•A large portion of chain messages are crafted by people who do it to get a kick out of it.

By JOYCE JERE –

“GOD is going to fix things for you tonight and let things work in your favour. If you believe in Him forward to ten people,” reads the text message.
“If you break the chain, you will have bad luck for the rest of your life,” reads yet another message. Who has never received one of those hideous “strings”?
These menacing messages try to make you feel guilty about something or threaten you to burn in flaming hell if you do not spread the message to a required number of people, share it on your wall or forward it by WhatsApp .
Chain messages started as actual letters that one received in the
mail.
Today, chain letters are sent through e-mail messages, postings on social network sites and mobile phone text messages. With the arrival of the Internet and the impact of new technologies,
the speed of propagation of the chains has increased to unprecedented levels.
What makes people to continue spreading these hoaxes?
These messages take advantage of people’s goodwill, their greed, their superstitions, and above all, the ignorance of the receiver.
They are easy bait for the uneducated, the fearful and gullible, though the educated are not an exception.
If the strings were true, some of my friends should be millionaires and I should have died at least fifty times .
While some of these messages seem harmless, they are tragically toxic, especially when they are labeled as “Christian.”
Maria Karima who works as communications manager at Zanaco says, “When they touch on matters and values which l resonate with and are important to me, such as God and religion, I must confess that l find myself compromised and l am usually inclined to pass them on!”
Rachel Nsoneka, a Lusaka resident jokingly said, “Who are they fooling with chain letters? It is nothing but spam to me. I ignore them and I have not had any bad luck”.
However, Bishop Hobby Mpundu of Rhema Embassy Church in Lusaka describes these messages as tacky and manipulative.
“Chain messages offer a very simple view of Christianity, teaching the
wrong thing about Christianity,” says Bishop Mpundu. “When you severely over-simplify Christianity to be based on our short term behavioural response, you often lose vital parts that are
absolutely necessary, such as Jesus dying on the cross for sins, salvation by faith, being born again or joining a church,” the Bishop explained.
Pastor Mathews Mukuka, resident pastor for Missions for Africa, said  that there is nothing Christian about the so-called ‘Christian’ chain messages.
“The fear tactics being used in these mails disqualify them from being Christian” Pastor Mukuka says.
According to him, the Bible in 2 Timothy 1:7 clearly states: ‘for God gave us a spirit not of fear but of power and love and self-control.”
The pastor explained that this scripture not only gives us assurance that living in fear is not part of God’s plan for our lives, but that God would never use fear or scare tactics such as these to induce obedience from us or as a condition for blessing us.
There are a few types or variations of chain messages that regularly make their way through to my phone. In fact, some have been disproven and still cycle back every year.
The basic premise of these messages is that the recipient is stimulated by guilt, fear, shame, rage, or reward, to forward the message to as many people as they can.
Common methods used in chain letters include emotionally manipulative stories, get-rich-quick pyramid schemes, and the exploitation of superstition to threaten the recipient with bad luck or death if he or she “breaks the chain” and refuses to adhere to the conditions set out in the letter.
A large portion of chain messages are crafted by people who do it to get a kick out of it.
Chain messages take two forms: firstly, they take the form of hoaxes which attempt to trick or defraud users. A hoax could be malicious, instructing users to delete a file necessary to the operating system
by claiming it is a virus.
It could also be a scam that convinces users to send money or personal information. Phishing attacks could fall into this.
Secondly, chain letters take the form of urban legends designed to be redistributed and usually warn users of a threat or claim, or to be
notifying them of important or urgent information.
Another common form the emails take is that of promising users monetary rewards for forwarding the message or suggesting that they are signing something that will be submitted to a particular group.
Urban legends usually have no negative effect aside from wasted time.
As we propagate these messages, they only trash our credibility because when you forward a message that is untrue, you lose your credibility.
The messages also deny Christ (by works of salvation). I sincerely hope that people, who forward and post all of these things, don’t actually believe they will earn their salvation,
prosperity, or other rewards merely for sending spam.
After all Christians are followers of Christ. My understanding is that in our everyday lives, we ought to strive to be like Him.
If Christ did not use scare tactics to induce obedience from his followers, in
whose footsteps are we walking? Whose agenda are we pushing? Compulsion is not of God and it is not his character to force one into
doing God’s will. The truth is these messages
are devilish ways of spreading curses and laying heavy burdens on unsuspecting Christians if not to merely defraud the general populace.
I sincerely think these messages are harmful and should be stopped.