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Good day, Sir. Please can we meet you
My name is Pst. JideOgunsakin, I am the Senior Pastor of New Kingdom Church International Abuja, Nigeria, I am also the CEO of Digitflex Global Limited and VGA Properties Construction Limited.
Kindly share with us Sir, your salvation experience and brief highlight of your Christian race from childhood.
Tell us Sir, how did you discover your call into ministry?
When I got to Living Faith, the oil caught up with me there, even when I didn’t tell anybody about my personal encounter everything began opening up for me after I got there. I started from scratch, underwent another water baptism, and attended the believer’s foundation school again even though I was already an ordained Minister. Within a relatively short period of time, my superiors began to see the grace of God upon me and began to give me assignments. That was how I graduated to become a Pastoral Assistant in Living Faith Church until the time came when God said it was time for me to go and start a work for Him. I asked Him what He wanted me to do as I was already well settled at Living Faith Church. I didn’t want to leave. I love Living Faith Church and I was already at a point when I was supposed to start enjoying the place and another call started coming. So, I said to God I wouldn’t go until I hear directly from the mouth of the man of God you asked me to serve under. At that time, I was serving under Bishop Abioye in Abuja. I went to meet him and told him my story, what the Lord said to me. He told me God did not send me to come to him that I should go and see Bishop Oyedepo that he is the one God sent me to, he is the one that will give me the right word.
He told us the day I got to the headquarters that he didn’t want to see anybody. There were a lot of people waiting to see him; including top personalities, he told everybody he couldn’t see anybody. Suddenly I saw a man who had served under me in Living Faith Abuja. He asked, what I was doing there at the headquarters and I told him I came to see Papa, and he said he didn’t think that was going to be possible because Papa had said he didn’t want to see anybody. I told him that is why God brought him out to see me. So, I asked him to go in there and make it happen. Suddenly, Papa’s PA came out. He was a superior to this particular Papa’s PA so he called the PA, introduced me to him saying “this is my Pastor, he is my boss in the ministry and he is a son of the Bishop, please he wants to see Papa, can you just go in and tell Papa that his son Pastor JideOgunsakin from Durumi Church wants to see him?”. The PA said, that would be difficult, also repeating that Papa had said he wasn’t ready to see anyone that day. He then went in and casually relayed the message to Bishop Oyedepo that his son Pastor JideOgunsakin from Durumi Church, Abuja was there to see him and that he had told him Bishop didn’t want to see anyone but he insisted. To his surprise, Bishop asked him to allow me in. That was how Papa agreed to attend to me alone that day. I went in and prostrated before him and as I stood up and was about to start talking he told me to be silent. Already I was holding my seed offering in my right hand and my anointing oil in my left hand. He collected the seed and gave to his PA and said to me “God bless you”. He then took the oil from me, dipped his middle finger in the oil and put it on my head and to my utter amazement said “this is the right time, go and start that work that God asked you to start”.
I was shocked to my bone marrow to say the least because he did not ask me anything, neither did he allow me even speak. As I came out of his office, my head was spinning. How did he know that was the message I came to confirm? I was thinking he will ordain me as a full Pastor since I was already a Pastoral Assistant at Durumi church; that was my expectation and I already told God I would adhere to whatever he says. I would have preferred to enjoy the grace of God already functional there; it would have been easier for me than to go and start on my own but now he had just caught me off guard and I could not run away from God. I came out and that was it. God actually brought me here because his word says “in the mouth of two or three witnesses, a matter shall be established”. I went back to Abuja and upon my return, on the very first night, I slept and, in a dream, I saw the name of the church “New Kingdom Ministry International”. I called my Lawyer to go and register the name immediately with all necessary government and regulatory agencies and in their usual professional way, he said I had to write down three names to toggle between just in-case the name I gave was already registered. I told him that I knew nothing about three names and that this is the name God gave to me and there is no way it would be already taken because My God is not an author of confusion. He insisted that the name looks too common and he thought that such a name would already be registered. I told him to go and register it and that GOD would not give me a name that already exists. He went and did the search and said the name does not exist with the CAC. That is how New Kingdom Ministry International was registered and that is how it all started.
Sir, how long have you been in the ministry as the pioneer of the ministry God entrusted in your care?
The ministry has been in existence now for twelve years.
How have you been able to successfully combine family commitments, highly demanding spiritual and physical engagements of ministry with the daily running of other establishments?
Sir, every servant of God has at one point or the other faced challenges in life or ministry, can you share with us your most difficult challenges in ministry and how were you able to weather the storm?
Well, I won’t lie to you, ministry work in itself is full of challenges. If I say there are no challenges, that will be a big fat lie but I also don’t see them. Challenges come but I focus more on the solutions – I always see the victory before anything else. You see, what you see and what you say when you are faced with challenges determine how it all plays out. So, when challenges and adversity come, and you stay focused on them rather than the solutions, you will remain there with the problems but when they come and you have trained your mind to see and confess what God is seeing and saying concerning you as His child, those challenges disappear just like smoke carried away with the wind. Remember how the devil came to Jesus and disappeared suddenly because Jesus did not give attention to him. What you don’t give attention to would come and go. So, challenges come but most challenges that I have had are from the people and most helps that I have equally received are from the people likewise. So how does one handle that? When the people are your strength and they are your weakness as well, it takes the Holy Spirit to be able to help you solve that – to be able to know those who are real and those who are not because He knows everything and everyone. Jesus told his disciples thus “it is expedient that I go but I am going to send you a comforter, the Holy Spirit. If I don’t go, he will not come but if I go, he will come and he will guide you into all truth”. So, when you release your life to the Holy Spirit, He helps you in so many ways; only those who release their lives to be helped are helped, they enjoy the ministry of help.
Can you kindly tell us the high points of God’s blessings, miracles, testimonies, signs and wonders in your life and ministry over the years?
I can say that I am a blessed child. Sometimes I look at myself and I feel that I don’t deserve what God has done for me. I tell God sometimes that even if He doesn’t answer my prayers anymore, I can’t thank Him enough for the ones He has answered already. That is how gracious God has been to me. By the special grace of God in these past years, God has done so much. I don’t want to be a celebrity in the successes of the past. However, because you have asked and to encourage others out there I will mention some because I am one of the people that preach that people shouldn’t stay celebrating the successes of the past and I don’t equally remember past mistakes. I always forge ahead. That was what Paul the apostle said: “I will forge ahead, leaving behind the things that are behind”. My point is that whatever it is, I just want to encourage people, I am not saying it to boast of myself rather, I am saying it to boast in the name of the Lord. Also, I am not focusing on that past any more. I am trusting God for a better future.
However, by God’s grace, I have been used by God to raise five deaths in my life. One of the ministries God has given to me is that it is not difficult for me to pray for the dead whom God wants to raise back to life through me. I was in India in a crusade where the son of the lead choir minister died, he was sick before the crusade started and while we were in the crusade on the last day, the boy died at the hospital and I asked them to go and bury the boy. In fact, I was already going, because I was fasting. I had fasted for 21 days without food; I was just drinking water so my mind was already programmed to just go and break my fast. So, as we finished the crusade that day I was going to enter the car when the man ran to me and held my leg. I had preached in those meetings the power and authority in the word of God, one of the illustrations I shared with them in that meeting which was a 17,000 open air crusade, was how God used me in the United States. I was at the airport in Philadelphia, in the process of boarding a plane when my phone rang and someone told me they want to fly me into Maryland to come and pray for their son who had just died in the incubator. I said I didn’t have to travel down to Maryland as I was on my way to a revival in Columbus. I told them to allow me pray for the child over the phone – after all, I am not the one who has the power to bring him back to life anyway. Jesus is the one who will do it and He is right there with you so I don’t have to fly into Maryland. I told them to put the phone on loudspeaker mode and put the phone in the incubator and I prayed. Immediately I was done praying for the infant, I put the phone off and entered into the aircraft. I landed and went straight into the meeting, after the revival program that night I switched on my phone and a few minutes later, my phone rang and behold, it was the same family. They told me “praise God, immediately you prayed in less than two minutes the boy jerked back to life”.
They would eventually go on to name the boy after me. So there in India, the man held onto my leg and said,” man of God, you won’t go”. God has used you to raise the dead previously; I believe God brought you here because of me. I was beginning to become impatient as my mind was on the food waiting for me so I asked God, “Lord are you going to bring him back”? I wanted to know if God was interested in bringing him back. If He wasn’t, I would just enter into the car and leave. Fortunately, God told me this scenario was for His glory to be made manifest; that is why He permitted it to happen. He told me to tell them to bring him to the altar and He will tell me what to do, I didn’t even know what to do. They brought him and put him on the altar and I went back to ask God what it was He wanted us to do and He answered and said we should just worship Him. We began to worship the beauty of His holiness, while we were at it, the keyboardist kept starring at the boy so I told him to stay focused on the keyboard and take his eyes off the boy. I told the Father to worship God in a way he had never done before. By the time we had worshipped for 10 minutes, the boy sneezed and came back to life. I wasn’t even looking at the boy, I was just worshipping God, they were worshipping in their language while I just knelt down worshipping in the spirit and he came back to life. There are so many other miracles like this one, so many of them. The one that happened in my neighborhood was in like manner. One major area of my calling is to help people get wealth. By coming in contact with me, you only need to release your faith and things begin to happen naturally. Things that you previously struggled for begin to happen with ease for you because of God’s anointing. Also, is the grace to heal the sick – I mean instant healing and instant deliverance. I don’t struggle to deliver the oppressed. In my entire life, the only deliverance that I have done that seemed to shake me a little was one lady that was brought to my church for deliverance. I tried to deliver her as usual and it wasn’t working, the lady wanted to tear me up and I said God what shall I do and God said worship me.I knelt down, took my eyes off her and shut my eyes. The lady was really violent. I lifted my hands and worshipped God and as I was worshipping, before 15 minutes, the girl was delivered. One thing I have discovered in my ministry is that, it is a ministry of ease. God told me as I was entering into ministry that difficult things shall be made easy for me. The things that are difficult for others, He will make easy for me. This is the covenant promise upon which my ministry stands. So, whenever I encounter challenges I remind God about what He said to me that difficult things shall be made easy for me. He is a covenant-keeping God. He will always bring His word to pass.
Nigeria as a nation is faced with many challenges, from high level of insecurity to insurgency, brain drain, inflation, unemployment, failing educational system, epileptic power supply, and widespread corruption and so on, largely due to failure on the part of most of our political leaders. What can we do to have a more people oriented and God-fearing political leaders?
One of the most instructive things I am going to tell you today is that, the solution to the challenges of every nation of the world is with the Church – whether we accept it or not. The bulk of the solution to the general societal malaise we witness today rests squarely on the shoulders of the church and until she takes up her responsibility in solving and resolving the problems of nations via the proper building of the human mind and by extension, the society at large, nations will remain in dilemma. This is the plain truth. Now, talking specifically about our dear country Nigeria, God has answered our prayers already. If you seek a country that prays, I don’t think you will find many like Nigeria. Yet Nigeria is still in a mess, this is because the church hasn’t woken up from her slumber over this nation. There is the place of prayer and there is the place of action – there is the place of raising people. They keep saying Nigeria will not be great because the Bible says when the unrighteous rule, the people mourn but when the righteous are in authority, the people rejoice. Isn’t that what the Bible says? The church is not encouraging her youths and her well-meaning members to go into politics – to actively engage in participatory politics. This is not only counterintuitive, it is altogether wrong. The truth remains that there is enormous power in preaching; it is what we preach on the altar that manifests in the life of the people. If you are not preaching about politics and releasing the people of the church to go into the field of politics in Nigeria, the unrighteous people will continue to rule us and the people will continue to mourn and be sad. That is what will happen and that’s what is happening in the country. God has answered our prayers. It is time for us to take deliberate measures in raising men and women in the church to go out there and take their place in the political space. The political throne of this country is not meant for a select set of people; it is meant for all and if we take our place and the church helps we would soon be singing a whole new song of true hope. There is money and influence in the church but are we using the money just to erect buildings? I am not against building befitting edifices for the worship of our God. As a matter of fact, it is good and a desirable thing to build comfortable places of worship for God. What I am saying however is that we must also extend our projects into the Nations of the world. An adage amongst the Yoruba people of south-western Nigeria goes thus: “the peace of the tree is the peace of the birds nested therein”. The Bible instructs us to “pray for the peace of Jerusalem”. If you are comfortable but living in an uncomfortable nation, how long do you think your comfort can last? That’s the million-dollar question. That’s why I encourage people in my own capacity, as many people as I possibly can. There are a number of people that I have encouraged to pick up forms and contest electable positions. I accord them all the necessary support within the ambit of my capacity. I pray for them and because of my backing, they have developed the boldness to go into partisan politics. By the special grace of God, I have been able to raise a few politicians in this country and we are still trusting God to raise more within our limited capacity. If every man of God, especially those who are already standing as major pillars in the body of Christ – our fathers in the faith – can begin to look into this aspect, I think Nigeria will be a better place because life is not all about praying alone. A man of faith is a man that works. The Bible says if we remove work from faith how can you say you have faith? If we pray and we don’t act for the nation, for people in the church to take over in the political spaces in the nation, then it means that we have not worked. We have to work for our faith to be manifested. This, in my humble opinion is what I presume we need. I would like to use this opportunity and medium to ask the Senior Pastors and the General Overseers of mega ministries to encourage their people. I love what the RCCG have done. They have established a political platform. I think Pst. Femi Immanuel is the chairman of that committee. They are tried to see how they can encourage Christians to take a shot at active politicking. I hail that move. We need more of that so that more Christians can participate in politics. We are lagging behind politically. Having a strong representation in the corridors of power in a country is very helpful to the general well-being of the church. The church must wake up because it was while men slept the enemy came to sow tares.
It is clear that beyond fasting and praying for Nigeria, men of God have more to do in helping to better the fortunes of Nigeria as a country.
What is your take on this, sir?
This is quite a difficult question. The truth is, there are problems of every sort, ranging from insecurity, to poor power supply and all that. At my little level, there are certain things I am trying to do with some of my partners in the USA. The team from the USA was set to come down to Nigeria to help in tackling issues bothering on infrastructure, education and real estate. The plan was partly to build residential apartments in all 36 states in Nigeria and the FCT with the aim of making these homes affordable for average Nigerians by establishing a structured payment system that will be quite supportive. They are a Christian organization and the financial resources had been made available. Everything was set for their initial visit to Nigeria before Covid struck and we unfortunately lost the Team Lead to Covid. Though we experienced a temporary setback, our initial plans are still in the pipeline. The organization is still trying to regroup after the demise of its leader. The vision of the Leader is still very much alive and his deputy who has stepped into his shoes is working with us to ensure that this laudable dream sees the light of day. We trust on God that it will not take too long before work resumes in bringing that dream to fruition. I am trying to see what I can do to help our nation, Nigeria because I love Nigeria. I am based here and this is where I come from, I am proud to be Nigerian and I want Nigeria to be great. This is why I am always willing to do whatever I can within my own limited capacity to contribute my humble quota to societal development.
Sir, what steps have you taken to disciple and mentor youths. How are you helping to instill integrity in them?
Well, the way out is to keep teaching, keep preaching the truth and keep talking about it. The Bible says, faith cometh by hearing and hearing by the word of God. The more we keep pumping the word of integrity, the better for us. However, that doesn’t stop some from being who they choose to be. If Jesus Christ, with all of his power and great report still had somebody like Judas Iscariot among the twelve, who then are we? So, we do our best in teaching and raising people the right way. We must continue to teach about integrity and honesty in the Church and apart from these teachings, we must know that the words of our mouth do not speak as much as our characters – our general way of living. Our character speaks more volume than our words so we must live by example. Having the right attitude and lifestyle enhances the messages we preach on the altar.
Sir, what are the key factors behind your success in ministry and life generally?
The secret of my success and life generally is centered on God. I’ve always said that you cannot work for God and not walk with Him. Unless you walk with God, your work for God won’t yield fruits. So, I just allow the Holy Spirit to take over. All I do and achieve are all God’s doing.
Sir, it’s your birthday, what are you most grateful to God for, celebrating another year in the land of the living?
I am so grateful for the gift of life and the gift of salvation.
Sir. You are celebrating your golden jubilee and yet you look much younger than your age, what’s the secret and what’s your advice for other God’s ministers on living healthy and staying young?
Every good thing in life is by the grace of God. My look, my life and my entire being is as a result of His grace. Also, it’s important that people love God and take care of themselves.
Thank you so much for this awesome time with TIMELESS FACTS MAGAZINE, God bless you Sir, please your closing remark.
By way of closing, I dare say that it pays to serve God – by this, I mean service to God with one’s totality. I am where I am today because I gave my all-in following God. Jesus told Peter to forget about other things and follow Him. Let’s carry our cross and follow Christ. It might be challenging initially but it pays ultimately. If you serve God properly, He will honor you. Revelation 5:12 talks about the benefits of redemption – everything you’ll ever need – blessings, power, riches, wisdom, glory and honor are for those who serve God with everything.
Thank you to everyone at Timeless Facts Magazine for having me. God bless you all.
