In a statement issued by the church’s headquarters and confirmed by Pastor Ibe, senior pastor of BCC, the church’s management called into question the motive and journalistic integrity of Sunday World, a widely-circulated South African newspaper, in publishing the said reporting of April 3. BCC called the article “biased, spiteful, villainous and most regrettably, laced with hallmarks of inadequate investigation by the journalist”.
“It is worthy of note that our Senior pastor received an email from an un-recognised personal Gmail account on a weekend (Saturday) with a line of accusatorial questions that were further saddled with putative deductions quite demeaning of a journalist from such a highly rated media outfit,” the statement noted, adding that the proof of “bias and questionable professionalism” was that the newspaper report was published “with no further investigation, a practice quite alien to the basics of journalism.”
The church asserted that the allegations cited by the newspaper evidently originated from a Twitter post back in October 2021, which claimed that Ibe had fled South Africa with up to R300 million that was supposedly earned from selling off the church headquarters. The statement called this allegation “another inordinate belief.”
A number of posts on Twitter and Facebook had also called for the pastor to be investigated by the authorities because he was a Nigerian who could not be trusted. “But Nigerians, I will never trust them even if Jesus was Nigerian I will never accept him actually I’d be the AntiChrist is Jesus was Nigerian. We’d be scammed and they’d make us carry the Cross instead of him carrying the Cross himself (sic),” a Facebook user Larry Matlala had written.
Pastor Ibe had also reported to have received numerous threats to his life and the lives of his family members.
In response to the alleged sale of the church facility by Pastor Ibe, which was the primary cause of the agitation, the statement asserted that the property in question still belonged to the church. According to the statement, a resolution was reached in 2005 “to purchase the land on which the new facility is situated, and most importantly, on behalf of Bethesda Christian Centre under the name of World Outreach, which is owned by Bethesda Business Foundation.”
World Outreach is not “alienated from BCC”, the statement said, noting that Pastor Ibe and his team had clarified this position numerous times in the past.
Meanwhile, the news report cited some aggrieved members of the church, collectively identifying themselves as ‘BCC Concerned Group Task Team’, who had filed a report in December 2021 with the South African Police Services Directorate for Priority Crime Investigation (DPCI) and Department of Social Development in South Africa, calling to question Ibe’s conduct as lead pastor of the church. This group, the report said, had raised questions around the management of the church’s finances over the last 20 years.
However, BCC leadership, via its statement, expressed doubts over the supposed good intentions of the BCC Concerned Group Task Team, which they said comprises former members of BCC whose objective is to “spread seeds of confusion and spite.”
The church’s leaders claimed the Concerned Group Task Team exposed an ulterior intention when the agitators purportedly used the church’s letterhead for internal and external correspondence without authorisation by the church leadership, an action deemed “condemnable and portends criminality” by the church. The BCC leadership has asserted that there is no evidence of wrongdoing in its operations. “We will continue to stay focused on the word of God and preach the gospel to the souls that are in need of guidance, especially during this trying time,” the statement read.