Winners Chapel to create new record by building 100,000 capacity 20-storry church

WINNERS Chapel founder and Africa's richest pastorpruener Bishop David Oyedepo is set to launch another first with plans to construct the world largest megachurch auditorium to be known as the Ark Project with a capacity of 100,000 people.

Bishop Oyedepo, 66, is the head of Living Faith Church, popularly known as Winners Chapel and is believed to be the wealthiest of Nigeria's new breed of pastorprueners. These wealthy clergymen collect 10% of their congregations earnings in the form of tithes and with their large following have become millionaires.

Most of these pastorprueners own strings of businesses, have fleets of posh cars, own private universities and travel around in private jets, with a retinue of body guards. Bishop Oyedepo is estimated by Forbes to be worth $150m as he exerts control over churches in 45 African nations, as well as several in Dubai, the UK and the US.

Bishop Oyedepo said: “We are commencing the 100,000-capacity Ark Project very soon, which will also house a new campus for Faith Academy where the students are resuming tomorrow.  Our multi-billion project will match any campus of any university in Nigeria.”

Under plans being drawn up, the project which involves the demolition of the old Faith Academy, as well as Word of Faith Bible Institute among other facilities, will also include the transformation of the 50,000 capacity Faith Tabernacle. Up until now, Faith Tabernacle was the largest auditorium in the world but will give way to a new project that will include a 20-storey tower.

This 20-floor tower is to replace the initially planned 12-floor building which was to have been built with the initial Faith Theatre Project in 2015. Bishop Oyedepo's Living Faith Church had in the mid-90s, constructed an eight tower headquarter facility at the Raji Oba, Lagos Church known as Capernaum as well as a five-storey tower known as Garden of Faith, at Barnawa in Kaduna.