Mensa Otabil's Latest Warning: Not Everyone in Church Is Planted by God

"Not everybody in the church is planted by God. Some are planted by God. Some belong to God, and some don't, although they look like they belong to God." The words landed like a stone in still water at ICGC Christ Temple East in Teshie, Accra, on Sunday, October 18, 2026. Pastor Mensa Otabil was not preaching to outsiders. He was preaching to the congregation itself.

The message was the third installment of his "Parables of the Kingdom" series, titled "Who Planted It?" Taking Matthew 13:24-30 and 36-39 — Jesus' parable of the wheat and the tares — Otabil challenged Christians to look past religious appearances, spiritual gifts, and material success when deciding who genuinely represents God.

It was the kind of sermon that makes regular churchgoers shift in their seats. Not because it attacked them, but because it asked them to examine something most prefer to assume: that presence equals belonging.

The Parable: Wheat and Tares

Jesus' parable is deceptively simple. A farmer sows good seed in his field; at night, an enemy sows weeds — tares — among the wheat. When both sprout, the servants want to pull the weeds immediately. The farmer refuses: wait until harvest, lest you uproot the wheat with the tares.

Otabil explained that Jesus identified the good seed as the children of the kingdom and the tares as the children of the wicked one. The critical insight, he said, is that wheat and tares look nearly identical in their early stages. Their difference only becomes visible through what they produce.

That is the mirror he held up to the church. Attendance cannot establish spiritual identity. Neither can titles, robes, or eloquence. The question is not "Do they look like they belong?" but "What are they producing?" — a standard that applies to pastors and pew-sitters alike.

Why This Message, Why Now

The sermon's timing is hard to miss. In the same week, headlines carried the story of a South African pastor naming yet another Rapture date after two failed predictions — and of a Nollywood star claiming a famous ordination. The contrast between Otabil's wheat-and-tares standard and those stories is stark.

Otabil did not name names. He did not need to. His point was structural, not personal: the Church has always contained both wheat and tares, and the healthy response is not witch-hunts but discernment. Pull too eagerly at the weeds, Jesus warned, and you damage the wheat.

That restraint is what separates this sermon from mere alarmism. It is a call to wisdom, not suspicion — to judge by fruit while leaving final judgment to the harvest. Believers watching persecution cases in Pakistan know what real fruit looks like: faithfulness under fire, not platform under lights.

The Test Is Fruit, Not Form

The sermon's deepest challenge was aimed at self-examination. Otabil pressed his listeners to ask not "Who among us is false?" but "What am I producing?" The parable's harvest, after all, separates individuals — not groups, not denominations, not national churches.

That inward turn is consistent with Otabil's long teaching ministry. As founder and General Overseer of the International Central Gospel Church, he has spent decades urging African Christianity toward substance over spectacle. The ICGC's influence stretches well beyond Ghana, and this sermon will likely circulate through its network for weeks.

It also lands in a season when the global Church is asking hard questions about leadership. From celebrity ordination claims to failed prophecies, believers are learning — sometimes painfully — that charisma is not character. The persicution the Church faces in places like northern Nigeria has a way of clarifying that distinction fast.

What Discernment Actually Looks Like

So how does an ordinary believer apply the wheat-and-tares test? Otabil's framework, drawn from Jesus' own explanation, suggests three practical questions. First: does this person's life produce the fruit of the Spirit — love, joy, peace, patience — or just the appearance of it? Second: does their teaching point people to Christ, or to themselves? Third: does their influence make others more faithful, or more dependent?

Those questions cut both directions. They expose false teachers, yes — but they also expose comfortable consumers who attend, applaud, and produce nothing. The tares are not only the wolves. Sometimes they are simply the fruitless, occupying soil where wheat could grow.

The good news of the parable is that the Farmer is not anxious. He knows the field. He knows the harvest. The Church's job is not to purify the field by force but to grow as wheat — deeply rooted, visibly fruitful, patient until the end. That is the kind of faith the young people returning to churches in Britain say they are looking for: not performance, but reality.

Otabil closed, as he often does, without theatrics — just the Word, laid plain. The congregation that filed out of Christ Temple East on Sunday carried a question that will follow them all week. Not "who are the tares?" but something harder: "What am I growing?"

And that question, honestly faced, might be the beginning of the very revival the rest of the christain world is praying for.

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But the most surprising part of this story is yet to come — keep reading.