Nigerian Pentecostal Crusade Poster & Billboard

• Make the man of God the picture: cut out the founder or host pastor in a suit or clerical collar, often with a microphone or with his wife at his shoulder, set him large to one side of the board, and label him with his honorifics and role ('Prophet (Dr.)', 'Baba', 'Host').
• Turn the programme into a brand: give it a name ('Solution Night', 'Fire Convention', 'Power Packed Revival'), a theme with its Bible verse, and set the number of days as a giant bevelled numeral ('7 Days Mighty Crusade', '2 Weeks').
• Rank the guests below the host: line up smaller cut-outs or thumbnails of invited ministers, gospel singers or comedians in a row, each captioned with name and title, so that the crowd of names adds power without competing with the pastor.
• Stack the practical facts in coloured bars, circles and starburst badges: date, time ('10pm till dawn', '4pm daily'), venue, phone numbers, '@' for 'at', and the logos of social-media platforms.
• Light it like a revival: a dark, fiery or sunset ground, or a white field cut by red and fiery bands, crowds of worshippers with raised hands, light rays and glows, and the key words in glossy, outlined 3D letters in red-to-yellow fire gradients.
• Lay it out on a computer and print it big for the traffic: billboards at junctions, banners across roads and on walls, and posters on poles, bridges and walls where crowds pass.

The cities and highways of southern Nigeria, where Pentecostal and other independent churches advertise crusades, revivals, conventions, retreats and night services along the roads: Lagos, and towns such as Ibadan, Osogbo and Ilesha in the south-west and Ilorin in Kwara State. Asonzeh Ukah named the practice 'roadside Pentecostalism' (2008), signage shown 'on urban roads, streets, and driveways' as billboards, as posters on pedestrian bridges, utility poles and walls, and as banners that straddle roads. Grace Agbede analysed 13 such billboards and posters from south-western Nigeria and Ilorin (those that carry dates announce programmes of 2015–2018) in a doctoral thesis at the Durban University of Technology (2019), and discussed five of them with Rodwell Makombe and Gift Mheta in Alternation (2023), which gives the size of the study as 15. The start year is approximate: writing in 2008, Ukah dated the transformation of Nigeria's cities into 'sacred galleries' to the preceding decade, and the photograph of the pastor's wife, unknown in the 1970s and 1980s, to the preceding two decades

1. Grace Temiloluwa Agbede, R. Makombe and G. Mheta, 'Prophet-centrism in Church Advertising: A Visual Cultural Reading of Nigerian Church Adverts', Alternation Special Edition 41 (2023): 54–69, https://doi.org/10.29086/2519-5476/2023/sp41a04 (PDF: https://alternation.ukzn.ac.za/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/04-Agbede-min.pdf)
2. Grace Temiloluwa Agbede, 'Analysing visual culture in selected Pentecostal church advertisements in Nigeria: a case study', DTech (Language Practice) thesis, Durban University of Technology, 2019, https://hdl.handle.net/10321/3479
3. Ebenezer Obadare, 'On the theologico-theatrical: popular culture and the economic imperative in Nigerian Pentecostalism', Africa 92(1), 2022, 93–111, https://doi.org/10.1017/S000197202100084X
4. Asonzeh F. K. Ukah, 'Roadside Pentecostalism: Religious Advertising in Nigeria and the Marketing of Charisma', Critical Interventions 2(1–2), 2008, 125–141, https://doi.org/10.1080/19301944.2008.10781334 (quoted in Agbede 2019; cited in Agbede, Makombe & Mheta 2023 and Obadare 2022)

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