By Banji Ojewale
At the close of every month, an African non-denominational brand, the Global Crusade with Kumuyi (GCK), launches into the international scene, seeking a solution to humanity’s multidisciplinary crisis, arising from integrity bereavement.
We’re all discomfited, distressed and depressed under a cloud of uncertainty about what is to drop down. The nations and their governments are facing a host of seemingly implacable challenges, shot at us by failed relationships among the constituents of the human race.
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These straits coalesce day by day, threatening to consume man, the myriad of perceived recipes thrown in to pacify the odds not turning in needed results. But Pastor William Folorunso Kumuyi, GCK convener, won’t also be appeased over his unyielding insistence that the world and its billions of inhabitants can sail through these tempests, if the right antidote is applied. He can’t be disconnected from his conviction that the world can’t go under if they accept his message at the crusades.
Of the 195 member-states of the United Nations, GCK has continuously reached out to the peoples of more than 150countries every month since July 2022 when Kumuyi served formal notice he was taking his monthly programmes beyond Nigeria and Africa. He partners with national and sub-national governments, interest groups, religious and traditional leaders, professional bodies, grassroots denizens etc. to teach that God must be in full control of all our activities in order for our problems to get the death blow.
Men and women may pursue their business, academic, scientific and socioeconomic and political targets, Pastor Kumuyi says, but they will lead to a tragic cul-de-sac if the Creator of Heaven and Earth is left out of it all. In his recent trips to India (November-December 2023) and the Philippines and UAE (May 2024), he said: man must go back to God through His Salvation plan in the proxy death of Jesus Christ, His Son, for all of our investments in science and technology, education, medicine etc. to translate into joy and peace.
Here in the nations of Africa and across to other parts of the world, GCK has drawn crowds of hundreds of thousands of those willing to listen to Kumuyi and abandon their sinful nature and turn to Christ. Receiving Christ, according to the General Superintendent of Deeper Christian Life Ministry, DCLM, brings in the missing link called the integrity factor.
For instance, when GCK, with the theme, ‘Glorious Transformation Through Christ,’ showed up in Aba, Abia State, South East of Nigeria, for the April 2024 edition from the 25th to the 30th, the crusade attendees were glad to learn that possessing the salvation of Christ preached there came along with several other physical goodies.
As they embraced the Lord, they were gifted the privilege of a new life. This inner being doesn’t brook baneful natures like immorality, deception, selfishness, greed, lust, pride and vindictiveness among other vices that have sentenced men and women and their societies to death, literally.
Although the sick were healed while the blind received their sight, with the lame walking and the deaf-mute bouncing into wholeness, there was more: crowds were given a fresh relationship with God that granted them hope of prompt answers to the prayers of the man of God for breaking of yokes, victory over family and marital setbacks, thirst for righteousness and a closer walk with God, and an inner peace.
Ahead of the sessions of the Abia GCK, an international medical team comprising doctors, nurses, laboratory scientists, specialists and other health personnel visited the neighbouring communities of Umuamacha and Uratta-Okpolumobo, all in Aba South.
The medical group also took a trip to the Correctional Centre (Prison) in the area. The inmates, like the rural dwellers, were offered free health services.
The doctors made them understand, however, that as they were healed and had more health needs met on the crusade grounds, they should repose greater faith in the Ultimate Physician, Jesus Christ, through salvation. He alone, they said, could give them lasting physical and spiritual healing. If they had Him as their Lord and Saviour, He would give them peace in the body and in the soul, which no doctor in the world could do.
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They were told what they got was temporary relief, suggesting that there might be a relapse. But Christ’s greater touch gives no room for short-lived solace, if one abides in Him. The health personnel taught that sin is the origin of all sickness, which only Christ can heal, not the inventions or policies or philosophy of man.
So, when Pastor Kumuyi mounted the pulpit on the last night of Abia GCK, he spoke of the enduring transformation that all humanity should experience through Christ. The world would remain at war with itself and not know peace if its citizens are not first, as individuals, relieved of their basic moral weaknesses. Governments and institutions; private and public recruit their leaders and workers from among these same persons who bear the trademarks of antisocial vices. These fatal traits influence their decisions and policies, whether in office, in worship centres, in schools, in the home and generally in all our interactions.
Now, an extrapolation of Kumuyi’s presentation can be wrapped in this question: What would men and women without transformed souls offer if asked to form a government to oversee the affairs of the society? They can’t offer what’s absent in their lives; they’d give what they have, namely the depravities inherent in them. They would dish out menu they have been used to all their lives.
This hasn’t nourished the world. It has done the opposite: despite the advances in science and technology and medicine, man is joyless, hopeless and helpless.
Our case is like that of the sailors in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.’ The seamen were dying of thirst aboard their troubled ship. Yet, there was water all around them. But it wasn’t potable; it was excessively salty, unfit for consumption. Water, water everywhere, but none to drink.
That’s mankind’s dilemma this age turning out to be the most promising of all that history has experienced on account of our giant strides.
The marvels of science and technology and an intriguing and prodigious offshoot, Artificial Intelligence (AI), are everywhere. But they aren’t giving us fulfillment. They’re rather scaring us, giving us darkness at noon. Only a return to the laws of the Source of lasting peace can deliver us.
This May, GCK is heading for the African nation of Cameroon, where, again, Pastor Kumuyi would be facing the world and be counselling its inhabitants: come to God for soul-cleansing.
.Ojewale is an author and journalist in Ota, Ogun State, Nigeria.
