattle and build personal ranches in Badagry, while the meat never reaches God’s people. Another bishop is reported to be building houses worth billions of naira and acquiring property in Nigeria and abroad. Before their consecration, these men had one testimony: that God had called them. Today they rank among the wealthiest men in the land. The faithful have every right to ask where this wealth came from.
And when they retire, congregations are still coerced into building them houses and buying them vehicles, after years of feasting on and fleecing the Church. Why should a struggling congregation build a house for a bishop who has already built houses for himself and his children since the day he entered office?
Set this beside the Apostle Paul, who could look the elders of Ephesus in the eye and say, “I have coveted no man’s silver, or gold, or apparel” (Acts 20:33). Set it beside Gehazi, who ran after Naaman’s silver and carried leprosy home for his trouble (2 Kings 5:20–27). The prophet Micah described our situation exactly when he said that the priests of his day taught for hire (Micah 3:11).
If these reports are false, an open audit will clear the accused. If they are true, silence makes this House an accomplice to the theft. Either way, the House of Bishops can no longer look away. Scripture is plain:
“Ye cannot serve God and mammon.” (Matthew 6:24)
The Contest of the Purple
There is now an unhealthy competition among the purple men. They compete over who wields the most power and who has the most “swag”. They compete over who rides with the most mobile police escorts, who lives in the most majestic palace, who terrorises his priests the most, and who is the richest. This is not ministry. It is a beauty contest of vanity.
Our Lord answered this spirit long ago: “Ye know that the princes of the Gentiles exercise dominion over them… But it shall not be so among you: but whosoever will be great among you, let him be your minister” (Matthew 20:25–26). Peter, the chief of the apostles, charged the elders to feed the flock, “neither as being lords over God’s heritage, but being ensamples to the flock” (1 Peter 5:3).
The Church has always known this danger. Around the year 590, Pope Gregory the Great wrote his Book of Pastoral Rule, warning that those who seek the office of shepherd for its honours are unfit for it, and that a bishop must be first in humility before he is first in rank. Our own history gives us a living example. Samuel Ajayi Crowther, a freed slave boy who became the first African Anglican bishop in 1864, laboured along the Niger in simplicity. He bore humiliation from younger missionaries without abandoning the Church he loved. Which of today’s palaces would he recognise as a bishop’s house?
Priests in Poverty, Bishops in Plenty
While the wealth of the Church is enjoyed at the top, the priests who carry the real work of the gospel are left to suffer. In several dioceses, priests’ stipends remain below the national minimum wage. Some go months without pay.
In some dioceses, priests cannot afford proper healthcare for themselves or their families. Many cannot give their children a decent education. A priest who falls ill is left to the mercy of his congregation. A priest who dies leaves a widow and children with nothing.
Worse still, some bishops are sending priests to early graves through wicked and callous treatment. It is widely reported in church circles that an archbishop in the South-West had his own chaplain arrested over a trumped-up charge of missing dollars. The priest was detained for as long as the archbishop wished and was later derobed in a widely circulated letter. When someone else confessed to taking the money, no reparation was made to the priest. There was no retraction and no apology for the public defamation he suffered.
The labourer is worthy of his hire (Luke 10:7). James warns that the wages kept back from labourers cry out, and that their cries have entered the ears of the Lord of hosts (James 5:4). A Church that houses its bishops in luxury while its priests live in want, and destroys them without remorse, has lost its sense of justice.
Lords of the Manor, Rebels to the Hierarchy
Arrogance now sits enthroned in the Bishopscourt. Too many bishops no longer remember that they are priests. In their dioceses they have become emperors. They command obedience from priests and members and punish dissent swiftly, ruling like military dictators who answer to no one.
They use all manner of derogatory names for their priests, as though they were the ones who called them into ministry. They threaten to “deal with” any priest who displeases them, as though they were his god. But no bishop called any priest. God did.
Yet when the hierarchy of the Church calls them to order, these same lords become the worst of followers: headstrong, disobedient and undisciplined. The bishop who would suspend a curate for one sermon will defy the Primate and the General Synod without blinking. There is no accountability in the House of Bishops, and that must end. A shepherd who will not be shepherded has no right to the staff.
Some bishops even say openly that loyalty to their wives is the beginning of wisdom. Scripture says otherwise: “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom” (Proverbs 9:10). A bishop must rule his own house well (1 Timothy 3:4–5), not be ruled from it, nor turn his diocese into a family business.
The truth is that much of the leadership of the Church of Nigeria today lacks the spiritual maturity required for the vast authority it wields. Paul warned that a bishop must not be a novice, “lest being lifted up with pride he fall into the condemnation of the devil” (1 Timothy 3:6). We are watching that very fall in our day.
The Conspiracy Ahead of the Episcopal Meeting
We hear of caucuses before this meeting. We hear of bishops trading support and of discipline being subverted along tribal lines. We hear of deals struck so that loyalists, cronies and favoured sons can be installed as bishops of dioceses. If that is the agenda, it is a conspiracy against the Church of God.
These men are ready to sacrifice the truth, integrity, purity, sanctity and sanity of the Church on the altar of personal ambition. They chase purple for mammon and for power, not to contend for “the faith which was once delivered unto the saints” (Jude 3). Many would not sacrifice their convenience for the faith, much less their lives.
And when discipline finally comes, they run to court. The same men who allow no appeal in their own dioceses rush to secular judges to escape the canons they swore to uphold. We saw it with a bishop in North America, and we are seeing it now in Awka. That is not a defence of justice. It is a flight from accountability.
Awka: Arrogance, Pride and Insubordination on Display
Today the whole nation is watching the Archbishop of the Province of the Niger and Bishop of Awka, the Most Rev. Alexander Ibezim. In July 2025, a petition was filed with the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) alleging the illegal sale of church land and the diversion of its proceeds. Rather than answer, he obtained an order from the Anambra State High Court stopping the EFCC from arresting him, and the investigation stalled. Those in authority who looked away at that moment, when they should have left him to answer the allegations, cannot now pretend they were not part of the story.
In October 2026, the Primate finally directed him to proceed on six months’ leave so that the allegations, including the alleged unauthorised sale of church land worth more than ₦2 billion, could be investigated. Instead of submitting to inquiry, he went to the High Court in Awka against the Primate and the Dean of the Church. His Diocesan Board rejected the Primate’s directive and threatened to take the diocese out of the Church of Nigeria. It has even been publicly alleged that he continued to officiate during the leave.
Whether the land allegations are proven is for a proper inquiry to decide. But his posture is already plain for all to see, and it reeks of arrogance, pride and insubordination. An archbishop who demands obedience from every priest in his province cannot refuse obedience to the Church that consecrated him. This crisis is a monster the Church herself raised. She allowed such conduct to fester and flourish for years, and she now reaps what she tolerated.
Anyone who stands against the lawful discipline of the Church in this matter must examine himself. Those who shield indiscipline for friendship, tribe or benefit make themselves partners in it. Birds of a feather flock together, and the faithful are taking note of who is flocking where.
North America: Discipline Frustrated Along Tribal Lines
Awka did not come from nowhere. Before it, there was Bishop Olukayode Adebogun of the Anglican Diocese of the Trinity in the United States, who also served as Area Bishop for Canada. After the General Synod at Nnewi in September 2023 resolved to reorganise the Church of Nigeria’s mission in North America, his words and actions were judged to undermine the lawful directives of the Primate and the General Synod. On 30 January 2024, he was suspended pending investigation into what the Church called his wilful disobedience.
What followed was a display of unruliness. The diocese was dragged before a court in Indiana to stop the Church from carrying out its own synodical decision. He insisted he was only named as a defendant there, yet he went on to seek relief against the Church in a Nigerian court, engaging Femi Falana (SAN). In December 2025, the Indiana court ruled that the dispute was a purely ecclesiastical matter that civil courts cannot decide. The Church was vindicated, but only after its name had been dragged through foreign courts. Throughout, voices along tribal lines rose to defend him and frustrate the discipline of the Church, as though the canons should bend to the tribe of the offender.
There is a sadder story underneath. Some who rallied behind him saw him not as a shepherd to be corrected but as a conduit pipe: a way to get themselves abroad, or to get their children abroad. That is not fellowship. It is merchandise. When James, Cephas and John gave Paul and Barnabas “the right hands of fellowship” (Galatians 2:9), it was for the sake of the gospel, not for visas and foreign placements. Support bought with favours is a market transaction, and it has no place in the household of God.
Bishoprics for Sale
The episcopate is being handed to the most influential and to the highest bidder. Priests move from place to place, begging and lobbying to become bishops, and promises are made in exchange. The Holy Spirit has been pushed to the background, and personal interest now leads.
Those labouring faithfully in rural dioceses are sidelined. Meanwhile, the purple goes to those who left our shores for a better life abroad, or to those who have spent years in Abuja keeping company with men of power and money. They want to eat their cake and have it. Today the easiest road to a bishopric runs through a diocese in Lagos or through Abuja. This is a sad story for the Church of God.
Some dioceses are split with bishops already chosen in advance. They are chosen not for competence, and not because they are genuine servants of God, but to reward loyalty to personalities, to satisfy the restless, or to settle someone so that he will vacate a particular seat.
When Simon the sorcerer offered money for spiritual authority, Peter answered, “Thy money perish with thee, because thou hast thought that the gift of God may be purchased with money” (Acts 8:20). That sin has carried his name ever since: simony. In 451, the Council of Chalcedon forbade any ordination for money. In the eleventh century, the Gregorian reformers fought for decades to drive simony out of the Church. Are we now bringing it back in purple?
Cabals, Kingmakers and False Witness
In the coming elections, the power blocs are contending again. They do not seek the mind of God. They seek bragging rights over who produced which bishop. They should rejoice only when God’s chosen servant is placed where God wants him. God must be weeping over the state of our communion.
There is now a cabal in the episcopate known as the former Abuja priests, or the “Primate’s boys”. They act as ambassadors in the House, working to engineer the nomination and election of members of their former constituency. Others call themselves the Emmanuel College G7, moving together from episcopacy to archiepiscopacy. Can someone please tell us the definition of cultism? A closed brotherhood that shares out offices among its members and closes ranks against outsiders looks very much like one. The Apostle John knew such a man: “Diotrephes, who loveth to have the preeminence among them, receiveth us not” (3 John 9).
The ambition of many of the purple men is unethical and self-centred. Some do not mind destroying lives, passively or otherwise, to occupy a position. Is there no end to this evil? James describes it exactly: “Ye lust, and have not: ye kill, and desire to have, and cannot obtain” (James 4:2). “For where envying and strife is, there is confusion and every evil work” (James 3:16).
Nowhere is this evil more visible than during episcopal elections. Some bishops play openly destructive roles. They campaign against candidates, spread rumours and work behind the scenes to block men they dislike. It is told that a former seminary rector, now a bishop, lied that his former dean had stolen a church vehicle, simply to stop him from being elected into the episcopacy. It is further said that he swore he would never allow that man into the House. How dare anyone swear to shut the door that God alone opens? “He that openeth, and no man shutteth; and shutteth, and no man openeth” (Revelation 3:7).
And those who do such things then gather for what they call a prayer meeting. What do they pray? How do they sleep at night? “Shall not God search this out? for he knoweth the secrets of the heart” (Psalm 44:21). The ninth commandment still stands: “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour” (Exodus 20:16).
The result is an episcopate crowded with businessmen, men rumoured to dabble in the occult, and professional priests who have never truly encountered the cross. With such men at the helm, how can the Church hear the voice of God?
Greener Pastures in the Name of Translation
The same restless ambition drives bishops to seek greener pastures under the polite name of translation. The ring on a bishop’s finger has always signified his marriage to his diocese. Yet many are quick to divorce their first bride and remarry a richer one as soon as a wealthier see falls vacant. That is not the call of God. It is mammon wearing a mitre.
The early Church saw this danger clearly. The Council of Nicaea in 325 forbade bishops to move from city to city. The Council of Serdica in 343 went further, condemning bishops who left a small city for a larger one out of greed and ambition. Sixteen centuries later, we are guilty of the very thing those fathers condemned.
Worse, some bishops seem to pray, quietly or even openly, for their colleagues to die so that they can take their place. When the Archbishop of Lagos died in October 2022, the scramble for his seat was shameful. By many accounts, no fewer than six bishops positioned themselves to take over. The Primate had to place a three-year moratorium on the translation of bishops in February 2023, calling the rivalry unhealthy and ungodly. It is said that some even had the effrontery to question his wisdom for doing so.
Somebody should ask the bishop who now wants to leave his diocese for the neighbouring see of Akure: Is this still ministry? What did you leave unfinished where God first placed you? Why does this ambition know no end? The Lord’s question to Elijah stands for every restless bishop: “What doest thou here?” (1 Kings 19:9). And Paul’s word still holds: “godliness with contentment is great gain” (1 Timothy 6:6).
Fallen and Unashamed
Some who were disciplined because of reported immorality now go about shamelessly, giving testimonies about their so-called travails and calling the Church’s discipline persecution. Jeremiah saw the same thing in his day: “Were they ashamed when they had committed abomination? nay, they were not at all ashamed, neither could they blush” (Jeremiah 6:15).
Discipline is not persecution. Paul told the Corinthians to deal firmly with open immorality in the Church (1 Corinthians 5), and told Timothy that those who sin should be rebuked before all, that others also may fear (1 Timothy 5:20). “No chastening for the present seemeth to be joyous, but grievous: nevertheless afterward it yieldeth the peaceable fruit of righteousness” (Hebrews 12:11). A man under discipline belongs on his knees in repentance, not on a podium collecting sympathy.
A Famine of the Word
This is why souls are dying in our dioceses. Amos foretold “a famine in the land, not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the LORD” (Amos 8:11). That famine is upon us. Dioceses are run as business centres, and money has become the order of the day.
In some places, fundraising has become the processional and recessional hymn of the service. It is collection after collection and levy after levy. There is no sound doctrine and no teaching that lifts souls. There is no rebuke, no reproof and no instruction in righteousness (2 Timothy 3:16). The sheep are fleeced but not fed, and “my people are destroyed for lack of knowledge” (Hosea 4:6). Our Lord drove the traders out of the temple with a whip, saying, “make not my Father’s house an house of merchandise” (John 2:16). What would He say of our cathedrals?
A Constitution That Makes a Bishop Larger Than Himself
Much of this rot is protected by our own laws. The ambiguities in the Constitution and Canons of the Church of Nigeria have allowed a bishop to become larger than himself, larger than his synod and, it seems, larger than the Church. It is time to amend the constitution drastically and remove those ambiguities.
The Anglican tradition never intended a bishop to rule alone. It is a tradition of the bishop-in-synod, in which clergy and laity share in governance and hold power to account. The Catholic historian Lord Acton warned in 1887 that “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” A diocese with no checks on its bishop is a temptation no man should be given.
The Way Back to Holiness
The road back is not hidden. Let every diocese open its land and property records to an independent audit, with the findings laid before its synod. Let every alleged sale of church land, in the South-South, in Benin City, in Awka and wherever else, be fully investigated, and let land wrongly taken be recovered for the Church. Let every bishop declare his assets at consecration and again at retirement, so the Church can see what he came with and what he leaves with.
Let every priest be paid a living wage, never below the national minimum wage, and paid on time. Let priests and their families have health insurance and help with their children’s education. Let the retirement benefits of bishops be fixed by the canons, so congregations are no longer forced to build houses and buy vehicles for men who have already provided richly for themselves. Let any priest wrongly accused and punished be restored, publicly cleared and compensated.
Let discipline be applied without tribe or favour, and let any bishop who runs to a secular court to escape it face the canonical consequences. Let no new diocese be carved out to reward loyalty. Let episcopal elections be decided by calling, character and fruit, not by money, lobbying, cabals or connections, and let faithful priests in rural dioceses be fairly considered.
Let the Constitution and Canons be amended to define and limit episcopal power clearly, to place escorts, palaces and diocesan spending under synodical control, and to create a standing body of clergy and laity empowered to investigate complaints against bishops. And let our pulpits return to the Word, with teaching and pastoral care placed before fundraising.
Questions This House Must Answer
Before you vote, before you caucus, before you lift a single hand in that meeting, answer these questions before God. Whose land have you sold? Whose wages have you withheld? Which priest have you broken, and have you ever asked his forgiveness? Whose election have you blocked with a lie? Whose discipline have you frustrated because he is of your tribe? Which see are you eyeing while the one God gave you lies neglected? And when you stand before the Chief Shepherd, whose crown will you claim (1 Peter 5:4)?
If you cannot answer these questions in the open, you cannot answer them before God. “For there is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed; neither hid, that shall not be known” (Luke 12:2).
Let the Martin Luthers Arise
Let it be said plainly: indiscipline in the Church of Nigeria, and above all in the House of Bishops, has passed an intolerable level. If nothing is done now, the Babylonians will come. Judah did not fall because Babylon was strong. It fell because its own house was rotten. Jeremiah lamented that “the prophets prophesy falsely, and the priests bear rule by their means; and my people love to have it so” (Jeremiah 5:31). After the fall, he wrote that it happened “for the sins of her prophets, and the iniquities of her priests” (Lamentations 4:13). The Church that refuses to judge itself will be judged by others: by the courts, by the press, by division, and finally by God.
This shameful decay must stop. In 1517, Martin Luther nailed ninety-five theses to a church door in Wittenberg and called a corrupt Church back to the gospel. Let a new generation of reformers arise, clergy and laity alike. Let ninety-five theses be nailed to the doors of our cathedrals, saying no to impunity and no to impurity.
Remember also what a true bishop looks like. In 1977, Archbishop Janani Luwum of Uganda confronted the tyranny of Idi Amin and paid with his life. He laid down his life for the flock. He did not take the lives of others to climb higher. That is the standard of the purple.
To the fathers of the Church, the retired archbishops and bishops whose labour built what we have: do not destroy in your old age what you laboured to build in your youth by siding with the wrong elements in the Church of God. Your silence or support now will define your legacy more than every cathedral you dedicated.
As this House prepares for the forthcoming elections, tear down the lists you have already drawn up. Go on your knees and ask God to choose credible men. Do not hand the staff to the highest bidder, the loudest lobbyist, the cabal’s candidate or the most loyal crony. Make a deliberate effort to purge the carnality in your circle by trusting God to send His tested servants into the place.
To every bishop who has made an agreement with darkness to frustrate discipline in the Church of God, and to every corrupt hand that has fed on her land and her people, we say this with all solemnity: God is not mocked. Judgment must begin at the house of God (1 Peter 4:17), and it will be swift. Let every bishop prepare to give account for what he has done to the Church and to her leadership. Repent while there is still time.
To the faithful bishops who still serve with clean hands, and there are many, we say: stand up in this meeting. Do not let your silence be counted with the guilty. The purple must serve the Church, or it must be retired.
Finally, we charge every bishop who receives this letter to pass it on until every member of the House of Bishops has read it. Let no one who has read it hide it. God told Ezekiel that the watchman who sees the danger and keeps silent will have blood required at his hand (Ezekiel 3:18). Whoever buries this letter will not be free of the guilt of silence.
Yours in the service of Christ and His Church,
Àyànfẹ́ Akínkúnmi
Dioces of Lagos Mainland
Church of Nigeria, Anglican Communion