PASTOR WITH A POWERFUL PAST

European church leader helps through empathy.

The pastor of one of the largest evangelical churches in Europe lived his first 19 years in a Nigerian village of 40 families.

Pastor Sunday Adelaja is now the spiritual leader of the 25,000-member Embassy of God church in Kiev, Ukraine, in the former Soviet Union, a church that has planted 200 other churches in the Ukraine with 100,000 members, and another 250 churches out of that country, most of them in Europe.

Adelaja, a short man in his late 30s with a face that barely contains his broad smile, was in Oklahoma this week speaking at churches and visiting an old friend, T.L. Osborn, the Tulsa evangelist whom Adelaja called a legend throughout Africa.
Nearly all Pentecostal believers in Africa trace their spiritual heritage to Osborn's huge African crusades, he said.

"Some Africans who do not know who the American president is, know who T.L. Osborn is. And some people think Tulsa is the only city in America, because of him."

Adelaja has a special love for Osborn. At a time when Adelaja was about to be deported from the Ukraine for what authorities called the practice of black magic, Osborn came to his defense. He explained to government officials that what Adelaja was doing was not black magic, based in Africa, but the same Christian healing ministry that Osborn himself, raised on an Oklahoma farm, had been taking around the world for years.

Adelaja's journey from a small village in Nigeria to the leadership of a major European church was long and difficult. He was converted to Christianity as a 19-year-old while watching a mathematics professor on television make a case for Christ.

"This was not a foolish man," said Adelaja, who previously had considered Christianity the white man's religion.
After accepting Christ, he said, "I felt like 200 kilograms was lifted off of me. I felt so light ... the sky looked so blue, the trees looked so green. Beauty came. Essence, meaning, came to nature."
A few months later, in 1986, he accepted a scholarship to study at Belarusian State University in Minsk, in what is now Belarus, then part of the Soviet Union.

There, surrounded by atheistic Soviets, his new faith was challenged every day.
When he prayed, his fellow students called him a primitive African whose reliance on a fictitious God was a sign of weakness and laziness.

He was required to take a course on scientific atheism, designed to prove that God does not exist. Some of his fellow African Christians refused to take the course and were deported. Others were sent to psychiatric hospitals.

"I cursed my luck," he said. "I asked why God had let me come here."
But he felt God was saying to him, "I sent you here for a purpose. Listen to the teachers, but don't digest it. At exams, pour it back to them," he said.

"That education has made me who I am today," he said, able to understand the Russian mind and thinking, and to communicate with those who hold an atheistic worldview.

At one particularly desperate time, he begged God for an answer to why he was in Russia.
"On three consecutive days, Jesus appeared to me in a dream and took me on a journey into my future. I saw myself in front of hundreds of thousands of white people. There were miracles and healings. It was very clear."

Three times during his years as a student, without Christian fellowship or a church or a pastor, he was near to being committed to a psychiatric hospital.

"This was a full desert experience, like (the biblical) Joseph in the dungeon. I was just trying to survive," he said.
During the time of his studies, things began to change in Russia under the liberalized policies of President Mikhail Gorbachev. In 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed.

Adelaja began to meet with Baptists and Pentecostals in the underground church, and began to travel and preach.
In 1992 he graduated at the top of his class with a master's degree in journalism.
His fluency in both English and Russian enabled him to get a job in Kiev as a television journalist, and in February 1994, he started a church in his living room.
But almost no one came.

The Russians viewed blacks as just "two centuries out of the woods" and only good for sports, he said.
"American blacks complain about racism, but when I come here it's like heaven, compared to Russia," he said.
Frustrated that no one would listen to him, he looked at the ministry of Jesus, who made the outcast and the downtrodden feel welcome.

"God was saying to me, 'Can I trust you with the downtrodden, with the alcoholics and the bums?'"
"I didn't even know any alcoholics," Adelaja said, but he went to the streets and the treatment centers to find them.
"They only understand one language, and that is the language of love," he said.
As these people found new life, their relatives began to come to church, and to invite others. In one year, the church grew   from   seven   people   to 1,000. In the second year it grew to 2,000, and in the third year, to 3,000. The church has continued to grow, and has birthed numerous other churches, training programs and Bible schools.Among its almost entirely white membership are some people of influence in the Ukraine. "I believe the church should be the salt and the light in society," Adelaja said. "We are affecting the government, the culture and the politics of the Ukraine." Twice a year? He holds a 10-day retreat  for about  1,000 pastors and leaders? Who rast and meet for up to 15 hours of prayer a day. “That’s the secret of our success’, he said.

By Bill Sherman, World Religion Writer

Newspaper “Tulsa World”, December, 3, 2005.