The Prosperity Gospel

What was this meeting?

It's called the International Gathering of Champions, an annual convention of Pentecostalists. It has taken place every year since 1991, and is now one of the largest Christian occasions in Britain. Preachers tell the congregation (who pay £20 for a weekend ticket) how God wants them to get rich and then get richer still. "Get your calculators out, I know this is going to beep your horn," declared one speaker before telling the story of a young man who turned a £14,000-a-year salary into a job at a Swiss bank on £140,000. "We have the answer to every challenge and to every need, including financial ones," says Pastor Matthew Ashimolowo, who runs the event.

Where did the idea come from?

America, of course. Although strands of the so-called 'Prosperity Gospel' have existed for centuries, its modern founder was an evangelical pastor from Oklahoma called 'Oral' Roberts (pictured). After WWII, Roberts developed a theology that encouraged Christians to celebrate Christ’s sacrifice for their sake with success. Material prosperity, he argued, could be proof of God's favour. The philosophy is now regarded as mainstream in the Pentecostal wing of the Christian Church, which has an estimated 250 million members worldwide. In the UK, the Prosperity Gospel is most closely associated with the Kingsway International Christian Centre (KICC), in east London, which has 8,000 members and is the largest Pentecostal church in Western Europe.

So how does it work?

Believers give money to their church and hope that God will reward them many times over. KICC, for example, suggests its members give 10 per cent of their gross income in return for His favour. Oral Roberts called the concept "seed faith", and based it on the words of Jesus in Mark's Gospel (10:30), when He said that anyone who gave up their possessions for God would "receive an hundredfold now in this time… and in the world to come, eternal life". Or as Gloria Copeland, a current American Prosperity preacher, explains it: "Give one airplane and receive one hundred times the value of the airplane. Give one car, and the return would furnish you a lifetime of cars. In short, Mark 10:30 is a very good deal." If the givers fail to reap the dividends, it is only because their faith is not strong enough.

What about the camel and the eye of a needle?

Access to heaven has traditionally been deemed difficult for the rich – see Luke 18:22-25 – and critics of the movement, which include most other evangelical churches, argue that it is just materialism masquerading as theology. Both sides claim the scriptures are on their side, however, even if preachers from the Prosperity school have been accused of some elastic interpretations. In