Members of Christ Embassy paid N1000 to participate in New Year crossover service?

Pastor Chris Oyakhilome of Christ Embassy is reportedly made his church members pay N1,000 each as gate fee to attend the Church's New Year Crossover service which held at their Ikeja church HQ on Dec. 31st, 2014. Those who could afford to buy the gate pass were allowed in, the ones who couldn't were are mad to be denied access into the church.

Previous year, the church made excuse on church capacity as a way to cut aid  numbers of people for the annual service, because the venue couldn't handle the multitude that showed up, many or whom were not even members of the church. So, this was their own way of controlling the crowd.

So the HQ sitting capacity is about 20k, and let's say half of the crowd paid N1k each, that would be about N10m for the church from just gate fee. Some say it's extortion, that no church should ever ask for money for members to attend, some say they understand why the church would insist on this. What do you think? Is crowd control a reasonable excuse to collect gate fee at a church