Dapo Aderinola
20 June 2008
Lagos — He hawked firewood and pap (ogi) in his difficult childhood so much so that he was nicknamed 'Sunday Ologi'.
The then little known Sunday Olorunwa Adelaja is what the world has today come to know as Pastor Adelaja, ministering across 40 countries in the world and crossing in the process the paths of notable world leaders.
In Idomila, a small village of less than 200 people near Ijebu-Ode in Ogun State of Nigeria, a little boy named Sunday Olorunwa Adelaja was born some 40 years ago. He never met his biological father to this day and was raised in humble circumstances by his grandmother, Rachael Adelaja, because his mother, Teniola, left him at a very tender age.
Adelaja, the surname he bears to this day, is actually the surname of his mother whose marriage to a much older man didn't work out. Her husband was an aggressive alcoholic who routinely beat her up. In fury, her relatives took her away from the husband, unaware that she was already six months pregnant.
The fruit of that pregnancy is what the world has today come to know as Pastor Sunday Olorunwa Adelaja, Senior Pastor, The Embassy of the Blessed Kingdom of God for All Nations or the Embassy of God for short.
"I never have and never will meet my biological father", he said. "I feel that God just needed a life to be born because God has a plan for it."
In 1973 when Sunday was only six years old, tragedy struck and the light went out on the Adelaja family. The sons of Rachael Adelaja, Dr. Kola Adelaja, a 36 year-old university teacher, and his brother Demorin Adelaja, a 29 year-old economist, who jointly cared deeply for their mother and Sunday died within six months. A month before then, the eldest of the Adelaja children, herself a graduate, also died in a road accident. The string of deaths deeply traumatised Sunday.
With her children dead, her life-support cut and shunned by wealthy relatives and friends, Rachael went with an axe in hand, into the tropical forest with Sunday, no matter the heat of the dry season or the heavy cold of rainy season, to cut wood and sell for a living.
She also traded in corn porridge (pap) to sustain the family and before trekking two miles barefoot to school in the neighbouring village each morning, Sunday hawked pap or firewood. That earned him the appellation of "Sunday Ologi (Sunday the pap seller).
At 11 years, social differences between Sunday and many of his friends from wealthy families who went to school abroad grieved his spirit and hardened his heart. He became very aggressive and seemed to conclude that he had a right to lord his muscularity over all else - elbowing people out of the way as if walking the aisles of a crowded hardware store. Thus, he turned a virtual street thug who got involved in practically every fight in the village.
When Sunday was 16, his grandmother died. The shock drove him perilously close to suicide. "My grandma was the only person in my life who really cared for me", he said. "But I didn't realise this then, I fully realised what she meant to me only after she was gone."
With grandma gone, Sunday stayed back in his home village and continued her trade in firewood and pap. Within a year, he became a successful cassava farmer, even as a high school student. Adversity conditioned him for success and, for the first time in his life, he excelled over all those he used to envy by finishing high school in flying colours.
But after high school, what next? As he was watching a religious programme that followed the regular news broadcast one day, Sunday got more than he bargained for.
"In that programme, for the first time in my life, I heard that Jesus loved and died for me and has forgiven all my sins", he said. "This impressed me greatly and I decided to repent." Thereafter, he knelt down and prayed.
A month later, he received a message that he had won a state scholarship to study either in the United States of America or the USSR. After a prayer session with his pastor for divine guidance, he elected to go to Russia, even though he was told that religious activists in the Soviet bloc trod the cutlass edge between their faith and the brink of jail.
On September 14, 1986, Sunday set foot on Soviet soil. His first impression shocked him. He saw that the surroundings did not fit the image of a superpower. He was shocked, he said, to find that even in Africa people did not drive the kind of rickety cars on the streets of the capital city of Moscow. The bigger shock, though, was that there was nothing to point toward the existence of God.
As he gradually reconciled himself to his new environment and attending an underground church with like-minded people to pray, he said he had a dream for three days in row in which he had a revealing encounter with Jesus. Because religion was prohibited by law in Soviet Union and whoever dared to pray openly was at once sent to the mental home, Sunday had to hide to pray. While resting in his room one afternoon shortly after enrolling in the university, a large crowd led by state and communist officials barged in and gruffly ordered him to take down the picture of Jesus hung above his bed or be expelled. Reluctantly, he complied with a vow to "serve a living God and not an icon".
In 1992, his passport was confiscated because of his involvement in evangelism and was given two weeks to leave the country. As he pondered the new challenge, he suddenly got a breakthrough with a commercial TV channel in Kyiv that needed a representative who had to be a believer who is proficient in Russian and English with a degree in journalism.
On February 6, 1994, Sunday and his team held the first three-day evangelism in Kyiv, which marked the start of the Word of Faith Church that later became the Embassy of The Blessed Kingdom of God for All Nations. It is the same church that grew from a ministry to dysfunctional people and misfits into the first mega church in the former Soviet Union with over 25,000 mostly white members and ranks as one of the largest in Europe.
The church is, meanwhile, building a $15,000,000 Ukrainian Spiritual Cultural Centre in Kiev City. Do the stories of his childhood bring the man of God down? "No, they don't", he said confidently. "On the contrary, these things must be said. Now people around the world are receiving the word of wisdom that I share and they cannot imagine that when I was a boy, I couldn't grasp even the most elementary things and that I was the worst student in my class."
From a grateful heart, he said: "My grandmother taught me the virtues of diligence, good manners and, by the grace of God, I'd let people know I had a mother and that Nigeria is not just a nation of the philistines and failures".
His pastoral duties have taken him across 40 countries in the world, crossing the paths of notable world leaders and personalities in politics, economy and religion.
Pastor Adelaja, an academician, journalist, motivational speaker, adviser to several heads of state and apostle, has written more than 70 books. He is married to Abosede with three children: Perez, Zoe and Pearl.
- Aderinola writes from Houston, Texas
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