VICTOR: Well, our guest today is capturing the imagination of millions of people around the world. He is the pastor of Europe’s largest church, Christ Embassy, in Kyiv, Ukraine. He’s also the author of “Church Shift,” a radical book that most likely will revolutionize your faith, your life, and possibly the state of the church in the 21st Century.
Please join me in welcoming somebody I would not hesitate to describe as one of God’s leading ambassadors, Pastor Sunday Adelaja.
PASTOR SUNDAY: Thank you Victor for having me. A joy to be here.
VICTOR: Spaciba. (thank-you)
PASTOR SUNDAY: Oh, you’re speaking my language now.
VICTOR: That’s a little Russian I know. Spaciba. Welcome to Turning Point.
PASTOR SUNDAY: You’re doing well.
VICTOR: Now, a few years ago, the world witnessed a major people’s revolution take place on the streets of Kyiv in the Ukraine, which that whole movement has come to be known as the Orange Revolution. Your church was in the middle of that, tell us about it.
PASTOR SUNDAY: Well, you see, when our church was 15,000 people, God convicted me and said, “Don’t just build a church, what is the good of it? What is the good of you just being -- feeling good about you and getting praises that you have this big church, and you know, you have this great ministry?”
And God began to convict me that it doesn’t matter how many people you have in the church, even if you have one million in the church, but if you are not changing the culture, if the society is not getting redeemed, that the church is just another club.
So that totally changed my theology. And I began to find ways and means by which to come out of the four walls of the church and invade every sphere of life of this society, including political life.
Well, God gave us the opportunity, because when you pray for something that nobody has ever done, normally it will come through trials and persecutions. So, we began to have persecutions from the government when they kicked us out of our building. Now, can you imagine a church that’s 15,000 people, or 20,000 people at that point, kicked out of the building of the church? And we needed to get a place to meet, or just meet in the snow -Russian snow is no joke.
So, that was when I had to make the most radical decision of my life, to take the 20,000 member church right to street and confront the government of the city. It ended up with us getting what we wanted. But God had spoken to me that that action is going to lead to the liberation of the country. And guess what? Six months later, when they tried to rig the results of the presidential election, the people of the country said, “Well, if the Embassy of God could do it, we can do it.”
VICTOR: So many have found their way into your church, God’s Embassy. My question for you is: What is it about your church, what is it about you that seems to attract so many of those that the church would not normally reach out to?
PASTOR SUNDAY: Well, because the first four years of my stay and my ministry in Russia did not lead any major visible result, I could not get any white European to give their life to Christ or come to me to listen to me. Some of them would give their lives, but they would never come to church. So, I was wondering what was the result, not what was the cause of this.
Of course we had some black people come, but I guessed if God sent me to Europe to minister, it would be funny to send me to minister just to the black people. I mean, we had more blacks in Africa. So, I was wondering, “God, you’ve got to show me a way to minister to the people of the land.” So, at one point of desperation when I was saying, “God, you told me you were going to have a mega-church here, and nobody is coming.” At that moment of brokenness, I said, “I will not sleep this night until you speak to me, Lord.”
And God spoke to me, “The problem is not just with the prejudice of the people, that they don’t want to listen to a monkey or a chocolate, or a black nigger,” --
VICTOR: Which is what you were called at the time.
PASTOR SUNDAY: Which, when you go to the street, that’s what you were confronted with. Anyway, God said, “You also have a problem with your own understanding of presentation of the Gospel. Because when you think that the Gospel is just about preaching, good preaching, fasting and prayer and the ability to be eloquent and pass the message across, you are mistaken. The pulpit is not all about ministry. The pulpit is just a tool, and preaching is only a tool. That is not ministry.”
I said, “Wow, what is ministry then?” He said, “Ministry is touching real people with God’s love. They need it. Touching them, really touching people, real people, with God’s love. People must have the divine touch upon their lives. That is ministry. Go touch somebody, go embrace somebody. I was naked, nobody clothed me. I was hungry, nobody fed me. I was in prison, nobody visited me. That is what ministry is all about.” He said, “Because you did not visit these people, you go to hell.” So, He said, “Leave your pulpit.”
Now, there are millions of preachers today who are preaching wonderful messages, who are having great churches, but they never really -- don’t regularly leave their pulpits to go touch the people. They don’t – wouldn’t do it. They think they are engaging ministry --
VICTOR: The most needy in society.
PASTOR SUNDAY: They think they are engaging ministry just by being in the pulpit.
VICTOR: But let me jump in there. This follows up to another question that I have. Do you think that the church, as an institution, has placed too much of an emphasis on the role of the pastor as being the “be all,” I mean, he’s supposed to do everything, rather than empowering the members of the church to go out and impact lives, and through that, transform society. Do you think that the church has it wrong today?
PASTOR SUNDAY: You are absolutely right. That is the- there-there is a book that I have written that is coming to the American stores and the bookstores of the world, called “Church Shift,” and that’s what it’s all about.
Now, can you imagine people sitting down in our pews, people sitting down in our pews should be able to be reaching more people than the pastor is reaching through the pulpit? Now, the people in the pews, some of them are CEOs, some of them are presidents of their companies, some of them are engineers, scientists, businessmen, successful people, but when they come to the church, they only occupy the pews and they write their checks and give their money to it and say, “Yes, sir,” to the pastor, or just be in the choir or in the usher, because they think, “This is the pastor’s thing. They should not mess up with this thing.”
But actually, what the church is supposed to be is an equipping ground – a breeding ground for deliverers and saviors. We are supposed to equip all those people who are successful in the world, and who are most successful in the world, to discover that everybody that was created by God and sent into this world, was sent with the commission and an assignment to be done and performed and fulfilled for God’s purposes.
So everybody that is in this world and that was saved, is sent here for God’s purpose. So the purpose of the church is to help everybody in the congregation to see God’s purpose, to embrace it, and to dedicate their entire life to bringing that will of God, which He had for them in heaven, to the earth and enforcing it, thereby establishing the reality of the kingdom of God in every sphere of their giftings and their callings, thereby we could make the world become the kingdom of our God in a few years.
VICTOR: Amen.
