Jack Voelkel
Sunday Adelaja
Nigerian Missionary to the Ukraine – and the World!
"I must give [Jesus] my best every day and every minute."
by Jack Voelkel
Part 1 of 2
The lonely Nigerian university student was pensive as he sat alone in his room in Minsk, Belarus (Soviet Union), in 1986. He had been a Christian less than a year, and the spiritually suffocating environment of an atheist Marxist culture was sucking the spiritual life out of him. He thought, “At least I can put up a picture of Jesus on my wall to encourage me.” But as soon as his roommate saw it, he reported him to the authorities. The local communist party leader and a professor banged on his door. “What do you think you are doing? Take down that picture! If you keep doing things that like we’ll send you back to Africa.”
Once again alone, in the quiet of his room, still shuddering from the experience, the Lord spoke to him. “Don’t worry about removing the picture; just make sure they don’t remove Me from your heart” (Jewell).
Sunday Adelaja was born in the village of Idomila Ijebu-Ode. Moved by a message he heard on T.V. he accepted Christ at 19 just before his high school graduation. His village was plagued by witchcraft that had killed many of his family (Blomfeld). He longed to leave and was delighted to learn that he had won a scholarship to study journalism in the Byelarussian State University.
He studied diligently and became a top student. “God used that time to train me, to help me master the language and understand European people” (Jewell).
The Prayer Covenant
He searched for a church, but was told, “There’s no church here.” After his confrontation over the picture of Jesus he hid his faith – just to survive. But he suffered. “Communism was shrinking me, and brothers and sisters who came as believers were all backsliding. People were being sent to the psychiatric hospital…because they were Christians; others were leaving the country” (Nesdoly).
Sometimes he had to have his devotions in the bathroom (Jewell). “When I woke up in the morning, I would lie on my bed, cover myself and I just prayed one hour, straight in tongues, no English, no Russian” (Nesdoly). Then he joined six other foreign students who secretly worshiped together. They made a covenant to meet every day. “No matter what we do. No matter where we go. No matter what happens, we are going to meet every day until God does something or heaven opens,” they promised each other. In their meeting they didn’t talk, didn’t preach, just interceded together for two hours minimum (Nesdoly).
As he looks back, Sunday concludes, “That was the most difficult one year in my whole life.” When it was time to pray, professors would ask me to come to class. We’d just begin, and other classmates would come into the room. They were being watched, monitored. “We needed to go through hell just to keep that covenant. But we did, for a whole year. Then “heaven broke loose…The Spirit of God descended on us…people began to get saved through us. God broke the chains and led us supernaturally to the believers…in the underground church….We began to fellowship together, preach together” (Nesdoly).
About that time the Lord appeared to him on three consecutive days and showed him in a vision a sea of people who were all white. He understood that he was receiving a call to preach and that crowds of Europeans would respond. For six years he struggled to believe this promise (Jewell). Before his graduation from the university, he had pondered his future. More and more he was being drawn to full-time Christian work. He considered attending a Bible School. But then the Lord spoke to him, “When I want to do something new and unique, I take my Generals to the wilderness. This is your wilderness in Russia and it is your preparation, your Bible School” (Emenike).
When Mikhail Gorbachev began opening the Soviet Union to the West, Sunday began preaching. He and other Christian friends visited churches and led evangelistic campaigns in Russia, Ukraine, the Baltics, and Belarus. But the police caught up with him, and expelled him from Belarus (Jewell). He had nowhere to go. He wondered what would happen now.
Then unexpectedly he was invited to Kiev to work at Ukraine’s first commercial TV station. The director of the station became so impressed with his life and witness that he asked Sunday to create a program with Christian values. In this way the Lord opened the door for him to minister the Gospel through television each week and get paid for it! (Emenike).
The Call to Preach
After a year in Kiev, in 1993, God began to speak to him about founding a church. “I want you to raise up a country of strong men and women to reach other countries, especially where the Soviet Union has been known to send death, destruction, and tears. Instead, I want to use the Soviet people to bring healing, health, and the Good News.”
His first attempts were fruitless. He knew what people were thinking: “You’re black, you have an accent, you’ve come from an uncivilized place, so who are you to talk.” Desperate, he cried out to God, and in his prayer time he remembered that Jesus preached to society’s weak and outcast. He began with drug addicts, alcoholics, and the homeless (Jewell). He went out on the streets everyday and passed out tracts. When people called him “monkey,” he gave them a hug and asked, “Have you ever hugged a monkey before?” and made them laugh (Jewell). “They would spit at me in the street. They thought it was an insult for a black man to preach” (Blomfeld).
A year later, as the church grew, he asked the Lord for His purpose for the congregation. He received a vision of raising up a large body of believers and extending his ministry to other places in Europe as well. But then God told him He wanted a missionary church that would send out missionaries all over the world, especially China and the Arab countries – a vision that continues to be a motivating factor in the life of the congregation today (Emenike).
Three years later, over 3,000 people were meeting. During Ukraine’s peaceful Orange Revolution (2006) great numbers of his church members prayed and fasted in the 12-day standoff before the first presidential runoff was judged invalid. They donated food, warm clothing, and tents to the thousands of demonstrators camped in Kiev’s freezing Independence Square (Jewell). Later Viktor Yushchenko, who finally won the election, contacted Sunday, and recognized “it is evangelicals who most ardently embrace, promote, and protect the core ideas of freedom and personal responsibility” an illustration of what the Sunday feels is the influence God’s people are wielding in the Ukraine.
Sunday does not apologize for his interest in political involvement. “All the best people have left politics to those who are mediocre, to those who do not have the required values to create positive change. If the church is not going to take responsibility, nothing will improve,” he says. “Politicians do not have the values and attitudes, which are required for development.” But his vision is even greater. He is committed to even raising up a Christian faction in Parliament (Ustanny).
In two weeks (Sept. 17): Sunday takes a Wife
Bibliography
Asamoah-Gyadu, J. Kwabena. “African Initiated Christianity in Eastern Europe: Church of the ‘Embassy of God’ in Ukraine.” In, International Bulletin of Missionary Research, Vol. 30, No. 2, April 2006.
BBC Profiles Sunday Adelaja. http://blogs.salon.com/003494/2005/06/24.html (24 June 2005)
Blomfeld, Adrian. “Ukraine Attacks ‘charlatan’ and his booty-shaking babes.” [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/core/Content/displayPrintable.jhtml;jsessionid=3Q5QLVMS1H (2006).
Davis, Paul. Pastor Sunday Adelaja: Incredible, Humble, and Phenomenal. http://ezinearticlels.com/?Pastor-Sunday-Adelaja:-Incredible,-Humble-and-Phenomenal&id=272223.
Emenike , Victor & Judith http://www.it-is-easy.org/contact/friends/sunday.php (n.d).
Jewell, Dawn Herzog. “From Africa to Ukraine.” http://www.christianitytoday.com/tc/2005/006/4.42.html 7/7/2007.
Kwon, Lilian. Ukraine’s Influential Church Leader Shifting the Way Americans Think Church (http”//www.christianpost.com/pages/print/.htm?aid=28101. June 22, 2007
Nosdoly, Violet. http://vnesdoly.blogspot.com/2005/09/how -sunday-adelaja-learned-to-pray.html
Ustanny, Avia. Sunday Alelaja Taking the Word around the World. http://www.jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20051106/out/out1.html
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