FAITH
How a spiritual marketplace turns hope into currency and keeps the faithful giving
A COUPLE of Sundays ago, I went with a friend to a megachurch in Port Moresby.
He was from out of town and needed a guide, so I said yes. I had never been to a place like it before. I’m not talking about the size, though it was big. I’m talking about what I saw happening in those pews.
That morning sent me down a rabbit hole that opened my eyes to a side of Christianity I never knew existed. And after days of reading, what struck me most wasn’t that this thing exists everywhere, it does, but that the people inside it seem so determined not to see what’s right in front of them.
Machine behind the music
Inside some churches across the country, including the one I visited, there’s a system running underneath all that worship. It’s called prosperity gospel. It has its own logic, and once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
The belief system is basically that faith, money, and God’s favour are tied together in a loop. You give. God blesses. You give more. God blesses more. You don’t give? You get nothing. To understand it, you have to stop listening to the sermon for a minute and take a peek beneath the thinly veiled surface.
Where you sit matters
At the church I visited, the front rows were full of people who seemed to know each other. They greeted the pastor by name. They dressed well. They looked like things were working out for them.
Later I learned those seats weren’t accidental. The people in them were the big donors, the business owners, they were basically the visible proof that the system delivers. Their position was both a reward and a piece of evidence. Proximity to the pulpit meant proximity to power.
My friend and I sat toward the back. He wasn’t in that bracket, and neither was I. It was like a map of the spiritual journey they kept talking about – one we apparently hadn’t completed yet.
Testimony as currency
Inside this world, a testimony is like currency. When someone stands up and tells the congregation how God blessed them after they gave to the church, it’s not just a celebration. It’s proof. Each story of a sickness healed after a tithe was given becomes a kind of asset in the church’s bank of belief.
And it works. You’ll start to feel the pressure. If everyone around you has a story of breakthrough, you start looking for your own. Soon ordinary luck like getting a job, gets credited to the system.
The whole community becomes a factory producing its own evidence. Correlation becomes causation. You gave, then something good happened, so the giving must have caused it.
What the preaching says
The sermon gives you the rules. The core message, hammered down every Sunday, is that financial and physical wellbeing are the guaranteed birthright of every believer. If you’re struggling, it’s not bad luck. It’s a sign that your faith is faulty.
And the solution is always the same. Give more. Put money into the ministry, and God will multiply it back to you. The words are spiritual, but it sounds like a contract.
A very old machine
This isn’t new. I started reading about it and realised it’s basically a modern version of something that existed centuries ago. The medieval Catholic Church sold indulgences. You paid money, and the Church promised to reduce your time in Purgatory. Simple transaction. Coin for spiritual relief.
Prosperity gospel does the same thing but with a twist. Instead of promising relief from future suffering, it promises access to present wealth. The architecture is almost identical. A spiritual economy run by a central authority who holds the keys to divine blessing. The indulgence was a future contract on the afterlife. The seed-faith offering is a bet on earthly wealth. Both make grace look measurable. Both make sure the institution profits from every transaction.
Why the law can’t touch it
This is where it gets frustrating. Religious freedom protects them. Courts don’t want to get involved in questions about what’s true or false in faith. When a preacher says God will bless you if you give, that’s protected speech.
To prove fraud, you’d have to show the preacher knew they were lying and intended to deceive. But how do you prove intent about a spiritual claim? Courts around the world have tried. It’s almost impossible.
And here’s the weird part. The people who give the most will never call themselves victims. To claim fraud would mean admitting their deepest hopes were exploited. It would mean their sacrifices were wasted. Their community and their identity would collapse. So they stay. They keep believing their breakthrough is coming.
So without a complainant, there’s no case.
Engineering of emotion
You can’t run a system like this on logic alone. It needs emotion, and they know how to engineer it. The services are staged like a show. The music builds. Testimonies come at the peak of emotional intensity. The call to give comes when everyone is already feeling something.
It’s hope, peer pressure, and a kind of spiritual Fomo (fear of missing out) all mixed together. By the time the offering basket comes around, your brain has stopped calculating and started feeling.
I saw it happen. People giving with conviction and almost tears in their eyes. It looked like devotion. But I couldn’t help wondering what they were actually buying.
What the offering basket really collects
This was the first time I’ve seen envelopes in an offering basket. The envelopes have names on them. That’s not an accident. A name turns a donation into a record. The church knows exactly who gave what. Anonymous charity becomes a tracked investment.
Later, when the pastor prays for you by name, you feel seen. You feel special. And you feel like you have to keep giving to stay in that circle.
Legally, it’s a voluntary donation. There’s no written contract promising a return. So nothing is wrong. Nothing, at least, that any court would touch.
Personal prophecy
The most powerful tool is the personal prophecy. A leader walks through the crowd and points at someone. “You have the potential to get a white 10-seater Toyota Land Cruiser,” he tells a man. “God is promoting you to a private jet,” he tells a woman.
To someone outside, this sounds like encouragement. Inside the system, it’s understood as an instruction. The faithful believer, wanting to activate that future, knows what to do. They give. They sow a seed. The gift becomes both proof of the leader’s anointing and the seed for their own harvest.
And that white 10-seater Toyota Landcruiser in the pastor’s driveway? It’s not just a car. It’s a testimony.
Corporate labyrinth
The money becomes hard to follow. The church is a non-profit. But the pastor has other businesses, separate entities. Funds move between them. The trail goes cold. The pastor lives well. It’s all covered by salaries that look legal on paper. The system is perfectly built to hide itself.
Trap door
Leaving is not simple. I’ve seen people try. It would be tantamount to social suicide. It means admitting you were wrong about the most important things in your life. Your hopes were used. Your giving was foolish. To leave, you have to tear down the person you built inside that world.
For most, it’s less painful to stay. To reinterpret the silence as a test. To keep waiting. To keep giving.
Perpetual motion machine
So the machine keeps running. Teaching creates giving. Giving funds the theatre of blessing. The theatre attracts new people who want it for themselves. Round and round.
It lives in the space between faith and fraud, where the law can’t easily reach. It’s shielded by constitutional protections, layered finances, and the deep human need to believe our sacrifices mean something.
I sat in that church and watched it all happen. The music. The tears. The envelopes sliding into the basket. And when I walked out, I realised the system wasn’t built on scripture. It was built on hope, authority, and a design so clever it protects itself from being questioned.
My dear friend that I went to the church with is not a friend anymore. Because I thought I was being a good friend when I called him up after a month or so and told him about all this that I found.
He abruptly ended the call and blocked my number.
I was angry at first. To hell with him, I thought to myself. If he wants to live under this delusion and burn a hole in his pocket and hopes then so be it.
But then, after a while, I began to realise why he had done it. The belief has taken so deep a root and he has built his whole life around it that he cannot leave room for doubt. He has to believe that there’s a huge pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. There’s a predetermined path he has to follow. A sliver of doubt will throw him off.
So I now understand why he did what he did. But I don’t regret doing what I did because what kind of a friend would I be if I didn’t?
- Philemon Kaisa is a full-stack software developer and writer based in Port Moresby. His interests span technology, culture, governance, and the social forces that shape PNG society.
