'We can't find a place large enough'

Pastor Enoch Adeboye, General Overseer of the Redeemed Christian Church of God, probably now the biggest Christian grouping in London, talked to EN.

EN: Could you tell us how the Lord began the Redeemed Christian Church of God in your country.

Pastor Adeboye: The father of the church had an encounter with God. He was born an idol worshipper, he was a worshipper of the god of iron. So one day a prophet of God spoke to him and told him that he was an appointed of God and God was going to use him for his glory. He was so angry that he warned the fellow, you repeat that and I will cut off your head. But then one day he had a dream and the Lord appeared to him and gave him strict instructions as to what will happen concerning the church that was to start. Briefly, that is how it happened.

EN: How has your church spread throughout the world and in which countries do you have congregations?

Pastor Adeboye: One of the things that God told the founder was that if the founder would do such and such, God would make sure that: (1) the church started through him would spread throughout the world; (2) the Lord would meet the church on his return. The old man kept his own part of the covenant, and now he is dead, and so the Lord is merely fulfilling his own part of the covenant. The spread of the church, which is in over 90 nations of the world now, cannot be explained by human reasoning because, by the time I took over as the General Overseer in 1981, we had only one headquarters, 39 branches. Today, by the grace of God, in Nigeria alone we have very close to 10,000 churches and we are in all of Africa, maybe with the exception of just one country or two. We are in Britain, Europe, America, India, Pakistan, Thailand, Australia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Haiti, Dubai, Kuwait, China. We are practically in every strategic nation of the world.

Big church

EN: How large is the Redeemed Christian Church of God in Britain and could you tell us something about its organisation?

Pastor Adeboye: In Britain, at least at the last count, we had already exceeded 250 branches and our structure here is to have area pastors, people who oversee about five parishes. They would have what we call the zone pastors, who oversee the area pastors, and then we have the committee of three, that we call the Executive Council, that oversees everybody else, and, of course, I come over once in a while to oversee the Executive Council.

Church unity in Britain

EN: How should churches in Britain from different ethnic backgrounds relate to each other?

Pastor Adeboye: I think the church is the body of Christ and we should be one. While recognising, of course, the fact that, even in the olden days when the children of Israel were going to the promised land, the Lord told them to come tribe by tribe, but when it’s time to worship him they all come together as well, so even though denominations might differ — it might not even be scriptural to expect that all denominations might merge one day and become one — whenever it comes to the worship of God, we should forget anything that is dividing us and think only about those things that unite us: Christ, his death and resurrection, the Holy Spirit, our hope of the second coming of the Lord, and our journey to heaven, all those things that we all hold in common to bring us together in the worship of the Almighty.

EN: In Evangelical Alliance’s Idea magazine, Jimmy Carter, a US president, said we shouldn’t divide over homosexuality or abortion. What do you think?

Pastor Adeboye: We must be solidly biblical in our thinking. As far as the Word of God is concerned, it is forever settled, it does not change with times, it does not change with culture, it doesn’t change with human philosophy. You don’t have to want to be popular. The Word of God is the Word of God. The Word of God is very clear on the issue of sin, men lying with men, women lying with women, killing, murder in any form, whether the fellow you are killing is already born or still in the womb. The Word of God is clear, and we stand by that clearly written Word of God, period.

Festival of Life

EN: Can you tell us something about the Festival of Life (which had 30,000 attendees in the Exel centre last year) and its history. Is it as big in Nigeria?

Pastor Adeboye: Oh, it’s much, much bigger in Nigeria. I mean [laughs] the crowd here will probably be about the number of pastors in Nigeria. The crowd itself is probably about a couple of million. The Festival of Life is the London version of what we call the Holy Ghost service in Nigeria (which began 20 years ago). The Festival of Life started here ten years ago. I remember that first meeting just about 2,000 people gathered together to pray all night, and it was considered a phenomenon at that time to have 2,000 people praying from 7.00 pm to 6.00 am. But by the grace of God it has grown steadily and definitely we are expecting more than 50,000 people to turn up at the next meeting.

EN: What are the prayer requests for your ministry and the future?

Pastor Adeboye: Our greatest headache right now is accommodation, a place large enough to hold the ever-increasing crowd coming to the Festival of Life. We have secured a piece of property, but it is going to take quite a lot of money to develop it. We would love to see an auditorium built that could seat at least a 100,000 people.

EN: Bigger than the mosque being planned in Stratford?

Pastor Adeboye: Several times bigger. In fact, the 100,000-seater auditorium I believe, by the special grace of God, will be full before it is finished. But, at least we need to start somewhere, because when we built the first auditorium in Nigeria for the Holy Ghost service it seated about 50,000 people, but now we are constructing one that is a mile in length and half a mile in width; and that one, I’m still sure, is not the ultimate yet — because we keep growing. You see whatever is of God keeps on expanding. So our major prayer request is that the Almighty God will send help to us so that we can build a place where people can come freely and worship God.

Revival

EN: What do you think God’s message is for the churches of Christ in the UK?

Pastor Adeboye: I believe the Almighty God is saying there is revival at the door, that a great revival is coming, that one day not too long from now the streets of London will be practically empty on Sunday morning because people have gone to church to worship the Almighty God. I believe that the glory that was lost will be restored. And I believe it to be very soon. I believe that all the prayers that these thousands are sending to the Almighty God saying, ‘Revive our soul, Lord! Revive our soul, Lord!’ will receive an answer sooner than we expected.

Persecution in Nigeria

EN: We hear many saying that, though Nigeria is a Christian nation, there is heavy persecution in the north and Islam is taking over — what is your perspective?

Pastor Adeboye: The reason there is persecution is because Islam is threatened, because they have realised that, at long last, the Christians are becoming the majority, and they don’t want the world to know. And I give you an example to buttress that: anytime there was a census in our nation in the past, one of the major items was religion. But in the last census the Muslims saw to it that religion was removed, because they know if they put religion there it will become glaringly obvious that the Christians now are in the big majority and they don’t want the world to know that.

And the reason they are persecuting is because in the past there were very few churches in the north, and most of them were the mainline churches, you know the mainstream churches, the Anglican, Methodist, Roman Catholics and so on. Then all of a sudden they see this new group, this evangelical, Pentecostal group, invading the north massively; and so they decide to attack. For example, in one month they pulled down 45 of our churches in the city of Abuja, but they didn’t pull us down, because we have more than 250, and as they are pulling down one we are building another.

Interview with Enoch Adeboye