Samuel Oyeyinka
This Excellent Church (TEC) | Lagos, Nigeria
Tell us about your family.
I am married with four kids. My wife, Ijeoma (I.J for short), is my university sweetheart. I met her while I was in med school and she was a final year engineering student. We were 22 when we met and got married at 29. My first kid, Teti, is 7, Dieko is 4 and the twins, Desire and Tito are 4 months old. Tito is the only boy.
As a family, we love to watch movies together. We just enjoy being together and eating but watching movies is our joint enjoyment. The kids love to bother me with questions about the plot and the characters and I like to pretend I am not enjoying their questions.
How have you seen God working in your family?
God brought my wife and I together and she has been the greatest gift that God has given me. God has helped us to grow in godliness and love for each other and from our bond has come four children who are the most beautiful things God has given us. He gave us these children even despite some struggles with fertility issues.
Through many pains and challenges, God has been gentle with us and brought us further and further as serve Him together.
How have you seen God working in your life?
I have seen God bring me to find rest in Him. And this is no small thing.
I am prone to skepticism and my twenties were a tough time because of this. And all the places where I was assured I would find rest and that innate sense of completeness and assurance that life makes sense only offered me contradictions and hurt. The churches were all about prosperity gospel and power over voodoo. The ministers often turned out to be personally deeply flawed men.
I was born to christians and studied in a church's secondary school. When I got into medical school, I followed the natural course and joined a campus fellowship but the activities did not help. But God sent an unlikely person to show me that life was not only the natural and it made sense to my heart.
When I look back now, I see that, gradually from that point God slowly drew me to himself, through the valleys of church responsibilities and mountains of work life, God led me to Christian apologetics and then orthodoxy and then reformed theology and then a gospel-centered view of ministry where my heart has found peace after being rid of its idols. God brought me into rest by leading me to find Him and not just the idea of Him.
How have you seen God working in your church?
Our church started as a contemporary pentecostal church without clear directions.
But in a most mysterious series of events, God led people and materials to us and we began to grow in knowledge and became convinced that protested orthodoxy was where we ought to be. We adopted the Three Forms of Unity and made painful adjustments to our governance, liturgy and general church life.
We were afraid these changes would be our end but God is too great. He used it to strengthen us and even increase us. Now the church is more stable, lively with members full of zeal and growing every year. We even had challenges from the larger christian community. Being reformed and rejecting the ruling word of faith doctrines has been met with intense suspicion and worse. But God has kept us and is adding to us.
Only God could have pulled this off.
What is your church’s mission/vision?
Our mission: To reshape values and reconcile men back to God.
Our vision: To see multitudes across our nation come to know Jesus, delight in Him, and find ultimate satisfaction in Him.
How can we be praying for you?
1. For the Lord to grant wisdom and courage to the leaders of TEC to stir God's flock to what is pleasing in His eyes.
2. For the bond of love to be strong in our church.
3. For a revival in Nigeria, as many turn away from evil and to God.
To send Samuel a note of encouragement, write to HelloCP@spanishriver.com.