Sunday Adelaja is a Nigerian-born leader, thinker, philosopher, transformation strategist, pastor, author, and innovator who lives in Kiev, Ukraine. Suffice it to say that he found purpose very early in life and against the odds of race, poverty, and communism. Hence, at 19, he won a scholarship to study in the former Soviet Union. He completed his master’s program at Belorussia State University with distinction in journalism. At 33, he had built the largest evangelical church in Europe—the Embassy of the Blessed Kingdom of God for All Nations—with a congregation that is 98 per cent white.
Born in a very small village in Idomila Ijebu-Ode, Ogun State, Nigeria, Adelaja’s mother abandoned him as a kid, and he does not know his biological. He was raised in a simple Christian setting by his very poor but loving grandmother. At the age of 6, the mysterious deaths of three of his grandmother’s four children in one year marked his entrance into a world of unimaginable hardship. He began going into the bush, picking and selling firewood to survive.
At 12, he met his biological mother and wore his first pair of shoes. When he turned 15, his grandmother died of cancer. Her death broke the wall of bitterness and anger that poverty and her inability to be there for him had erected in his young mind. It dawned on him that his grandmother had sacrificed a lot for him, but he was too consumed in the pursuit of personal attention to notice her efforts. He worked hard in school and, in 1986, got a full scholarship from the Soviet Communist Party to study journalism at Byelorussian State University, USSR, with hopes that he would return to Africa and help spread communism. Man always proposes, but God has an interesting way of disposing.
Although Adelaja grew up Anglican, he was not a practising Christian. Six months before he departed from the USSR, Adelaja was watching a televangelist minister and was so impacted that he invited Jesus Christ to be his personal Lord and Saviour. His thirst for the things of God became unquenchable.
He got the shock of his life when he arrived in Russia. He describes it like this: “When I got to Russia, there was no church, no pastors, no believers, and I needed to survive. Things were very difficult. I thought I was going to lose my life. Three times I thought I was going to be incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital because believers were being sent to psychiatric hospitals, and some of them were deported because they were believers. We couldn’t have any relations with the underground church, so we were just isolated on the campus—the student campus. We had to hide our faith, pray in the toilet, and read the Bible under blankets. But God protected me. I had a very difficult time trying to survive communism. I knew I was giving up, feeling defeated because communism was shrinking me and the brothers and sisters who came as believers—we were all backsliding.
“There was another believer who was my friend. We made a covenant, and we said, ‘We are going to meet every day no matter what we do, no matter where we go, no matter what happens! We are going to meet every day until God does something or heaven opens.’ ”So we made a covenant with ourselves to meet together—not to talk, not to preach, but to intercede and pray together for at least two hours a day. That was the most difficult year of my whole life. I could pray before then for two hours, but to do it every day? Everything fought it. My classmates would come, and you couldn’t pray openly. You were being watched. You were being monitored. We needed to go through hell just to keep that covenant.
“After a year of praying two hours every single day, heaven broke loose. It was like we were no longer under communism. The Spirit of God descended on us like madness. People began to get saved through us. God broke the chains and led us supernaturally to the believers, to the Russian believers in the underground church. We had a breakthrough. We began to fellowship together and preach together.
“That was how my ministry began in 1991. The Holy Ghost began to appear. Whenever I woke up in the morning, I would lie on my bed, cover myself, and pray for one hour, straight in tongues, no English, no Russian, till fire swept through the room.
“After Gorberchev came and there was Perestroika, there was more openness to witnessing the gospel. That was when I realized that God probably stationed me and several others in the backyard of communism to train us in a unique and peculiar way so that we would propagate the gospel in the enclave of communism. From 1991 on, there was more freedom for the gospel, and I started preaching openly around the same time.”
Sunday Adelaja is one of the few individuals in our world who has been privileged to speak in the United Nations, the Israeli Parliament, the Japanese Parliament, and the United States Senate.
The movement he pioneered has been instrumental in reshaping the lives of people in Ukraine, Russia, and about 50 other nations where he has branches. His congregation, which consists of ninety-nine per cent white Europeans, is a cross-cultural model of the church for the 21st century.
His life mission is to advance the Kingdom of God on earth by raising a generation of history-makers who will live for a cause larger and greater than themselves. Those who will live like Jesus and transform every sphere of society in every nation as a model of the Kingdom of God on earth. His economic empowerment program has succeeded in raising over 200 millionaires in a short period of three years.
Sunday Adelaja is the author of over 300 books, many of which are translated into several languages, including Russian, English, French, Chinese, German, etc. His work has been widely reported by world media outlets such as The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Forbes, Associated Press, Reuters, CNN, BBC, and German, Dutch, and French national television stations.
Plan to return to Africa
In one of the interviews, he said that after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Pastor Adelaja said he lost property worth over $4m to the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. He said, “God told me to go back to Africa, and I said what will happen to the church I spent all my life building. He showed me what would happen. I saw a volcano, and I saw members of my church like lava flowing from one country to the other. I saw it vividly, just like what happened to the Jerusalem Church. But I did not know it would happen through war.
“I implore Christians to pray so that the invasion does not escalate.”
Adelaja’s Awards and Honours
He was given The Face of Kiev 2009 in May 2009. The magazine Afisha held the yearly competition, and Adelaja won with more than one-third of the votes, defeating both Bohdan Stupka, the most well-known actor in Ukraine, who came in second, and heavyweight boxer Vitali Klitschko, who came in third.
On Saturday, April 25, 2009, Sunday Adelaja was presented with the inaugural International William J. Seymour Award at the Azusa Street Revival Festival. This honour is granted to ministers who reflect the traits of William J. Seymour, a pioneer of the American Pentecostal movement. Adelaja received the Archbishop Benson Idahosa Award for Missionary Exploits in March 2008 in honour of his humanitarian efforts and involvement in Kiev, Ukraine, and other parts of the world.
Pastor Sunday is happily married to his “Princess” Bose Dere-Adelaja. They are blessed with three children: Perez, Zoe, and Pearl.
*Additional report by GodEmbassy.com