For decades right from its formation in 1952, The Redeemed Christian Church of God (R.C.C.G.) had languished at the backwaters of popular reckoning in the ecumenical firmament.
It took the advent of Enoch Adejare Adeboye, Ifewara-born mathematician and ex University lecturer to spearhead the revolution that was to launch the church onto an exponential quantum leap, which today has seen it as a converging hub of the greatest agglomeration of Christian faithfuls in Africa, and easily among the fastest rising churches in the world, superseding its compeers in its influential force of impact,and by logical inference, a gravitational force of the most formidable stature in accelerating the phenomenally high wavelength of religious tourism, as presently extant in the vast continental Africa and Nigeria in particular.
The Adeboye trajectory is such that parades a curious humour in irony. Indeed, that God is a humourist, no medium could have been more apt in vivifyingly graphic relief, than in the serio-comic metaphor defining the Adeboye trajectory from primeval heathendom,to the epiphany of a sorterial Christian dawn.
Of his paganistic pedigree, so dyed in the wool, what else could have evinced a better portraiture,than the scenario of a university lecturer, abdicating the dizzifying height of his academic high command,for the arcane herbalist shrine;with the oracular diktat from the herbalist, subjecting him to the tedium to go to the market, purchase a ram, to be personally dragged, unaided by the brawn of his own hand – from the place of purchase, down to the arcane portals of his occultic consort.
This was indeed a real life story, shorn of imaginary fictional make-believe, related by no less a person than the very horse mouth himself, of course in the person of the same Pastor Adeboye.
Today, this man, once universally acclaimed as among the elite bracket of 50 most powerful people on earth, ranks in eminently distinctive terms as an exceptionally foremost quantity in the global pantheon of Christian Evangelical dispersal.
Another salient factor in this comedy of humour, could well be narrated in the experiential Odyssey of the pantocratic Divine, a term in allusion to Christ the Saviour; in desperate quest for a strategic vessel of ministerial proselytism.
He had within easy reach, myriads of suitable materials, in passionate hunger for that particular grand Divine commission; but when eventually he will cast his kibble; it was at a most unlikely devotee, grilled in the numerate sciences of higher mathematical abstraction, with its ratiocinative propensity to attribute every phenomenom to the natural, rather than supernatural causations, of miracles.
That fateful day, when the renowned mathematician and ex University Don, stepped for the first time into the hallowed precinct of the Redeemed Church, it was emanating from an apparently cynical cast, far from a causative free-wheel volition, but rather borne – as a staple of common knowledge – of the critical natal question of her wife, barred from further notch-up on child birth, or brace up with the grim risk of a caesarean operation.
Though skeptical, but given the possible prospect of his skepticism being allayed by any stroke of Pentecostal theurgy, it was doubtful whether such could be sufficient enough to disuade his predilection to “steal and run”, as personally expressed in his eager quest for the miracle, which obtained by any stroke of happenstance;he could then be sufficiently well at ease, to retreat to a safe distance, possibly for aye, from the devotional precinct of worship, to carnal ways of old.
However, while the caesarean Sword of Damocles, salutarily yielded to a supervening Pentecostal contagion, not so, for the premeditated desipience of a bolt-out, with the haul of “Stolen Miracle.”
The Holy Ghost, in magisterial omneity, simply arrested and held him hostage.
He has remained ever hooked, progressively right on the same spot, charting an ever increasing ascent in Glory, staggering in its mirific wonderment – seeing a sprawling space of global heathendom in stuporously supine fall, before his formidable Evangelical espada.
It will appear as if the deistic pantocrator (Christ) was direly needful, not of the normal man,but one of a grotesquely eccentric cast – denotative in popular idiom,as peculiar ideograph of the devotees of this science of numerate precision.
In his omniscient all-knowingness, he reached out even multi-steps farther for the intensely peculiar maverick stuff in the inner portals of deeper abstraction of this excruciating science of numbers.
And for those imbued with picturesquely vivid recall, the chimeric ogre metaphorically notional of the territorial space now transmogrified into the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway – then resplendent in its staggeringly mammoth wild – this unending vortex of Ogygian hell – infernal jaw of the demorgorgon, where even the angels feared to tread – was Adeboye’s fancy spot deemed fit as the power-base for his evangelistic expansionism.
With at best a smattering of security cordon, Adeboye, in evocative reminiscence of the “Ogboju Ode Ninu Igbo Irunmole” of Daniel Fagunwa, the Yoruba literary wizard, or Wole Soyinka’s Forest of The Thousand Demons, walked in and out at will, with the confident swagger and Majesty of the “Oluigbo”,King of the forest.
This man will go down in history, for the psychopathic ruthlessness and monomaniac fury he had brought to bear in lifting the paradigm of evangelistic expansionism to hitherto uncharted frontiers.
Where the mass of his contemporaries, especially of the Pentecostal clericity, would unabashedly confess to the sybaritic creed of mammonistic prosperity, Adeboye’s evangelistic trajectory, right from his nascent missionary stewardship, stands out for the sustained furore he had brought to bear in his sermonistic proselytism on “Holiness”
Imagine for instance, a genius of a distinctively unique cast,in sacrificial immolation, abdicating from the cozy forte of his Ivory tower,for a church barely tethering above the lower notch of infancy,with all the hazy uncertainties at risk.
Though he had all chances in this world, to square up with the leading gnomes of the society,in mercantile Midas success;yet this man, in commendably inspiring puritan uncompromise, refused the alloy of terrestrial commercial engagement, tainting his sacerdotal Divine commission.
Top corporate players had been head over one another, for his affixation as corporate chairman or at least among the nomenclatural list of Directors, with all the fabulous wealth at promise, but the man would not just brook the move, to which he sounded repeatedly stern warning; despite the staggering exponential rake-up automatically accruable to ready consent.
Whereas in the past, response to the alter-call of born-againism was often with subdued shirk and shrug, and bashful shame-face, but today, it’s a transmogrificatory symbol of pride and social esteem.
The Ifewara-born mathematician and revered General Overseer of the Redeemed Christian Church of God, Pastor Enoch Adejare Adeboye, takes the Glory as the ultimate dialectical causation.
If the legendary exploits of the man, coupled with his global clout and the global ubiquity of the R.C.C.G. which he leads are anything to go by, as portrayed, though briefly in this piece, then one could reasonably affirm with every assurance, devoid of any atom of doubt, that all roads lead to the RCCG International Headquarters and all eyes across the wider global universe, cynosurally cast, as the reputable church again celebrates the 2023 edition of its annual convention.
*KOLA JOHNSON IS A WRITER AND JOURNALIST.
