Avia Ustanny, Outlook Writer 
Ukraine-based minister Sunday Adelaja has a programme which he believes can improve national leadership and reduce crime. - Carlington Wilmot/Freelance Photographer
"THE CHURCH should get involved in politics. It is not God who supports a separation between church and state. All the best people have left politics to those who are mediocre, to those who do not have the required values to create positive change."
This is the opinion of Sunday Adelaja pastor, motivational speaker and writer of 35 books who visited Jamaica recently at the invitation of Fellowship Tabernacle Ministries, which held a church leaders conference at the National Arena in October.
LARGEST CONGREGATION
The pastor is head of the largest white congregation in the Ukraine and has frequently put his money where his mouth is. He has been responsible for the entry to politics of several Unkrainian ministers and promises that, by the next general election in this former Russian province, at least two Christian parties will be well positioned to run in the democratic elections.
In Kyiv, Ukraine, where Adelaja pastors a congregation of 20,000, over 20 services are held every Sunday in various auditoriums with over 50 daughter churches functioning in the Kyiv region. In other areas of the Ukraine, more than 100 daughter and satellite churches exist in the cities and villages. Over 200 churches have been established in the countries of the former Soviet Union, the USA, Germany, UAE, Israel, and Holland by his ministry, also.
In the central church of Kyiv, 20,000 people attend regularly.
Adelaja notes that more than 50 per cent of the members and congregation of the church are actively involved in volunteer ministries and that more than 2,000 people have been set free from drug and alcohol addiction in the church's Love Rehabilitation Centre. People fed daily in the church's soup kitchen "Stephania" number 2000.
In Kyiv, the minister has had many fights with the political administration, which he said has tried on several occasions to throw him out of the country. He believes that it is the work of the holy spirit which has kept him in Kyiv.
RESPONSIBILITY
It is Adelaja's opinion that the church world should take responsibility for the state. The church, he said, is culpable with regards to the state of the Jamaican nation and the quality of leadership it currently has. "I came to speak to the church world. If the church is not going to take responsibility, nothing will improve. Politicians do not have the values and attitudes, which are required for development," Adelaja told Outlook.
The three-day conference, which he addressed in Kingston, was held against the background of a Jamaica in crisis. Some of the issues addressed at the Conference are, "The Church's Answer to Corruption in National Affairs," "Ethics and Morality in National and Church Leaders" and "The Church Impacting World in the 21st Century."
Sunday Sunkanmi Adelaja has journeyed a long way. The black man was born in the village of Idomila Ijebu-Ode, Nigeria. After graduating from high school in 1986, he received a scholarship to study journalism at Byelarussian State University, USSR. The Soviet Union was a difficult place to be.
Adelaja studied journalism, but as time would prove, he would soon be spending all his time in Christian ministry.
Sunday Adelaja told Outlook magazine that his life has been guided by a series of divine visions. Just as he was contemplating returning to Africa after University, he heard God whisper into his heart, "I have a purpose for bringing you here."
Jesus appeared to him, he said, on three consecutive days and showed him a sea of people who were all white. It was an assurance, he said, that the door to evangelism would be open to him in the state with a communist past. Ninety nine per cent of his church today are white Europeans.
Sunday Adelaja has been presenting to several countries, including Israel and Norway, his "Principles of National Transformation" which is a model of how to use godly principles to reduce corruption and crime and to engender economic and political regeneration.
There were trials and persecution from the Communists, but God kept him through the years, Sunday Adelaja says. The period after the fall of communism was also a dangerous time for Christians.
Sunday and his friends, who had served with him in the underground church, travelled throughout the countries of the former Soviet Union to teach, preach and plant churches. They did this until they were detained by KGB officials in Belarus. The government demanded that Sunday be deported and God paved the way for Sunday to enter Ukraine.
As Sunday and his friends were praying against the deportation declaration, he received a call inviting him to interpret for Jeff Davis, a pastor travelling and speaking in Ukraine. This was his entry to and the beginning of an enormous opportunity to minister.
He said that when he arrived in Kyiv he told God that he did not want to start a church in Kyiv because he did not want to leave another church in its infant stage. He had started churches in Belarus and God had told him to leave just as it was getting established. However, God revealed that there was a purpose in leaving the churches. God was teaching him not to embed his heart in the churches he began. God does not want his ministers to "own" churches or denominations, but to rather be caretakers and ready to follow the Master's voice and call, Adelaja said.
CONSULTING GOD
When the Nigerian felt it was time to marry (after eight years of ministry) he went directly to God and began to pray. He visited Moscow and saw his wife to be, Bose, at a conference and said he knew she was the one. He prayed and received a sure word and revelation from the Lord that he was to marry Bose and then began pursuing her. Today, they are married with two girls and a boy.
In the Ukraine, where 48 million people reside and where the high-tension contest between the incumbent Prime Minister, Viktor Yanukovich and opposition candidate, Viktor Yushchenko created friction, Adelaja has continued to clamour for change.
"It is important to change the status quo. It cannot be business as usual. He who comes to (power) must come with clean hands," says Adelaja.
CHRISTIAN FACTION
He is committed to raising up a Christian faction in Parliament. The biggest problem he has, he says, is that Ukrainian nationalists feel that a black man has no right to tell them how to live. The press, he says, is also against him, but Adelaja responds, " I am more than a conqueror in the name of Jesus. I am not going to be stopped."
In addition to a political revival influenced by Christianity, he is also intent on fostering an economic revival.
"The people think that they are poor people who cannot be rich. I am going to prove that when you live by the standards of God, the hand to the diligent maketh rich. With God, nothing is impossible."
Sunday Adelaja said that he feels that his message is perfectly suited to the political and economical condition of Jamaicans.
"God created man to have power over all the earth and to fill all the earth ( Genesis 1:28). Be fruitful and multiply. That is the kind of Christianity I practise.
"I will provide all your spiritual needs and in terms of what you need physically, you will have to do the work. If you pray and do nothing, you will die of hunger."
With his Bible in one hand and the other pointing at Christians and urging them to take personal responsibility, Pastor Sunday Adelaja plans to take his message around the world.
