Waiting For Pastor W.F. Kumuyi

By Banji Ojewale 

The people of Kumasi in Ghana did not wait for too long for the much anticipated visit of Pastor William Folorunso Kumuyi from Nigeria.

In 1973, Kumuyi had been used by God to set up a Bible Study Group that had radicalized Christianity in a country just crawling from an internecine civil war. The Ghanaians were themselves passing through stormy times, tossed for several years by billows of military regimes.

In 1979, Kumuyi was invited to lead a crusade in the second biggest city in Ghana, the country whose military rulers played the peace maker as Nigeria stood inexorably on the cusp of war.

Was Kumuyi coming with scars of conflict? Was his message going to be relevant to the people of Ghana who were also writhing under the boots of the soldiers? If what his Bible Study Group was offering was healing the wounds inflicted by 30 months of a carnivorous war in only a few years of its existence, let him come and wave the “magic wand” in Ghana too.

The Ghanaians were thinking right. The people needed a healing- spiritual and physical- at the touch of something new, something fresh, something not born of the jaded prescription that had worsened their condition day after day. Those who invited the young Nigerian evangelist (only in his late 30s) to Kumasi accepted the man whose group has since blossomed to become the Deeper Life Bible Church with stable and dignified presence all over the world.

That trip to the land of the Golden Stool and home of popular football club Asante Kotoko has been notched as a reference point in church history in Ghana. Annalists of developments within DLBC have hailed the event as the beginning of the international reach of the church.