London to get GBP 35 million mega-church

A Nigerian television evangelist whose church has drawn the intervention of the Charity Commission is planning Britain’s biggest religious building, writes Robert Booth.

Pastor Matthew Ashimolowo has commissioned architects to design Britain’s first US-style “mega-church” with an amphitheatre and television studio. The 8,000-seat capacity of the £35m building, on a disused industrial site in Rainham, east London, will dwarf Liverpool Cathedral, the country’s largest Anglican church, which can seat 3,000.

It is modelled on arena-style evangelical churches spreading across the American Bible Belt, which have a capacity for up to 18,000 worshippers.

The building is partly funded by an estimated £13.5m windfall from taxpayers to compensate the church for having to make way from its present site, an East London factory, for the 2012 Olympics. The London Development Agency says it bought the site at the market price.

Ashimolowo’s Kingsway International Christian Centre (KICC) teaches a controversial “health and wealth” version of Christianity. It tells its followers, largely of African origin and living in deprived areas, that God wants people to be rich and healthy.

In 2002 the charity which operated the KICC was found to have made payments of almost £1m “in breach of trust” to companies owned by Ashimolowo. The Charity Commission found “serious misconduct” and seized control after the church spent £120,000 celebrating Ashimolowo’s birthday, including the gift of an £80,000 car.

It found Ashimolowo had used the church’s Visa card to buy a £13,000 timeshare apartment in Florida and enjoyed free accommodation for him and his family, and that payments were made directly from congregational collections before they were banked.

After the inquiry, Ashimolowo was ordered to repay £200,000. A new charity with fresh trustees has since been established.

Ashimolowo has shared a platform with Creflo Dollar, an American preacher known as “dollar by name, dollar by nature” for his “school of prosperity” which teaches “why God wants you rich”.

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