Living Faith Church Worldwide aka Winners Chapel International. Part 1
By Leke Beecroft
‘The hour has come to liberate the world from all oppression of the devil through the preaching of the word of faith and I am sending you to undertake this task’.
The Mandate as delivered to David Oyedepo in an 18 hour vision-May 1st and 2nd 1981.
If there are any carefully documented stories about Nation-Churches for future generations, the story of the Living Faith Church will be one.©Church Gist. Today, it is the largest Church organisation in the world whose visioner/founder is still alive. We have established that the Nigerian pentecostal
revival was led mainly by university staff and students; the organisation being reviewed in this series, led by another of those ‘students’, took the ‘Church’ concept to a new level with a lot of ground breaking ‘firsts’. Leke Beecroft tells the story of a ministry which was birthed by prophecy and has grown until it has achieved a near nation-status. The story of this Church will not be complete without the name of a young man, well prepared (It is said that he studied 39 biographies of fathers in the faith before commencing ministry) for the assignment which he carries on with till date, a native of Omu-Aran in modern day Kwara State of Nigeria. David Olaniyi Oyedepo, whom God used to birth the ‘Liberation Commission’ as he fondly calls it.
More than any other Nation-Church, this Church has carefully documented her story from inception and put it in the public domain. This ministry started painstakingly after 26 months of prayer and fasting of a 70 man group known as the ‘Power House’, upon receipt of the Mandate by Oyedepo who first shared the vision with his fiancée, Faith Akano, as well as his friends, notable among them-another David-Abioye.©Church Gist. The Church which was meant to be an itinerant ministry at the start soon got instruction to plant churches. In her first decade she established her roots locally, growing from 4 members in December 1983 to becoming the largest Pentecostal church north of Nigeria, the most challenging of all Nigerian regions to plant churches. After the first 5 years of growth in the north in response to the divine directive ‘It is time to spread out’, she moved to the southern region, the bastion of Christianity in Nigeria and continued her expansion drive. The Church arrived Lagos on the instruction ‘Arise, get down to Lagos and raise me a people’ in July 1989 and started off operations there as ‘Winners’ Chapel’, hosting 300 people in her first service. By the start of her second decade, she spread out to the African continent in the African Gospel Invasion Project (A.G.I.P) so quickly and noiselessly that even back home in Nigeria, very few realised any signifant missionary work was happening. The third decade led the Commission to nations outside Africa in an operation called ‘Mission to the World’ (MTW) while in her fourth decade, under the directive ‘I, the God of wonder double, am visiting you’ , is presently involved in consolidation in terms of rapid numerical increase, expansion of existing spiritual and administrative structures and construction of required infrastructure to cater for the attendant increase. All these has led to the birth of one of the Nation Churches of the world today.©Church Gist.
What exactly is a Nation-Church and when does a church institution become one?
The three million Israelites led by ‘Pastor’ Moses, who marched out of Egypt towards Canaan can be considered the first Nation-Church scripturally. The term Nation-Church is therefore thus defined:
A church, numbering over a million members, which has grown into a major group or conglomerate of several Mega-Churches and with a reach and spread internationally, that she is now a veritable source of influence within and outside her foundational Base and as such is now respected the world over.
Such a church in Nigeria must fulfill several requirements such as:
*Physical presence in terms of membership, structures and facilities in all Nigerian states and her capital (100 percent local coverage).©Church Gist.
*Physical presence in at least 4 continents (more than half) of the world and not less than 58 foreign nations (a quarter of the countries of the world) spread over these continents.
*Online presence in at least 120 nations (about half of the countries of the world).
*Membership of not less than 1 million people.
*Facilities and infrastructure to administer followers and organise large gatherings.
*Minimum of a thousand branches in Nigeria and another 500 branches cumulatively in other nations of the world.
*Self funded: No sponsorship or funding by any external agency or organisation.
*Annual budgets running into multi-million dollars or same size with several other nations.
*An established international headquarters with functional administrative structures.
*Numerous other organisations such as welfare organizations, schools, colleges, media houses and other institutions, established for the goal of the “Nation-Church” and which have inherent power to influence nations in which she has been domiciled.
*An organised system of succession.
The Mandate, the constitution of The Living Faith Church Worldwide is one of the most detailed records of new generation churches in the world today. The Mandate relates how the name ‘Livng Faith Church’ was coined. On October 4, 1981, while before the Lord in Jos, Nigeria and writing a letter to his then fiancée under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, David Oyedepo, then a 26 year old man wrote “...the Living Faith is the acting faith and the acting faith is the winning faith; and the winning faith is the conqueror’s faith’. Thus came the name, the LIVING FAITH WORLD OUTREACH CENTER.©Church Gist.
The Living Faith World Outreach Center (LFWOC) is a Christian missionary organization, whose primary objective is the general development and upliftment of mankind by stirring up the God given potentials embedded in people of all race and nations through the propagation of the gospel of Jesus Christ.
The church was commissioned in Kwara State, Northern Nigeria on September 17, 1983 by Pastor Enoch Adejare Adeboye of the Redeemed Christian Church of God. At inception, Pastor David Oyedepo was instructed to move to Kaduna. The Kaduna Church consisted of four members and started in December 1983. During a Powerhouse meeting in April 1982, Brother David Oyedepo listed seven areas where God had spoken to him concerning the future of the ministry. He stated that "at the base of the commission will be a tent which will sit 50,000 people". He added, very soon there will be millions gathering at the base to listen to the gospel. He said he saw them flying with the gospel on wings which showed that soon the ministry will have her own aircraft. Also, that the whole world will soon be able to hear the message of the commission from the base-live. At that time, there was no internet. At the inception of the ministry, David Oyedepo got instruction to commit the spoken word into writing. This led to the establishment of the Dominion Publishing House which has produced over 10 million book copies till date.
In 1987 while in the United States he got an instruction from God to "Get back home and make my people rich". This served as a major thrust for the prosperity message of the commission. He was ordained as a "Bishop" by the late Archbishop Benson Idahosa of the Church of God Mission in 1988. During the church's Easter faith convention in April 1987, Pastor David Oyedepo announced that the church was to begin to spread out and on 27 May,1987, exactly a month later, the first five branches of the church were established in Mubi, Azare, Biu, Maiduguri and Bauchi. In 1989, Bishop Oyedepo received a vision from God to "Get down to Lagos and raise me a people". By this time, the Kaduna Church had grown to about 3,000 people. By December 1993, the Lagos church had 3,000 worshippers and by December 1994 it had increased to 10,000 members. In 1996, Archbishop Benson Idahosa dedicated the church's Iyana Ipaja facility located at Raji Oba street. This consisted of a 3,000 seater auditorium with overflow facilities for 30,000 as well as an eight (8) floor tower which was the World Mission Agency headquarters. This facility was already largely inadequate in less than 2 years of its existence.©ChurchGist. The church membership increased to 50,000 in single services by the middle of 1999. The Dominion Cathedral at the Garden of Faith, the first headquarters at Kaduna was dedicated on December 1 1995.
Driving back to Kaduna from Zaria after a meeting on May 4 1994, Bishop Oyedepo heard a call from God that "The harvest of Africa was over-ripe and that he should rush in and preserve it from decadence". On May 8, 1994,the mandate was dedicated with a giant map of Africa and on January 15, 1995, the first missionaries left the shores of Nigeria. As at January 2017, Winners Chapel has more than 1,000 branches in at least 63 cities in 48 African countries as well as in other countries in the Americas, Europe and Asia. There are branches of Winners Chapel in the USA in cities like Houston, Georgia, New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Chicago, Dallas, Philadelphia, Minnesota, Atlanta and Massachusetts. There are also branches in the UK, UAE, Belgium, Phillipines, The Caribbean, Canada, China, Malaysia, South Korea and Japan among others all over the world; in Nigeria alone, there are over 7,000 local branches with Delta State having 505 branches alone making it the highest in Nigeria. In the Lagos area, there are over 2,000 zonal fellowships (midweek churches with about 100 people each) and about 28,000 satellite fellowships or home cells. The Zonal fellowships would normally stand as independent churches, however Bishop Oyedepo insists that one central church in Lagos remains his mandate.©ChurchGist. The number of Winners’ Chapel churches grew from about 700 worldwide in December 2009 to 2,500 by October 2010 before the present figure of 8,000 branches worldwide. The Church has witnessed souls saved in hundreds of thousands annually. For instance, souls saved from January to October 2013 in Faith Tabernacle alone numbered over 65,000 people and all these were given scholarships at the Word of Faith Bible Institute. New converts continue to enjoy scholarships at the Bible School. Faith Tabernacle attendance has also averaged 400,000 people on Sundays making her the world’s largest weekly congregation.
The Commission has 12 ‘Pillars’ known as The Pillars of Faith. The Pillars are The Word, Faith, The Supernatural, The Holy Spirit, Prosperity, Prayer, Healing, Wisdom, Success, Vision, Consecration and Praise.©Church Gist.
to be continued...
Leke Beecroft is an author, historian, artist and Air Traffic Controller.
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