Kumuyi abroad: Africa’s new narrative

The West has no business sending missionaries to Nigeria; they can’t help us; they have lost Christianity…substantially…They are the ones who need us. We will give (the erring West) pastoral help…Africa is now the historical custodian of (true) Christianity. – Professor Dapo Asaju, former Vice Chancellor of Ajayi Crowther University, Oyo State, Nigeria.

Sir: As July of 2022 closed, Pastor William Folorunso Kumuyi, General Superintendent of Deeper Christian Life Ministry, DCLM, was also closing a chapter that, according to some theologians, made his ministry somehow ‘insular and centripetal’, even if his messages, as we all know, have always been universal.

At an event in Lagos, Nigeria’s economic hub, Kumuyi drew our attention to a new point in his evangelical trajectory, when he formally launched the initiative he christened Global Crusade with Kumuyi, GCK.

Born in his denomination, GCK is inclusive and centrifugal; it’s an open body, with wide arms stretched to receive all worldwide, irrespective of your faith, class, culture or country. The cleric’s global outreach had started in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital in 2021. But observers claimed its structural garb appeared to have become tame and lame as a vehicle designed to capture the wider vision he has been unmasking.

Previously the respected evangelist had ‘informally’ undertaken missions outside Nigeria to preach the Gospel of Christ. However, they were all under the shadow of DCLM. Critics said this seemed to limit the churchman, giving the unintended impression that his crusades were a closed shop. So, there had been a troubling thinking that these gatherings were planned exclusively for his denominational flock.

This pedestrian perceptional ways threatened to project into restrictive realities, leading many to the imagery of the Procrustean bed: everybody, short, tall, bulgy or sparse of flesh, must lie in the Deeper Life bed: they must be squeezed to fit into it. The charge was that there seemed to be no sensitivity to distinct individual and spiritual tastes of denominational yearnings. All were, willy-nilly, served the same menu by Kumuyi. In my mind, these conclusions were gravely unfair to the preacher and his calling, which, like that of Jesus Christ and of His early followers, is without frontiers.

Whether to address these concerns or not, Pastor Kumuyi now says he’s presenting an international platform on which he will stand to reach the whole world. By the way, his sermons have always been meant for the whole humanity. Yet, to fulfil all righteousness, this GCK rostrum, he says, won’t be a DCLM affair; nor is it Nigerian; it is going to be borderless; it will be a construction God is bringing all the movements of His Universal Church to put together this end time of man’s history.

By Kumuyi’s own reckoning, GCK is the new cauldron God will employ to brew hope for grieving humanity in our generation. Many of us believe this under-reported, under-marketed and under-exposed African missionary would now, at last, receive due global accord, as he exports the Gospel message to the world, deploying a home-grown apparatus.

Banji Ojewale is a writer in Ota, Ogun State.