My encounter with the ‘devil’, by CAC Pastor Adeniyi

Pastor Augustine Afolabi Adeniyi is the General Overseer of Christ Apostolic Church, Egbe, Ikotun, Lagos. He spoke to Sunday Vanguard on how he became a minister of God. Establishing church seems to have become an all-comers affair. How did your own start? Christ Apostolic Church, Myriad of Miracle was planted in 1986. And we started the second service on October 2, 1986. I have been in the ministry since 1967. I started as a member and I was ordained as an elder. While I was an elder, I was working in the Ministry of Federal Ministry of Commerce, former Ministry of Trade. It wasn’t my wish to become a pastor. My intention was to travel abroad and you know…I had an encounter with the devil. It was a serious encounter. I visited so many hospitals. The last place was University College Hospital (UCH), Ibadan and they could not cure the sickness. As a result of that, I went to a herbalist, they still couldn’t cure it until finally when somebody introduced me to CAC in 1967. A sickness we could not cure for almost 16 years was cured within a week. It was a divine intervention. How would you describe the healing experience? When I got to the church (CAC), they prayed for me and asked me to go into a seven-day fasting. Since I had not been doing it, the day I started, my legs were shaking, my head was aching, my body was something else. Before I got to the place, for about 9 days, I couldn’t sleep, but the first day I fasted and they prayed for me, I was able to sleep. So I stayed in the mission, the fourth day of the fasting, in the afternoon, I dreamt that I saw an old man who came down to me and said: ‘My son, they told me about your plight I said, ‘Thank you, sir’ and he said: ‘Open your mouth’. I opened my mouth. It was around 1pm. As I opened my mouth, he put his hand into my mouth and removed a very big stone. I cried such that the people around heard and ran to me. They asked me what happened and changed my room. I slept again and saw the old man in another dream. He said, ‘My son, it remains only one thing’. I said, ‘What is the thing again as the first one was really painful? He said, ‘let me do this one’. He put his hand into my mouth again and removed a husk of maize, he removed it from my tummy. As he removed it, I cried and blood gushed out. People around came to me. When the pastor saw it, he said the work had been done, that it was the work of God. That’s how the sickness vanished and I became a strong believer in the power of God. What is unique about this ministry? We want to win souls for Christ, evangelise the whole world. And we are moving to every part of the country. All we need is God’s assistance and assistance from people. We also need finance to back it. You may have knowledge but you also need what it takes to carry it out, which includes prayer, finance, etc. We are planters of Christ Apostolic Church; we are not the founder. Christ Apostolic Church started as far back as 1930. It started in Ilesa, Oke-Oye where the dead rose. What is unique about the upcoming harvesting in the church? In Christendom, there are two ways to harvest – physical and spiritual. We are doing the physical to tell people how the invisible one will be done and that is why we are practicalising it. Let everybody bring what he started doing right from the beginning. When you look at our country, we have rainy season and dry season. In the rainy season, you plant. When it is ripe, that is during the dry season which is approaching, everything will be ripe for harvesting and we as Christians follow it by what our Bible tells us in Ecclesiastes 3 that there is time for everything. That is the reason this year people from all our branches will come together and do the harvest to tell the people that there will be a day that the whole world will be harvested based on whatever we have done. There is somebody awaiting us, to whom we would give account of what we have done. Then, the chaff shall be separated from the seed. The upcoming harvest will bring blessing by the grace of God. What is your advice to Nigerian leaders All leaders should acknowledge and seek God first. All Christians must pray for the country to survive. Also, I’ve travelled and seen a lot. Our leaders should follow the example of the developed nations Vanguard Newspaper