Discover Nigeria: Faith Tabernacle, An Engineering Wonder of the World

Ota, a quiet town in Southwestern Nigeria, is home to one of the world’s most amazing architectural edifices.

On January 24, 2008, Nigerians woke up to the announcement of a laudable feat. The headquarter church of Winner’s Chapel, known as the Faith Tabernacle, had been listed by the Guinness Book of World Records as the World’s Largest Church in terms of capacity. With a sitting and overflow capacity of 50,400 and 250,000 people respectively, the bright red roofed edifice sits over a sprawling 5000 acres of land at Cannanland in the Ota suburbs, about 50 miles from Nigeria’s commercial nerve centre, Lagos. A behemoth hexagonal multiplex, The Faith Tabernacle took only twelve months to build – and many of the architects and engineers who worked on the project offered their services pro bono. The Faith Tabernacle is acclaimed to have been built entirely debt-free and with only made-in-Nigeria materials. The most outstanding of the Faith Tabernacle’s features, is that its roof is suspended over the entire structure without a single pillar at its epicentre. Commisioned by President Olusegun Obasanjo on September 18, 1999, the Faith Tabernacle is deemed one of the world’s recognisable feats in the field of engineering.