Any pastor arrested for violating govt directives on his own - Nigeria's PFN Chairman

Chairman of the Pentecostal Fellowship of Nigeria, PFN, in Cross River State says any Pastor arrested for violating the COVID-19 lockdown order on churches should not involve the association.

He said PFN is a law-abiding organisation and would not engage in anything whatsoever to disobey or disregard government directives.

Pastor Ekwok who spoke with Vanguard in Calabar on telephone stated that he is not aware of the alleged arrests of some pastors in the state by security personnel monitoring the government directives that churches should not hold services.

“As a body, we have a platform where we circulate information concerning government directives as far as COVID-19 is concerned we received this information and put it there for everyone and we encouraged our people to obey government directives.”

According to him, “so any pastor who has gone against government directives will as well answer for himself. As PFN does not have anything to say outside of what Christian Association of Nigeria CAN has said”.

He said, “we are in the block under CAN which is the umbrella body for all Christians and once a decision is taken we are bound by that decision whether it is good for us or not so long as it is CAN’s decision we obey it.”

In our own church, “Christ For the World” for instance, we don’t meet. We only meet in our houses for fellowship and not in the church since the government says five people and we cannot have a church service with only five people."

He, however, said he has not been officially informed of the arrest of any pastor for disobeying government directives on COVID19 in the state “What I can only tell you is that we have been encouraging our people to obey what the government says and what CAN says.