David Oyedepo, Forbes's Pick for the World's Richest Pastor

Forbes named Nigerian bishop David Oyedepo the world’s richest pastor, estimating his net worth at $150 million, a ranking that placed him ahead of several other prominent Nigerian church leaders who also appeared among the world’s wealthiest clergy. Oyedepo founded Living Faith Church Worldwide, widely known by its popular name, Winners Chapel, a Pentecostal ministry that has grown from its founding in Nigeria into an international network with congregations across more than 40 African countries and additional branches in the United Kingdom, the United States and the United Arab Emirates.

The physical scale of Oyedepo’s ministry underpins much of the coverage of his wealth: the church’s Faith Tabernacle auditorium in Ota, Ogun State, seats roughly 50,000 worshippers, making it one of the largest single-auditorium churches anywhere in the world and a physical embodiment of the scale his ministry reached over several decades of growth from its founding in the early 1980s. Oyedepo’s business holdings extend well beyond the pulpit: he owns and operates Covenant University and Landmark University, two private Nigerian universities that generate substantial tuition revenue and stand among his most significant assets outside the church structure itself, alongside additional interests in publishing, media broadcasting and real estate.

Oyedepo is far from alone in Nigeria’s cluster of extremely wealthy church founders. Reporting on the country’s richest pastors has regularly listed several other Nigerian ministry leaders, including Chris Oyakhilome and T.B. Joshua, among the world’s wealthiest clergy alongside Oyedepo, a pattern that reflects the scale Pentecostal megachurches have reached in Nigeria specifically, where prosperity-gospel theology, emphasizing that faith and giving are directly rewarded with material wealth, has taken particularly deep institutional root compared with much of the rest of the Christian world.

That prosperity-gospel model has drawn sustained criticism from observers who argue it functions to transfer wealth from often economically struggling congregants to church leadership, criticism Oyedepo and similar Nigerian megachurch founders have faced repeatedly without it slowing their ministries’ financial growth or public followings. Whatever the merits of that critique, Oyedepo’s position atop Forbes’s informal ranking of the world’s wealthiest pastors reflects a genuinely distinct scale of institutional and personal wealth built through religious leadership, one with few direct parallels outside Nigeria’s own particular megachurch landscape.