'I can’t stand pastors who have sex with church members' – Otabil

Pastor Mensa Otabil has condemned his colleagues who line up women in their churches and have sex with them.

The founder of the International Central Gospel Church (ICGC) told his congregation on Sunday 12 June 2016 that such pastors are not good leaders worth emulating.

Citing leadership in the church as an example to teach his congregation about generational leadership, Dr Otabil said: “Many times, leaders come up and they have serious moral challenges and I’m talking within the church. You know, I don’t have a problem if a preacher’s English is not good, he can crucify the English language for all he wants, it doesn’t bother me. If his English is corn and groundnut, it doesn’t bother me, or his English is like caterpillar…I don’t have a problem with that because God doesn’t judge us by English language, after all, the first disciplines of Jesus were not educated. I don’t know, if they were speaking English, I don’t know what Peter would have been saying…the problem is not language, the problem is character. I can stand bad English, but I can’t stand immorality, and we shouldn’t stand immorality.”

According to Pastor Otabil, “When a man says he’s a man of God and he’s sleeping with all the women in the church, we cannot tolerate it, you cannot say he’s anointed, but that’s his problem, that problem is the main problem, it’s a huge one, don’t excuse it and don’t accept it, otherwise you will impose on yourself a generational leader, who will brand you for life, you have to determine what you accept, not every behaviour is acceptable, especially when the leader is wrong, but can’t accept it and won’t repent from it.”

Dr Otabil said although “generational leaders are not perfect people,” they must live above reproach and set an example. “David made some major mistakes in his life, but he repented, openly, and he warned against it. It doesn’t make his sin less, but he was conscious that: ‘What I’ve done is wrong.’”

“I can’t stand it when somebody says: ‘I’m a man of God, God is using me and people say: ‘Well God uses him, but he has this little problem with women’. It’s not a little one. It’s a major problem,” Dr Otabil said.