The Pentecostal Fellowship of Nigeria (PFN) recently celebrated its 40th anniversary with a thanksgiving and veterans’ award service themed ‘PFN: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow,’ at the Redemption Camp. The event was a time of reflection and gratitude, honouring the fellowship’s remarkable journey and divine impact in shaping Nigeria through spiritual revival. It also served to recognise the founding fathers and veterans, including the late Dr Uma Ukpai and other notable men and women of God, for their invaluable contributions to the PFN’s growth. In a chat with journalists during the celebration, Bishop Francis Wale Oke, National President of the PFN and Presiding Bishop of The Sword of the Spirit Ministries, highlighted the fellowship’s positive impact nationwide, Ayoyinka Jegede reports.
We are celebrating today because God has been faithful. God has blessed the PFN hugely and to a very great extent, the vision of the founding fathers of bringing the Pentecostal believers together in unity under one umbrella has been fulfilled, and it’s still been fulfilled from generation to generation.
PFN has made a great, positive and milestone impact in our nation, Nigeria. In the preaching of the gospel, and the changing the hearts of people from evil to good, from sin to righteousness. The only weapon that can change the hearts of people is the gospel of Christ. When people receive the gospel of Christ, their lives change.
We preach the gospel all over, and God has blessed it. Also, we teach people that only God through Jesus Christ saves, and we disciple them to live godly lives. The Bible says godliness with contentment is a great gain. So, we teach them to be true disciples of Christ and all over the nation for years. And then again, we pray for this nation every day. The Bible says the effectual fervent prayer of the righteous availeth much. The prayers of the saints are helping Nigeria; Nigeria would have collapsed but for the prayers of the people. One renowned man of God said the only thing we need to do for the nation to collapse is to stop praying. The moment we stop praying, evil will take over. So, the prayers of our members, we have them in millions, have prevented the enemy, the evil, from taking over our nation. And we give glory to God for that. Also, we are thankful to God for the huge landmark impacts PFN has made in this country. We cannot forget to mention a few landmarks that the PFN has stepped into in the nation, whether as an institution or as members of our fellowship. You talk about our impact on the educational sector, look around, count the number of private universities, Christian universities, you will see that Pentecostals have the largest number of universities. You look at the secondary schools, primary and nursery schools, it’s the same way.
Apart from the educational sector, we have also made a lot of impact even in the health sector, one of the earliest private health facilities was by our Archbishop Benson Idahosa of blessed memory in Benin, Edo State. And it cuts across, whether by Pentecostal professionals or by the churches, as Pentecostals, we are making positive impacts among the industrialists. We cannot forget the impact of certain individuals who are industrialists in this nation and are Pentecostals. Now, you look at the political sector. We have major Pentecostal people in the political arena who are making major positive impacts, whether in the executive, legislative, or judiciary. The fact that they are there doing something major has an impact because what we teach them, what they learn from church, becomes a marketplace activity.
Can you tell us some of the teachings you give to your members that are transforming the nation?
The entire Pentecostal teaches the basics of the scriptures. We teach salvation through the shedding of the blood of Jesus Christ. We teach redemption back to God through Jesus Christ. We teach turning people back to God. This nation could have had several names worse than what it is today, but for God’s words that are being taught in churches, particularly in Pentecostal. This nation is standing by God’s Grace through prayers. If with prayers we still have the challenges that we are having right now, without prayers, what do you think our nation would have looked like?
What have been the positive impacts of PFN on Nigeria?
The impact of the Pentecostals is actually felt across different sectors in this nation. You know how many Pentecostals are governors, legislators, and even in the military. If the nation is getting certain results from them, then they have helped the nation, and we thank God for their lives.
However, I think there is a need to begin to check our narrative about our country, Nigeria. There are positive things in this country. Recently, there’s been a rumour about a coup, and everybody is standing up and saying, we don’t want a coup. It should not happen in this nation. I heard one journalist say, we are seated in this office, criticising the government, making presentations. It’s because we are in a democracy. Bring in the military, and everybody will know the difference. There are good things in Nigeria, and we should begin to identify those things, talk about them, even as we talk about the things that we want to be improved upon. The aspect of just talking always about negative things is not actually right, because if Nigeria is as bad as we think, none of us would still be here.
What should Nigerians expect from PFN as a Christian body?
We will keep praying for Nigeria. We will do more of it because our nation needs more prayers, and until we get to the El Dorado, where we can say it is Uhuru, we will not stop praying for this nation because the importance of prayer cannot be overemphasised.
Secondly, we will continue to teach more of the things that can help Nigerians to be who they ought to be, from the perspectives of the scriptures. There’s so much the scriptures have to teach about righteousness that exalts a nation. There’s so much the scripture has to teach about living right with our neighbours.
There’s so much the scripture has to teach about peace in our nation, as well as governance in our nation. And we are looking forward, by the grace of God, to bring those things up much more.
We will intensify more efforts to teach the people the need for a rebirth in our nation in different aspects. Though the rebirth won’t happen overnight but undoubtedly, you keep building, just as we emphasised during our last Biennial conference, there is a need for a rebirth in this country, and we’ll keep teaching on that.
How are you uniting the body?
By God’s Grace, PFN is one body, and one of our key purposes for coming together is that we might be one. One of Jesus Christ’s prayers in John Chapter 17 is that the church may be one. If, as at that time, Jesus was praying for the unity of the church, it means that he saw a challenge ahead, and he was talking to the Father to do all things and ensure that the church that comes out of him comes together as one.
We are ensuring that with true Biblical teachings, true exemplary Christian life, we work together to achieve God’s purpose, and we keep building it up more and more. Our capacity, by the grace of God, to be able to bring the different leaders in the Pentecostal together, and be able to have teachings, buildings, praying, dialogue among ourselves, resolving issues that come our way, has all been yielding positive purposes.
Insecurity has been a major challenge in this country; in what way has PFN been helping in stemming this?
Like I said, our strongest weapon is spiritual. We are praying too. We believe God is answering our prayers, and we shall continue to pray; however, that does not mean we don’t have other things that we do. Most times, we help to douse the tension in the nation by talking to our people about the need to see what we can do with all hands on deck to fight insecurity, with the government taking the lead.
What is PFN doing to move Nigeria forward, better the lives of Nigerians?
We are praying for Nigeria and Nigerians in and outside the country, irrespective of their religious affiliations, ethnic biases or tribe. We pray for the government at all levels. We pray for the world at large. We propagated the need for unity and oneness in this country irrespective of religious affiliations, tribe or ethnic differences.
We teach our people to have a positive commitment to the growth of this nation. Also, the level of awareness that we are also giving our people about governance and politics is a major contribution of the PFN. I will give you an example. We now have a department in the PFN, called the Department of Politics and Governance, headed by a former Deputy Speaker of the House of Assembly, who is now a preacher, a pastor, and a prominent person in Nigeria. Reverend Femi Emmanuel, that Department is educating Pentecostals, educating churches to see the need to enter into governance and show practical examples of how things ought to be done. That department is synthesising and encouraging Pentecostals not to leave governance just to the people, because if you don’t enter into the ring, you can’t join in the fight. We do not want to stay only at the point of praying, we want to prayerfully raise people who have a Godly character and the godliness that can be presented in the marketplace to show examples of what Christian living is, even in the public square. That department has done so much in not only educating Pentecostals and the Church of Jesus Christ on the issue of politics, but making Pentecostals to see the need to be part of governance from the point of election, participating in political activities, to the point of being elected into office, and then getting there and showing the practicality of how governance ought to be.
I think that is a major contribution, because in the 40 years of the PFN, we have not had things like that. If you do know that early in the Christian faith, you hear people say, politics and Christianity do not go together, you leave it for them, for the people. But we have now found out that rather than talking and praying for the people alone, we need to go in there, we need to teach people to see the need to vote and be voted for, as well as being part of governance by taking elective offices, and see to it that by the reason of what such individuals achieve in governance, project the image of Jesus Christ, and of course the Pentecostal.
Before now, there’s this apathy, there’s this no politics in church thing, you don’t have to do anything with politics, it’s for them thing, then, and that has thrown people into governance that we eventually cannot control. Now we have moved from the point of complaining to active participation in politics. And I think it’s an important thing, not just for the church, but for the nation at large you can imagine if the church mobilize the people, the other religions also mobilize the people, rather than watching and see what’s happened, we teach them about voters’ education, we teach them about their right to governance, we teach them about the need to know how to demand accountability from elected officers.
That will have a long-term impact on the nation. I think that’s a major contribution.
How has PFN significantly, positively contributed to the growth and development of this country?
In many ways. First, fundamentally the Bible says righteousness exalts a nation, sin is a reproach to any people, so we teach ourselves and our people to live a life of righteousness that is acceptable before God. You see, when light shines, it drives darkness away. Nigeria would have been filled and taken over by darkness but for the presence of the saints of God. I used the word saints because every believer who is born again is a saint of God.
PFN promotes righteousness- leading people to Christ, from sin to righteousness, from the devil to Christlikeness, and we are doing that on a daily basis. Before, we were few in number and negligible but now we are over 65 million in PFN and is growing, and apart from turning people to righteousness, we teach them to live a Godly life because if you are a true child of God you won’t steal, you won’t engage in corrupt practices, you won’t live in sin and you will fear God and do God’s will.
PFN is an agent of transformation, and we have been transforming people’s lives spiritually and, in all facets, including homes/marriages. Apart from that, in the education sector, we have so many primary and secondary schools that are based on the Christian faith, where the young ones are being taught the ways of righteousness and Godliness right from their childhood. We give them the best education and mental development, and not just that, we teach our students moral values, spiritual values, we teach them to be Godly and fear God. We are raising our children to be great leaders of this nation, not only in primary and secondary schools, even in our tertiary institutions.
As the National President of PFN, I took a cursory look across the nation to assess what we have done, and I counted 27 private universities that are faith-based, that are within the fold of PFN. In our universities, there is no room for strike, you can tell from the day your ward enters the university when he will graduate, and that doesn’t change. There is zero tolerance for cultism. Cultism is never heard in our faith-based tertiary institutions and universities. There is zero tolerance for hard drugs.
I am a proprietor and Chancellor of Precious Cornerstone University. You can’t hear of a strike, no cultism. There is zero tolerance for promiscuity, sexual abuse, or sexual harassment, whether among staff or among students, no! We raise our students in an atmosphere of Godliness, and we give them the best form of education and educational exposures with our partners abroad across Europe, North America, Canada and others. We use our influence to do exchange programmes between other universities and Nigerian universities, and our children are coming tops, and they have good jobs and are living Godly lives with positive major contributions. We also train them in entrepreneurial skills, which make them self-independent. Again, in the midst of the economic hardship of Nigeria, we have welfare packages and palliatives to encourage our people. We don’t stop at palliatives; we create jobs, the schools that we establish, we employ qualified teachers and administrators in hundreds of thousands of our schools across the country.
In our universities, we have management, lecturers, and non-academic staff, and we create jobs on our campuses. We employ architects, civil, mechanical, electrical and different types of engineers. We employ builders, artisans, bricklayers, carpenters and others.
We are driving the economy, and a lot of our universities have farms where foods are produced. We teach our students to be job and wealth creators, not just carrying papers around looking for jobs. Those who graduated from our universities are not only self-employed, they are also employers of labour. That gives joy. We are positively contributing to Nigeria’s economy day after day in a huge way.
How does PFN ensure accountability of its members?
You need to understand that the PFN has several leadership roles that we are bringing together. Unlike other arms, where you have the Catholics, everybody under the Catholic, you have the ECWA and others, but in the Pentecostals, you have several General Overseers of churches. Bringing all of them together cannot be an easy thing. One of the most challenging situations about the Pentecostal fellowships is the very many different leaders who are independent, as it were.
And then because the Pentecostals, apart from teaching the word and praying, even when an herbalist hangs a collar and does things and messes up Christian ethics, they are called Pentecostals. So how do you check this? The best we could do is to continue to teach, continue to pray, and continue to bring everybody together to see how you can make everybody fall in line. Even if you talk about the need to discipline people, it’s a voluntary organisation under God.
There is a limit to which you can go in compelling the individual persons to follow whatever you think is the right thing to be done you can only be at the point of appealing to the understanding of God’s Word by the individual, you can be a check over them from the dimension of praying for them, encouraging them, organizing conferences and programs where people are taught, and then we are introducing a few things that can help us distinguish who is a Pentecostal church member or not. For example, we are raising registers across the nation such that when things happen and they say it’s a Pentecostal person, we want to check our register to know if that person is truly our own member, because it’s not every Pentecostal church that actually submits to the Pentecostal fellowship. So, we are raising registers such that we can confirm who is ours and who is not ours when things happen.
