My testimony

Early life

I was born in 1966, one of nine children. My parents worked long hours to give my brothers, sisters and me a safe and good life. Our family was not especially religious. My grandfather, Pa Mezu Anugwolu, was a traditional healer (what people locally call a “native doctor”) who treated all kinds of sickness with herbs. He had two wives.

But when he was well over a hundred years old, Pa Mezu asked the reverend father of our local church to come, take away the things he had used for his healing work, and lead him to Christ. He did this because he did not want his first grandson, me, to suffer in the future. After he came to Christ, he was married in the church to my grandmother, who was the wife still living at that time.

Later, when I returned to the village, he called me and asked to be alone with me. When everyone had gone out, he said quietly, “Emma, my son, have they told you that I have become a Christian?” I said, “I have only just arrived, and no one has told me anything.” He replied, “I did it because if I am no more, you will be the one who suffers.” I laughed and asked, “How?” He said, “You will not understand now.” Then he prayed that it would be well with me, and I said, “Amen.”

How the fellowship began

I went to the senior pastor of the church where I worshipped and told him that the Lord had told me to hold a Tuesday fellowship in the church. After a week the man of God told me that it might be the Lord’s leading, and he encouraged me and promised to support me in every way. He did, until the Tuesday fellowship began to grow and some difficulties came up, and we were asked to stop. After seven months we tried renting an apartment, but after a year we could not pay the rent and were asked to leave. It was then that we joined the Tuesday and Thursday fellowships together in my compound, where we still meet.

Test of faith

Immediately after my calling in 2011, I had to choose between two vehicles — a Camry and a bus — since I could no longer maintain both. I decided to keep the bus, since it could carry more people from where I lived to our Tuesday fellowship, and to sell the Camry. A buyer and a mechanic came with ₦500,000. I told them I could only accept ₦550,000, and they left. That same night, the Lord told me not to sell the car at all, but to give it away to a man of God who was ministering in my own compound at the time.

I obeyed, even though it cost me a friendship. Some time later, a family whose newborn the Lord had saved during a difficult delivery came to the fellowship to give thanks, bringing gifts with them. After the service, the visiting man of God took everything home without sharing it, which caused real hurt in the congregation. When I raised it with him afterward, he stopped speaking to me altogether. Even so, I did not go back on what I had heard from the Lord. I drove the Camry to where he lived and handed him the keys myself.

Not long after, I faced a harder test. I owned a plot of land I had been building on, and the Lord told me to sell it and give every bit of the money to the church — not to keep a single dime for myself. It was a frightening thing to hear, since things were already difficult for my family at the time. That confirmation came again the Sunday that followed, when a visiting preacher opened his message by saying, almost as if he could see straight into my situation, “You might be sitting here wondering how God could ask you to sell something and give away all the money.” I knew then it was real. I told the agents I would only take the standard agency fee and nothing more from the sale. Once the land sold, my wife asked, understandably, why we had to give it all away when we had nothing left to eat ourselves. I could only tell her that when the Lord has spoken, obedience isn't a negotiation. We withdrew every naira and transferred it straight into the church's account.

I have carried one lesson from both of those moments ever since: whenever we hear from God, the situation we're in at the time doesn't change what obedience looks like. It may take years, but the Lord who spoke will always make it right in the end. God does not owe anyone anything — but He is faithful all the same.

My calling to full-time ministry

It was an unexpected bus ride. One day I was taking my children to school and we passed a gate that was always closed. I felt prompted to go in and ask what they did there. After I dropped the children off, I went back. When the security man opened the gate, I asked him, “What do they do in this place?” He told me it was a theological school where pastors are trained, and advised me to go in and ask about the process. I did, and that is how I became a student at the Christ Apostolic Church Theological Seminary, where I earned a Certificate of Theology (2015), a Diploma in Theology (2016) and a Bachelor of Theology (2018).

As is the custom of the Nigerian school curriculum, every university and senior high school normally holds its graduation or convocation in August each year. When I entered the final year of my degree, I wondered what I would do, since my yearly covenant of forty days of prayer and fasting runs from the 1st of August to the 9th of September. At that confusing time, in July of that year, the Lord caused the school authorities to move that year’s graduation from August to the end of September — allowing me to finish my forty days undisturbed. I count it a memorable and divine intervention.

Above all, I thank God Almighty and everyone He has used to bring me this far. I thank my wife, my children, my mother and my siblings. May the Lord continue to give us the grace to serve and worship Him in truth always, in Jesus’ name.