Alph Lukau and Alleluia Ministries

Who Alph Lukau Is

Alph Lukau is a pastor, author and broadcaster born in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the founder of Alleluia Ministries International, the Johannesburg church he has led since its beginning. He is usually styled a pastor and a prophet in his ministry's own material, and he preaches in both English and French, which is the practical mark of a Congolese preacher working in an English-speaking country with a large francophone congregation in front of him.

He belongs to a generation of Congolese Christian leaders who left a country damaged by war and economic collapse and rebuilt their ministries elsewhere, most often in South Africa, in France, in Belgium and in Britain. Johannesburg is one of the main destinations in that movement, and the churches founded there by Congolese pastors serve congregations who are often far from home, frequently without secure immigration status, and short of the family and parish structures they grew up inside. That is the setting in which Alleluia Ministries grew.

On biography: this page gives no birth date, ordination date or founding date for Alph Lukau, because no source that can be verified from here supplies them with confidence. Dates that circulate online are drawn from the ministry's own communications or from press summaries repeating them. The verifiable outline is the one given above: Congolese origin, ministry established and led from Johannesburg, preaching in English and French.

Why he is known outside South Africa

Two things carried his name beyond his own congregation. The first is broadcast. Alleluia Ministries streams and rebroadcasts its services, and a charismatic service in French and English travels easily across francophone Africa and the African diaspora in Europe. The second, and by far the larger, is the February 2019 video described below. For most people who have heard the name at all, that video is the whole of what they know, and it is treated here at length and in order.

Assessment of him divides sharply. Members describe a preacher who gives displaced people a place to belong, who prays over their sickness and their paperwork and their unemployment as if these were matters God cares about, and whose services are the one part of the week where they are addressed by name. Critics, including South African journalists, other pastors and Catholic clergy, describe a ministry built on staged spectacle, unverifiable claims and money raised from people who have very little of it. This page sets out what is documented, what is disputed, and which is which.

Alleluia Ministries International

Alleluia Ministries International is the independent charismatic church Alph Lukau founded and leads from Sandton, a business district in the north of Johannesburg. The church belongs to no denomination. It is governed by its own leadership under Lukau rather than by any outside synod, conference or bishop, which means that questions of doctrine, of finance and of succession are settled inside the house by the people who run it.

What a service looks like

A service at Alleluia Ministries follows a shape that would be recognisable in charismatic churches on every continent. Contemporary worship music runs long, often for the best part of an hour, with the congregation standing, singing and frequently weeping. An offering is taken and framed with teaching about giving. Lukau preaches, moving between English and French, in a delivery that is conversational and direct rather than formal. The service then turns to ministry: prayer for the sick, prayer for deliverance, and prophetic words spoken over individuals who come forward or who are called out from the congregation.

That last element is the distinctive one and it deserves a plain description, because it is where most of the church's public attention comes from. In a prophetic ministry of this kind, the preacher speaks a specific word over a named person: about a sickness, a family situation, a job, a document, a debt. Some of those words are general enough to fit almost anyone. Some are strikingly specific. The congregation experiences the specific ones as evidence that God knows them individually, and for a person who feels invisible in a foreign city, that experience is powerful and it is the thing that keeps them coming back.

The wider operation

Around the congregation sits the usual apparatus of a large independent ministry: media production, an online and broadcast presence, published material, and conferences and events. Congregants are drawn heavily from the Congolese diaspora and from other African migrant communities in Gauteng, alongside South Africans.

On size: this page gives no attendance or membership figure for Alleluia Ministries International. Numbers that circulate come from the ministry's own communications or from press reports quoting them, and no independent audit is available here. The verifiable statement is qualitative: it is a well-known Johannesburg church with a substantial congregation and a broadcast reach considerably larger than the room.

Why Johannesburg Produced a Church Like This

Johannesburg has a crowded and competitive religious landscape, and Alleluia Ministries grew inside conditions that were already in place rather than creating them. South Africa combines a large Christian majority, complete freedom of religious association, no registration requirement for founding a church, a very large internal and cross-border migrant population, and severe unemployment. Any one of those would shape a religious landscape. Together they produce thousands of independent congregations, from a room above a shop to an arena.

The diaspora congregation

A Congolese family arriving in Johannesburg has usually left a parish behind. Catholic practice in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is deep and old, and a great many Congolese migrants were baptised Catholics. On arrival they meet a Catholic parish that speaks a different language, follows a different rhythm, and takes a while to notice them, while a Congolese-led charismatic church across the road speaks Lingala or French, meets for four hours, prays over their asylum paperwork by name and gives them a role by the second month. The pull is pastoral, and Catholic parishes that have taken it seriously have retained their migrants.

That pattern repeats across the continent and is described in the wider guides to Christianity in Africa and its growth and to African initiated churches and their history. The rise of a church like Alleluia Ministries says something true about what a great many African Catholics were and were not receiving in their parishes, and a Catholic reader gains nothing by pretending otherwise.

The South African prophetic scene

South Africa in the 2010s produced a recognisable public figure: the independent prophet, usually a charismatic preacher of considerable personal magnetism, leading a large congregation, active on social media, and making claims of healing, prophecy and miracle. Several of them attracted national controversy over what happened at their services. Public attention to that scene was intense in the years before and after 2019, and the coffin video landed in the middle of it.

One case is worth naming precisely, because it is often confused with Lukau's and it is a different matter entirely. Shepherd Bushiri, a Malawian preacher who led a large congregation in South Africa, and his wife were charged in South Africa with fraud and money laundering. They denied the charges. They left South Africa for Malawi in November 2020 while on bail, and extradition proceedings followed. This page does not track the current status of that case and makes no claim about its outcome. Bushiri is a separate person with no connection to Alleluia Ministries, and nothing in his case is evidence about Alph Lukau.

The CRL Rights Commission

South Africa has a constitutional body with a direct interest in this territory: the Commission for the Promotion and Protection of the Rights of Cultural, Religious and Linguistic Communities, usually called the CRL Rights Commission. It conducted an investigative study into what it called the commercialisation of religion and abuse of people's belief systems, holding public hearings and summoning religious leaders, and published its report on that study in 2017. The report recommended a system of peer review and registration for religious practitioners, and it provoked a serious argument in South Africa about whether the state can regulate religious practice without infringing the constitutional freedom of religion.

Source: the CRL Rights Commission is a Chapter 9 institution established under the South African Constitution, and its report on the commercialisation of religion and abuse of people's belief systems was published in 2017 following public hearings. This page describes the report's existence and general thrust and does not quote it, and it makes no claim about any specific finding regarding Alph Lukau.

That debate is the frame in which South Africans received the 2019 video. For many viewers it was another instalment in an argument about whether anything at all stands between a preacher and a poor congregation.

What Alph Lukau Teaches

Alph Lukau preaches within the broad stream of independent African charismatic Christianity, and its main features can be described fairly without caricature. Members would recognise the description that follows, and it is set out before any Catholic response is offered.

The core emphases

Preaching in this tradition holds that God is active and immediately present, that the Holy Spirit works now as He worked in the Acts of the Apostles, that healing and deliverance are ordinary parts of Christian ministry rather than exceptional ones, and that a believer may expect God to intervene concretely in ordinary life. The Bible is treated as directly applicable to today, with promises in the text read as available to the hearer in the room. Prayer is loud, expectant and specific.

Deliverance holds a large place. Sickness, poverty, family breakdown and persistent failure are frequently interpreted as having a spiritual cause that must be broken by prayer. That reading of misfortune has deep roots in African Christianity and it is one reason charismatic churches grew so fast on the continent: they took seriously a spiritual world that many missionary churches had treated as embarrassing. Catholic teaching also holds that the devil is real and that spiritual combat is real, which is set out on the page about spiritual warfare and how the Church understands it. Catholic practice, though, requires that natural causes be excluded first, and it reserves formal exorcism to a priest given permission by the bishop.

Giving

Teaching about giving is prominent in most churches of this kind, including the language of sowing and harvest, of seed and increase, and of God honouring a generous gift. That language runs across the prosperity stream of charismatic preaching and is examined in full on the page about the prosperity gospel and what is wrong with it. The Catholic assessment is short and it is worth stating here rather than later: generosity is a genuine Christian duty, almsgiving is commanded, and God is never placed under obligation by a gift. A donation is not a transaction with God, and any preaching that implies it is has crossed a line that Scripture itself draws in the story of Simon in Acts 8:18-24.

Prophecy

The prophetic word spoken over an individual is central to the ministry's public identity. Catholic teaching does not deny that God gives charisms, including prophecy, and Saint Paul treats prophecy in the assembly as a real gift to be desired and also as a gift to be weighed by the community rather than accepted automatically (1 Corinthians 14:29). The difficulty is structural. Where a prophetic word is given publicly by a leader whose authority rests on it, the congregation has no practical mechanism to weigh it, and dissent from a word spoken over you in front of a thousand people is socially close to impossible.

The February 2019 Video: What It Showed

In February 2019 a video recorded at Alleluia Ministries International in Johannesburg circulated worldwide and was reported by news organisations on several continents. The footage showed a man lying in an open coffin, positioned outside the church building with a hearse and mourners present, with Alph Lukau standing over him. In the recording Lukau places his hand on the man, speaks, and the man sits up abruptly and gasps. The people around the coffin react loudly. The clip runs for a matter of seconds and it is the whole of what most of the world saw.

The video was widely reported as a claimed resurrection, and it spread with extraordinary speed. Within days it had been reposted, reaction-recorded, parodied and turned into a meme format in which people staged their own mock resurrections. That reaction is part of the story and is dealt with below.

What the footage does and does not establish

A short video of a man sitting up in a coffin establishes that a man sat up in a coffin. It does not establish that he had died, when, of what, or whether any medical or legal certification of death existed. It does not establish who arranged the scene, who paid for the hearse and coffin, or what the man himself understood was happening. Those are precisely the questions that separate a miracle from a performance, and none of them can be answered from the clip. Anyone who watched the video and concluded either that a resurrection had occurred or that a fraud had been proved was going well beyond what a few seconds of footage can carry.

Stating that plainly serves a purpose. The same discipline applies in both directions, and it is the discipline the Catholic Church applies to its own alleged miracles, described below in the section on how a claimed cure is examined.

What the Funeral Companies Said

In the days after the video circulated, South African funeral service companies made public statements disputing the account that the scene implied, and those statements are the documented core of the controversy. Reporting at the time recorded that companies whose hearse, coffin or services were connected to the event came forward publicly to say that they had not handled or certified a death in the manner the footage suggested, that they objected to their businesses being associated with the video, and that they were considering legal action over it. Their complaint was commercial and reputational: a funeral business depends on being trusted with the dead, and appearing in a viral resurrection clip is ruinous to that trust.

On specifics: this page does not name the individual funeral companies, quote their statements verbatim, or state what became of the legal action they said they were considering, because those details cannot be verified from here and a wrong company name or a wrongly reported outcome would be a serious injustice to a real business. The general fact, that funeral service companies publicly disputed the account and publicly raised the prospect of legal action, was widely reported in February and March 2019 by South African and international news organisations. A reader who needs the specifics should consult that reporting directly.

Why their statements mattered

They mattered because they came from parties with no religious stake in the argument. A rival pastor's objection to a miracle claim can always be dismissed as jealousy, and a sceptic's objection can be dismissed as unbelief. A funeral director saying that his company did not certify this death and did not consent to this use of its vehicle is making a factual claim about his own business records, and it is the kind of claim that can be tested in a court rather than in a pulpit.

They also mattered because they changed the question. Before the funeral companies spoke, the public argument was theological: can the dead be raised today. After they spoke, the argument became documentary: was this man dead, who says so, and what paperwork exists. That is the correct question, and it is the one the Church asks of its own miracle claims before it asks anything else.

What the Church Said in Response

Alleluia Ministries International responded publicly and its position, as reported at the time, had a consistent shape. The church stated that it had never claimed that Alph Lukau raised a dead man, that the man had been brought to the church premises by others in a hearse and coffin without prior arrangement by the ministry, that he was already showing signs of life when he arrived, and that what happened at the church was therefore misrepresented by the coverage. The church rejected the description of the event as a staged fraud.

That response should be reported as the church's own account and weighed as such. It is the ministry's right to give its version, and a page like this one is obliged to include it. It is also a response that does not resolve the questions the funeral companies raised, since the central disputes concern whether a death occurred, who arranged the hearse and coffin, and what the man's condition actually was, and a statement from the interested party cannot settle any of them.

Where the record stops

The honest position is that the record, as far as this page can establish it, stops at competing public statements. There were public claims, public denials, threatened civil action and a great deal of coverage. This page is aware of no criminal charge and no conviction of Alph Lukau arising from the incident, and it does not imply either. Nor does it assert that the event was proved to be staged, because a threatened lawsuit and a disputed account are not a finding of fact.

Some readers will find that unsatisfying, and the dissatisfaction is fair. A page about a living man does not get to fill the gaps with what everyone assumes. Where the record is open, it is left open and marked as open.

What Followed: Ridicule, Scrutiny and Regulation

Three things followed the video, and they are worth separating because they had very different weights.

The ridicule

The first was global mockery. The clip became a meme within days, with people staging mock resurrections and posting them, and the phrase became a shorthand joke far outside any Christian context. That reaction cost Christian witness across Africa something real. A Christian in Johannesburg, Lagos or Nairobi who had nothing to do with the event spent the following weeks being asked about it. Ridicule of this kind is not evidence of anything, and its practical effect is to make serious claims about God harder to make in public.

The scrutiny

The second was renewed press and public scrutiny of large independent churches in South Africa, of the money they raise, of the claims they make and of the absence of any body that can hold them to account. The video became a reference point in that argument, cited whenever the subject returned.

The regulation argument

The third was the continuing debate over the CRL Rights Commission's proposals for peer review and registration of religious practitioners, described above. That argument is genuinely difficult and Catholics should not assume the answer. Religious freedom is a real good and a state licensing office for preachers is a dangerous instrument that a hostile government could later turn on any church, including the Catholic Church. At the same time, the absence of any accountability structure whatsoever is exactly the condition that allows the worst abuses, and the Catholic answer to that has always been the internal structure of the Church itself rather than state licensing: a bishop over a priest, a metropolitan and a Roman dicastery over a bishop, canon law, obligatory financial councils in parishes and dioceses, and a body of doctrine that no individual preacher may alter. That structure has failed badly at times, as the page on Church scandals and how they happened sets out without excuse. A structure that fails is still a structure, and it can be reformed. A ministry accountable to nobody has nothing to reform.

What This Page Does Not Claim

The record around Alph Lukau is open in several places, and this page states its limits directly rather than letting a reader infer more than the evidence carries.

• This page does not claim that Alph Lukau has been charged with or convicted of any crime. No such charge or conviction is known here.
• This page does not claim that the February 2019 event has been proved in any court or by any investigating body to have been staged.
• This page does not claim that a man was raised from the dead at Alleluia Ministries International. No verified medical or documentary evidence of a death and a subsequent restoration to life has been published so far as this page can establish.
• This page does not name the man in the coffin, the funeral companies, or any private individual involved, because their names cannot be verified from here and misnaming them would be a real injury.
• This page does not state the outcome of the legal action that funeral companies said they were considering, because that outcome cannot be verified from here.
• This page does not track events after mid-2026 and takes no position on anything that may have happened since.
• This page passes no judgement on the state of any person's soul, including Alph Lukau's. That judgement belongs to God alone.

A reader who needs the current legal or factual position should consult South African court records and recent mainstream reporting directly. A thinner correct account is worth more than a confident wrong one about a living man.

Raising the Dead in Scripture

Scripture records the dead being raised, and a Catholic reader should know these accounts well enough that no viral video can either impress or unsettle them. There are few of them, they are told with unusual specificity, and each one is doing theological work.

The Old Testament raisings

Elijah is sent to a widow at Zarephath whose son dies, and after the prophet stretches himself over the child and cries out to the Lord, the boy revives (1 Kings 17:17-24). Elisha, Elijah's successor, is called to the Shunammite woman whose son has died, and the child is restored (2 Kings 4:32-37). A third account is stranger and shorter: a dead man thrown hastily into Elisha's grave touches the prophet's bones and comes to life (2 Kings 13:20-21). In each case the point being made concerns the prophet's standing before God and God's power over death, and in each case the narrative is careful about who was present.

The raisings by Jesus

The Gospels record three. Jesus meets a funeral procession leaving the town of Nain, carrying the only son of a widow, touches the bier and tells the young man to arise (Luke 7:11-17). He is called to the house of Jairus, a synagogue ruler whose daughter has just died, puts out the mourners, takes her hand and tells her to get up (Mark 5:35-43). And at Bethany He raises Lazarus, who has been in the tomb four days, a detail the evangelist supplies precisely because it excludes any suggestion that the man had merely fainted (John 11:1-44).

Note what the Gospel writers do with detail. They name the town. They name Jairus. They record the number of days. They record who was in the room and who was put outside. They record that the crowd at Bethany went and told the authorities, and that the authorities responded by plotting against both Jesus and Lazarus (John 11:45-53, 12:9-11). The narrative invites checking. It supplies names and places to people who could still go and ask.

The apostolic raisings

Peter is called to Joppa where a disciple named Tabitha has died, and after he sends the mourners out and prays, she is restored and presented alive to the widows she had clothed (Acts 9:36-42). Paul preaches late at Troas, a young man named Eutychus falls from a third-storey window and is taken up dead, and Paul goes down, embraces him, and the boy is brought back alive (Acts 20:9-12). Again the accounts are specific to the point of awkwardness, including the detail that Paul had been preaching too long.

Two conclusions follow for the present question. The first is that Catholic faith has no difficulty at all with the proposition that God can raise the dead, and a Catholic who reacted to the 2019 video by saying such things do not happen would be contradicting the Bible. The second is that everything Scripture models about how such an event is reported (names, places, times, witnesses, hostile parties who could have checked and did) is exactly what was missing in February 2019.

Why the Resurrection of Christ Is Different

The resurrection of Jesus Christ stands apart in kind from every raising described above, and the distinction is basic Catholic doctrine rather than a fine point. Lazarus was restored to the life he had been living, and he died again. The widow's son at Nain died again. Tabitha died again. Every person raised in Scripture was returned to mortal life and later left it in the ordinary way.

Christ rose to a life that death has no further claim on. Saint Paul states it directly: Christ being raised from the dead dies no more, and death no longer has dominion over Him (Romans 6:9). The Catechism makes the same distinction, teaching that Christ's resurrection was not a return to earthly life like the raisings He Himself performed, and that His risen body is the same body, glorified, living now in the condition of the age to come (CCC 646). His resurrection is the beginning of a new creation and the pledge of the resurrection of the body promised to all the faithful, which is set out on the page about the resurrection of the body and what Catholics believe about it.

That distinction matters directly for how a Christian evaluates a claimed resurrection today. A restoration to ordinary life, if it happened, would be a mercy to one family and a sign of God's power. It would not be a new gospel, it would not establish the standing of the man who prayed over it, and it would leave every doctrine of the faith exactly where it was. Christian faith rests on the resurrection of Christ, attested by witnesses who were killed rather than retract it, and it does not rest on any subsequent wonder. Paul stakes everything on that one event and on nothing else: if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is empty and so is your faith (1 Corinthians 15:14).

How the Catholic Church Tests a Miracle

The Catholic Church affirms miracles and subjects every particular claim of one to an examination designed to fail it. That combination confuses people who expect a religious body to be credulous, and it is the single most useful thing a Catholic can bring to a conversation about a video like the one from Johannesburg.

The standing principle

The Church teaches that the miracles of Christ and the saints are signs that confirm the truth of the faith, and that they are motives of credibility which show that assent to faith is not a blind impulse of the mind (CCC 156). Miracles are treated as evidence, and evidence has to be examined before it counts.

Lourdes as the working model

At Lourdes the Church built the machinery for this and has run it since the nineteenth century. A person claiming a cure reports it to the Bureau des Constatations Médicales, the medical bureau at the shrine, where the file is opened and medical records from before and after are gathered. Doctors of any faith or none may take part in the examination. Cases that survive that stage go to the Lourdes International Medical Committee, which asks whether the cure is complete, lasting and without medical explanation in the present state of knowledge. Only if that committee finds no natural explanation does the file return to the bishop of the person's own diocese, who alone may declare the cure miraculous.

Source: the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes publishes the list of cures recognised as miraculous following this process, and the number stands at around seventy since the apparitions of 1858, out of many thousands of cures reported to the medical bureau over the same period. The ratio is the point, and the shrine states it openly. For the shrine itself, see the guide to visiting Lourdes and what happens there.

Canonisation

The same severity governs the making of saints. A cause for canonisation ordinarily requires a verified miracle for beatification and a second for canonisation, and each claimed miracle is examined by a medical board and a theological commission under the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints before it is submitted to the Pope. Files fail at this stage routinely, and a failed miracle does not impugn the holiness of the candidate. The process is described further on the page about how the Church recognises and canonises saints.

What that standard means for a coffin video

Apply the Lourdes method to February 2019 and the outcome is a list of missing documents. A death certificate or its absence. The name of the doctor or officer who pronounced death and when. The medical history preceding it. The contemporaneous record of the funeral company that received the body. An examination of the man afterwards by physicians with no connection to the church. Independent witnesses who were not part of the congregation. Not one of those is available, and until they are, the Church's own procedure would not permit the word miracle to be used at all. That is the standard the Church applies to its own shrines, its own saints and its own apparitions, and applying it here is consistency rather than hostility.

How Scripture Tells You to Test a Prophet

Scripture assumes that false prophets exist inside the community of faith and gives the ordinary believer tests to apply. The full framework, with its historical examples and its list of manipulation tactics, is set out in the guide to false prophets and the tests Scripture gives. What follows applies four of those tests to the specific questions a reader brings to Alleluia Ministries and to the 2019 video.

Does what he says come true

Deuteronomy 18:21-22 gives the blunt test: when a prophet speaks in the name of the Lord and the thing does not happen, the Lord has not spoken it. A prophetic ministry that produces a stream of specific public predictions is inviting this test, and the honest way to apply it is to write down what was said, with the date, and check later. The dishonest way is to remember the hits and forget the rest, which is what an unaided memory does automatically.

What is the fruit

Jesus warns of those who come in sheep's clothing and are inwardly ravenous wolves, and gives the test of fruit: you will know them by their fruits (Matthew 7:15-20). Fruit here means the visible effect on lives, on the poor, on the truthfulness and freedom of the people under a ministry, over years. The imagery is developed on the page about wolves in sheep's clothing and what Jesus meant.

Is the doctrine sound

Saint John instructs the churches to test the spirits, since many false prophets have gone out into the world (1 John 4:1), and Saint Paul warns that even an angel from heaven preaching another gospel is to be rejected (Galatians 1:8). Doctrine is testable in a way that charisma is not, and a Catholic has the Creed, the Catechism and two thousand years of conciliar teaching to test against.

Do signs settle it

No, and Scripture says so with unusual force. Jesus warns that false christs and false prophets will arise and perform great signs and wonders, enough to lead astray, if possible, even the elect (Matthew 24:24). Saint Paul writes of a coming with power and pretended signs and wonders (2 Thessalonians 2:9). Pharaoh's magicians reproduced the first of Moses' signs (Exodus 7:11-12). A wonder is therefore never self-authenticating. It has to be judged by the doctrine and the life of the one who works it, and never the other way round. That principle alone disposes of most of what the internet does with clips like the one from Johannesburg.

Where does the money go

Saint Paul deliberately worked with his hands so that no one could say he preached for gain (1 Thessalonians 2:5-9, Acts 20:33-35), and Saint Peter warns against shepherds who tend the flock for shameful gain (1 Peter 5:2). Financial transparency is a scriptural expectation rather than a modern audit culture imposed on the Church. Any ministry, Catholic or independent, that will not say what it received and what it spent has failed a test the New Testament sets.

Signs, Faith and the Danger of Spectacle

The Gospels record a persistent tension between Jesus and crowds who wanted a spectacle, and it explains a great deal about why the Church is so slow to endorse one.

Jesus refuses to give a sign to those who demand one, telling them that an evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign and none will be given except the sign of Jonah (Matthew 12:38-40). He answers the royal official whose son lay ill at Capernaum with the line that unless you see signs and wonders you will not believe (John 4:48). He tells the crowd after the feeding of the five thousand that they seek Him because they ate their fill of the loaves, and He then preaches the discourse that empties the room (John 6:26, 6:66). At the end of Luke 16, Abraham tells the rich man that if his brothers do not hear Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced if someone should rise from the dead. That last line is worth sitting with for anyone weighing a resurrection video: the parable puts the point that a resurrection would not convert a hardened heart.

Then Christ does rise, and the apostles preach that resurrection as the foundation of everything. The Church has never been embarrassed by the miraculous. What it refuses is the substitution of spectacle for conversion, of excitement for the sacraments, and of a preacher's power for the ordinary means of grace that are available on a wet Tuesday in every parish in the world. The Eucharist, described on the page about the Eucharist and the Real Presence, is a greater thing than any wonder performed on a stage, and it is on offer to anyone, without a crowd, without a camera, and without a fee.

A note on caution about superstition: the Catechism treats superstition as a deviation of religious feeling, including attributing a magical importance to certain practices, and warns against attributing efficacy to the external performance of prayers apart from the interior disposition they require (CCC 2111). Both the promise of a guaranteed wonder and the practice of paying for one fall under that warning.

The Catholic Response, Point by Point

The Catholic response to a ministry like this can be stated in a few clear positions, each of which grants what should be granted before it says what it has to say.

On the reality of miracles

Granted, fully. God heals, God has raised the dead through His prophets and apostles, and the age of miracles has not closed. Any Catholic who suggests otherwise has left Catholic teaching. The Church maintains a permanent apparatus for examining claimed miracles precisely because it expects some of them to be real, which is set out on the page about what a miracle is and how the Church tests one.

On the burden of proof

The heavier the claim, the heavier the evidence required. A claim to have raised a dead man is the heaviest claim available, and it requires documented death, documented restoration, and independent examination by people with nothing to gain. A video is not evidence of any of those things, whatever it shows.

On the pastoral risk

The risk in a ministry built on wonders is borne by the sick and the poor, never by the platform. A person who believes a chronic condition has been cured may stop taking medication. A person who is not healed may conclude that the fault was their own faith, and that conclusion can do more damage than the illness. A person who gives money they needed for rent in expectation of a return has been harmed whatever the preacher intended. Catholic teaching on the anointing of the sick and on prayer for healing is careful for exactly these reasons, and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith addressed them directly in its Instruction on Prayers for Healing, published in September 2000, which permits prayer for healing while forbidding anything resembling staging, hysteria or the promise of a guaranteed cure.

On accountability

A church accountable to no external authority has no mechanism to correct its leader. That is a structural fact rather than an accusation, and it applies to every independent ministry regardless of the character of the man in charge. Catholic structure exists to answer that problem and has itself failed at times, badly. The difference is that a failed structure can be reformed, and the absence of one cannot.

On the people in the pews

The congregation at a church like Alleluia Ministries is largely made up of people who are far from home, who work hard, who love God and who found somewhere that welcomed them. Contempt for them is both unjust and useless. If Catholic parishes in Johannesburg, London or Brussels had met arriving Congolese and Nigerian and Zimbabwean families with the attention those families were given elsewhere, this page would have less to describe.

If You Attend Alleluia Ministries, or Have Left

Practical counsel, offered without contempt for anyone's church.

If you attend and you are unsettled

Ask concrete questions and notice how they are received. The full checklist of high-control markers belongs to the comparison of cults and Christianity, and the questions below are the short version worth asking in any charismatic congregation. Where does the money go, and is there a published account. Can you disagree with the leadership about anything, and what happens to people who do. Are you free to stop attending without losing your friends. Is the preaching taking you to Scripture, or to the preacher. A healthy church can survive those questions calmly. A church that punishes them has answered them.

If you are a Catholic who drifted

The way back is short and it is not humiliating. Go to confession, which exists for exactly this and is explained on the page about confession and how to make a good one. If you have not been to Mass in years, the guide to what happens at Mass and why will get you through the door without embarrassment. Nobody at the desk is keeping a record of how long you were away.

If you want the charismatic dimension and Catholic faith together

Both exist inside the Church. The Catholic Charismatic Renewal has been recognised by successive popes and prays for healing, prophecy and the gifts of the Spirit within Catholic doctrine and under the authority of bishops. The page on the Catholic Charismatic Renewal and its place in the Church sets out what it is and where to find it. Wanting the Holy Spirit to act now is a Catholic instinct.

If someone you love attends

Argument rarely moves anyone, and contempt for their church will end the conversation on the spot. Ask what they found there and take the answer seriously, because they usually found something real. Offer the depth of Catholic tradition as an addition rather than as a correction, and be patient over years. The guide to why people leave the Church is written for exactly this situation.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Alph Lukau?

Alph Lukau is a Congolese-born pastor who founded and leads Alleluia Ministries International, a charismatic church based in Sandton, Johannesburg, South Africa. He preaches in English and French to a congregation drawn heavily from the Congolese and wider African diaspora in South Africa, and his services are streamed and rebroadcast online. He is usually described in his own ministry's material as a pastor and a prophet, and he became known worldwide in February 2019 after a video from his church appeared to show him raising a man from the dead.

What is Alleluia Ministries International?

Alleluia Ministries International is the independent charismatic church Alph Lukau founded and leads from Sandton in Johannesburg. It belongs to no denomination and is governed by its own leadership under Lukau rather than by any outside synod or bishop. Its worship follows a familiar charismatic pattern of extended contemporary music, long preaching, prayer for healing and deliverance, and prophetic words spoken over individuals. The ministry runs a broadcast and online operation alongside the congregation that meets in Johannesburg.

What happened in the February 2019 resurrection video?

In February 2019 a video recorded at Alleluia Ministries International circulated worldwide showing a man lying in an open coffin outside the church, with Alph Lukau standing over him, and the man then sitting up and gasping while the crowd reacted. The footage was widely reported as a claimed resurrection and it spread across social media within days. Funeral service companies then made public statements disputing the account given at the church, and Alleluia Ministries issued its own statement saying that the church had never claimed to have raised a dead man in the way the coverage suggested.

What did the funeral companies say about the video?

Several South African funeral service companies publicly stated in the days after the video that their vehicles, coffin or services had been used in connection with the event and that they had not certified or handled a death in the way the scene implied, and they said publicly that they were considering legal action over the use of their names and equipment. Reporting at the time recorded those statements and the companies' anger at being associated with the footage. No criminal conviction of Alph Lukau arising from the incident is known to this page.

Has Alph Lukau been convicted of a crime?

No conviction of Alph Lukau is known to this page. The February 2019 video produced public disputes, funeral company statements, threatened civil action and calls for investigation, and none of that is the same thing as a criminal charge or a verdict. Where an allegation cannot be tied to a named source and a stated outcome, this page does not repeat it, because stating an unresolved accusation as fact would be unjust to a living man. A reader who wants the current legal position should consult recent South African court and news records directly.

Does the Catholic Church believe people can be raised from the dead?

Yes. Scripture records the dead being raised by Elijah, Elisha, Jesus and the apostles, and the Catholic Church has never taught that God stopped being able to do such things. The Church also holds that a claim of this kind carries the heaviest burden of proof any religious claim can carry, and that it must be tested with medical and documentary evidence by people who have no interest in the outcome. Christ's own resurrection stands apart from every raising in Scripture, because Lazarus and the others returned to a life that would end again, while Christ rose never to die again.

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