Kumuyi At 83: Beyond The Preacher’s Cassock

 By Banji Ojewale

There comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe nor polite, not popular, but he must take it because conscience tells him he is right.  —Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968) American churchman and civil liberties defender.

*Pastor Kumuyi and his wife, Mrs Esther 

In his book, An Outline of the History of the World, Herbert Abraham Davies relates the epic story of how a cleric put himself in the path of potential backlash to deliver ancient Rome from annihilation at the hands of an all-conquering army of barbarians. The predators were already in the regions of the Roman Empire; all the soldiers needed was an order from their leader, Attila the Hun, to move in and overrun Rome. From this she was saved, (so it was said), "by the earnest entreaties of Leo, Bishop of Rome, who entered Attila’s camp and warned him not to risk the vengeance of heaven by plundering the city, and the Hun leader was so impressed with the bishop’s sincerity and intensity of purpose that he withdrew his troops."

At 81, Pastor Kumuyi Remains Different

 By Ugochukwu Ejinkeonye

Pastor William F. Kumuyi, the General Superintendent of the Deeper Life Bible Church, easily stands out as a man of God with an unshaken resolve to please God always and undertake the divine assignment given to him with zeal, dedication, meticulousness and sense of urgency.

*Pastor Kumuyi

He continues to demonstrate a clear understanding of his mission which is to win souls for Christ and teach them to embrace standard Christian living to remain at peace with God and rapturable.

Pastor Kumuyi turned 81 on Monday, June 6.

Although not a member of his church, I have derived illumination and edification from his recorded messages, books and attitude to God’s work. The internet has now made many of his messages accessible – both the old, timeless ones and the more recent ones.

Lessons From W.F. Kumuyi’s Global Crusades

 By Banji Ojewale

It wasn’t fulfilling for Mahatma Gandhi,  a Hindu and father of modern India, to read the Bible and be challenged by Jesus Christ’s Sermon on the Mount.

*From Left: Mrs Kumuyi, Pastor Kumuyi and another pastor in Ghana

The Lord’s lofty teachings touched him, as he believed they seemed to surpass his own faith’s call on man to a lifetime of exalted moral values. But Gandhi held that merely mouthing these principles was disingenuous, if it ended in the mind.

The outworking of the precepts of religion by its votaries must confer on it drive, dignity and distinction. He wrote in his autobiography, The Story of My Experiments with Truth, “…morality is the basis of things and that truth is the substance of all morality…A virtue achieves its potential only in its application and it ceases to have any use if it serves no purpose in daily life.”

When God Visits A Beleaguered World

 By William F. Kumuyi

I did say in my last State of the Nation intervention essay published in October in most of Nigeria’s leading newspapers and worldwide in the social media that while God expects the state and its institutions of administration to attend to secular matters, He is nonetheless interested in fairness, equity and justice as man discharges those obligations. Man’s challenges in various shapes of crime, insurrection, corruption, climate change, youth restiveness, collapse of moral norms, pandemics, sectarian intolerance, wars etc., are all a consequence of our failure to meet our Creator’s demands.

*Kumuyi

Where justice or fairness is denied its centrality in our relationships, whether in the Church or outside it, the victims would always fall into the ensnaring and extirpating embrace of the devil. He is perpetually on standby to feed on man’s quest to right perceived wrongs through ways not prescribed by Heaven. It is safe, then, to conclude that although Satan is the infamous author of all evil assaulting mankind, man is his inseparable accomplice on account of his wilful alienation from the Lord manifesting in his rejection of His laws.