The town welcomed us with a blanket of old brown roofs that suggested its age. It was Saturday afternoon and the township had obviously emptied itself into the farmlands surrounding it. The streets were nearly deserted. It was not any different at the centre of town. Even a motor park nearby was idle. Welcome to Ifewara!
An ongoing project made it mandatory for me to visit Ifewara for a better appreciation of the miracle that is Pastor E. A. Adeboye, General Overseer of the Redeemed Christian Church of God. Ifewara, some 10 minutes drive from Ife, Osun State, is his hometown.
From various accounts and available evidence, it is indeed a miracle that from abject and debilitating depravation has emerged a highly revered man, who heads a church with a massive visible presence in over 184 countries.
Right from Lagos, the GPS on my phone assured me that there was no way one could miss it: from Lagos to Ibadan, continue to Ife, and then Ifewara.
Ife
Lagos to Ife was uneventful. But from there on, we had to ask for directions to Ifewara. The hawkers of akara (bean cake) whom we approached on the outskirts of Ife showed great excitement at the mention of the place. Many of them were eager to direct us. However, with Ife’s many streets, the information could only have been useful to someone who was familiar with the town.
In the end, the choice for a commercial motorcyclist at the town centre became our best bet. Happy to show us the way for a fee, the motorcyclist took us through a network of narrow streets to the outskirts of the town. “Go straight along that road,” he said, pointing at it. “In about 10 minutes, you will come across Daddy Adeboye’s Church on the right and shortly after that you are in Ifewara town.”
Pastor Adeboye’s Church? I had heard about a church he’d built years ago but I had expected it to be within the town, so a church away from town could only be a new church. In any case, it was to be an important landmark for us to look for.
The motorcyclist was wrong! What we saw occupying the whole side of a hill was a beauty to behold. Work was ongoing at the site and so it had not been opened for use.
“Wow, wow, wow,” I kept saying to myself about the suitability of the place for worship and meditation, as our photographer snapped away as many shots as possible from the Ifewara road. We later confirmed from the town that the complex is a “Prayer Mountain’’.
Having seen the “Prayer Mountain”, we continued to Ifewara to look for Pastor Adeboye’s roots.
Miracle guide
As we got down from the car to look for someone to show us around town, a miracle happened. The owner of a motorcycle was parked a few metres away from where we were was prepared to be our guide.
We headed first to the primary school Pastor Adeboye had attended. St. Patrick’s Anglican Primary School, which was founded in 1914, was closed. It was a Saturday. It was a sobering moment to think that Pastor Adeboye attended this school.
While the photographer took shots of the school, my journalist instincts came alive. I engaged our miracle guide in a discussion about how lucky the town is have Pastor Adeboye as a son. In the end, he offered to take us to Pastor Adeboye’s house.
When the guide, who is close to the Adeboyes, took us straight to the living room of the house where Pastor Adeboye was born, I couldn’t believe our luck. There, in the moderately furnished living room we met his oldest sister, an elderly woman called Madam Abigail
Odoyemi Adeboye, and the current head of the family, Mr. Gabriel Bababunmi Adeboye, both half-siblings of the revered pastor.
The family house of three bedrooms, a living room and boys’ quarters that had obviously been the beneficiary of a facelift, still showed signs of Pastor Adeboye’s humble background. I think it should be kept that way.
It was, indeed, a humbling experience to be in that house; an experience reserved to be shared on another day on another platform.
Miracles are generally difficult to explain by mere mortals but I returned to Lagos later that day with a better appreciation of the miracle called Pastor Enoch Adejare Adeboye. This original miracle has birthed numerous other miracles.
But also, with my journalist instincts piqued, there was no way I would have forgotten the developing story of the prayer mountain. Not willing to miss a great story I monitored its progress from Lagos.
Mt. Carmel Prayer Mountain Opened
On May 28, 2015, some 30 years after the idea for a prayer mountain was birthed in Pastor Adeboye and his wife, Pastor (Mrs) Foluke Adeboye, Mummy G. O., in faraway South Korea, the magnificent prayer mountain was opened.
Named Mount Carmel Prayer Mountain, the facility was opened in a quiet ceremony that drew elders and pastors from the RCCG family and dignitaries from Ifewara, as well as workers and volunteers of the project.
Specifically built and fully equipped for its purpose as a prayer village, it is a modern facility of a magnificent mix of dormitories, a sanctuaries, chalets and numerous prayer huts flowing down the slope of a hill, overlooked by bigger residential blocks. There are also halls of various sizes. And to avoid the distraction of going out for one’s daily needs there is a restaurant, bookshop, a supermarket, etc. Of course there is reliable electricity there.
Welcoming guests at the opening ceremony, Pastor (Mrs) Adeboye, who was in charge of the construction, revealed that although the plot of land had been bought by them years ago for a prayer mountain, the land had been lying fallow until about seven years ago when her husband moved for its development.
“Who is going to help you build it?” She said she asked.
And Pastor Adeboye answered: “God, but you will be following His leading to do it.”
As she wondered how she would start, an architect volunteered her services to design the facility, and with the support of engineers and other workers, the forested hill slope turned years later into a beauty to behold.
Tracing the origin of the project, she said: “We had been inspired to build a prayer mountain by what we saw in South Korea in 1985. We went for a David Yonggi Cho prayer conference there, and one afternoon, they took the delegates to their prayer mountain, which we admired so much.
“But then, we said, ‘God, this is South Korea; we travelled almost a whole day to get here. How can we have something like this in Nigeria?’
“So since 1985, we had it in our minds that one day, there would be a prayer mountain of a similar status in Nigeria.”
Explaining the name of the prayer mountain, she said: “We named this Mount Carmel after the Mount Carmel where Prophet Elijah defeated the work of the devil. We also remembered the Mount of Transfiguration in deciding the name.”
What Pastor Adeboye Said
Corroborating his wife’s account, Pastor Adeboye, who spoke later, said, “When we returned from South Korea in 1985, we decided by this Grace of God that there would be a prayer mountain in Nigeria that people from all over the world would come to pray”
I have learnt to report Pastor Adeboye verbatim because the prophetic weight of his words and the power of his testimonies could be lost in paraphrasing.
Continuing, he said: I spoke with late Elder Oyebade about it. I told him “Ifewara was surrounded by mountains, which should I buy to use for a prayer mountain?”
“He laughed and said the mountains partly belonged to Ifewara and partly to Ilesha. And that if I wanted to buy a mountain I had to be well-prepared.
“Anyway, we bought this place, and it was years ago. I had even told the elders of the town that I wanted to build something great for the town. But as we are about to start construction, we faced some challenges. Some people protested that the land was not purchased the right way.
“The challenges were much, but what I had discussed with God about the prayer mountain remained burning in my heart. The way I had planned it, the place should have been built many years ago. But in the face of the enormous challenges, we resorted to building a place called “Halleluyah House” at Redemption camp.
“Yet the passion for the prayer mountain was still burning in my heart. I believed that by the time I was 60 years old, we would have built it, but it was not possible. When I was getting to 70 years old, I remembered that every year after 70 years of a man on earth is extra time.
“To ensure that the dream would not die, and efforts that had been made would not be fruitless, I called my wife and gave her the responsibility to build this prayer mountain.
“My prayer for all of you here today is that God will give you a good wife; a wife to be like a mother. Those who are already married, if your wives are not that good, God will change them; and those who are yet to be married will not pick wrong wives.
“They have mentioned those God used to build this Prayer Mountain, one of who is my daughter Sade. She did the architectural design, after which the engineers and others set to work.
“Normally, when I give a project to someone to do, I don’t go there until it’s completed, but in the case of this project, I came regularly during the construction. I am very happy today. Happy that a dream of 30 years has come to fruition.”
BISI DANIELS
THIS DAY LIVE
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