How God used me to propagate the gospel with Yoruba ministry in US —Okuneye

Pastor Henry Odeneye is the president, Harvest Point Ministries Inc. based in the United States of America. Odeneye holds a Ph.D. from the Christian Leadership University, New York, USA, and is also a certified and licensed counselor with a Master’s Degree in Missions and Indigenous Church Planting. In this interview with SEGUN KASALI, he shares the story of his journey into ministry, among other issues.

You use the Yoruba language to preach in the US. How have you been able to achieve this in the foreign land without any stress?

I remember travelling to Brazil some years back while in Nigeria. I was working with a company called Afro Technical Services Nigeria Ltd. I was the General Sales Manager of the company. We had some products from Brazil and I was asked to go to the factory in Brazil to get some information on the product as the sales manager.

On getting to Rio in Brazil, one of the immigration officers saw my passport and wondered if I was a Yoruba man from Nigeria. I said yes. He then told me he was learning the Yoruba language. He also told me he was an Ifa worshipper. When I got to my hotel the Holy Spirit began to speak to me on what the Yoruba language is being used for.

He reminded me that the Arabic language is synonymous with Islam, the Hebrew Language is synonymous with Judaism and now, it seems the Yoruba Language is synonymous with Ifa worship. That got me thinking.

The Lord then made me realise that the Christian faith played a critical role in the evolution of the Yoruba language. He reminded me of the enormous work done by AjayiCrowther who gave the language the alphabet in the first place. All these happened in 1997. That was when the Lord began to tell me of the need to employ the language on a global scale and make it a language that would be used for the propagation of the gospel.

So, what did you eventually do in achieving this?

By that time I had been an Elder in the Apostolic Church, Nigeria. I was invited to minister at a programme in the church in 1999. While in the hotel room during the programme, the Lord gave me a clear vision of my ministry. He told me my ministry would be in the US. I remember then that Akeem Olajuwon was in Houston, Texas. I began to have a picture of being in that part of the world. The district pastor of my church then confirmed that my ministry would be abroad. As God would have it, the opportunity came for me and my family in 2000 to travel to the US and it happened that we were in Houston, Texas. So, it became clear that I had work on my hand.

Did you now start the ministry immediately?

I had to get the necessary consent from the church authority. Incidentally, The TACN would not allow any church to use Yoruba language to preach in the US for obvious reasons. I went to my pastor then and told him about what God was asking me to do. I spoke with Pastor Samuel Jemigbon, the then chairman of the Lagos, Western/Northern Area (LAWNA) Territory and Vice-President of The Apostolic Church, Nigeria. He presented the matter to the executive council of the church and they approved it.

When Pastor Jemigbon came to the US, he asked me to stand up in the midst of the congregation and said the Lord had led me to do ministry in the Yoruba language. He said it’s a tough ministry, but since it is the Lord’s work, it would succeed. I was given the approval to run the ministry a year after I came to the US. That was quite unprecedented in the history of the TACN. The church does not usually approve of independent ministry before that time. But it acquiesced to mine.

So, what was the first hurdle you had to cross doing ministry in Yoruba language in an English-speaking country?

Let me confess that those I met in the US who were servants of God gave me the needed support. But I remember a pastor who warned me that he had tried it and failed, but that he wished I would succeed. But the fact that I got the official approval of my church, The Apostolic Church, Nigeria, was just what I needed. That gave me the needed energy to express my calling. Some of the pastors said they had used English to do ministry and had not succeeded; wondering how I would succeed using Yoruba.

The greatest challenge I would have had then was that I was more fluent in Hausa than Yoruba. I was born in the North and then my father moved to Ghana. When the Lord was preparing me for this ministry I did not know. I lived in Ghana for eight years; I speak Fanti and Twi very well. When I came back to Nigeria I served in Maiduguri, Kaduna and then Lagos. I used to preach in English language, but when I got to Lagos I was ordained an Elder and I was asked to preach in Yoruba. It became a big challenge.

I managed to pass Yoruba in my school certificate examinations. When I was told I had to preach in Yoruba, I had to start learning Yoruba language from the scratch. My wife took me through the basics. I also attended a Bible School in Ota, Ogun State and was fortunate to have a lecturer who was a former Babalawo (Ifa priest)

He told us many things about Ifa and he exposed us to the depth of the Yoruba Language. There are many sayings in the Yoruba language that look like incantations but are not really incantations but deep wisdom expressions. I was learning all that and I did not know God was preparing me for the US Yoruba Language ministry.

From your experience so far, what is your assessment of the Yoruba Language?

It is a very rich language. It is unfortunate that we don’t value it. UNESCO confirmed that the language is on the verge of extinction. If UNESCO makes that assessment, then we have to be careful. The good thing is that the language is being appreciated globally. Presently, 62 universities in the US teach Yoruba as a course. Unfortunately, I read somewhere that one government agency recommended to the government they should forget indigenous languages and not make them compulsory.

Some people deploy incantations in the name of praying in Yoruba. How do we draw the line?

We have to be careful. There are people who capitalise on the Yoruba language to do evil on the pulpit. But that does not mean the language itself is the problem. Someone once told me ‘jowo’, which is a plea from whatever angle has an occult connotation. But because there was no Christianity when the language was evolving, the Ifa worshipers used the word for incantation. Edabo, Edakun are occultic words. But that should not stop us from using it in day to day conversation and even during our worship because it is part of the Yoruba language.

But then if you want to use the language to preach, you have to be careful you don’t resort to incantation. Using idiomatic expressions and deep Yoruba wisdom is different from an incantation. There is a thin line though.

There was a recent interview of a young man born to parents who worship in a Deeper Life Bible Church and now promotes Ifa worship.  This development shows that the traditional religion is waking up from what he said in the interview. How will you react to this?

The weapons of our warfare are not carnal. Most of the time pastors approach the gospel from the point of prosperity. They tell people to come to Jesus and they would prosper. That leads us to problems. But we should approach the gospel from the point of view that anybody without Christ is doomed. We should not present prosperity as the basis for people to come to Christ.

The way of Ifa can’t lead people to salvation. There was a sister we preached to some years back. She converted from Islam. Six months after conversion, she had an accident and lost one of her legs. I was one of the leaders who went to counsel her in the hospital. When we got there, before I could say a word, she started singing that she was not bothered if her name was no longer in this physical world, but that her joy was that her name is in the book of life. She knew the essence of salvation and the accident did not affect her faith. Today, this sister is doing fine in the faith.

Some have said the Christian religion took away the Yoruba values. How do you address this mindset in the light of your ministry focus?

People say that because many people were given Christian names at baptism. But that is understandable because the white missionaries were trying to dissociate us from the idolatrous background we had and ensure we start on a clean slate. So, people who were bearing names that had to do with idols were advised to change their names to names relevant to the Christian faith.

But then they took our akara and gave us cake. They took akamu and gave us custard. They came with a superior culture so to say. The other way to look at it, however, is that they even allowed those idolaters to come with their emblems of worship to church. The irony of the whole thing now is that some of our fathers in faith have imbibed the western culture without being forced to do so. There are churches where church workers are not allowed to dress in native attire. We agree that the whites tried to impose their culture on us. Now that they are no more with us, why are we still aping their dress sense and culture?

The extreme I see in our end is that some pastors in the name of staying faithful to Yoruba culture are into rituals in the name of prayers.  They will do miniature coffins and read psalms into it saying they are trying to avert death over some people. That is not in the Bible. It should be discouraged. From our own end, we try to promote values that are Biblical from the Yoruba standpoint. For instance, we promote meaningful Yoruba names. I have given a lot of African Americans in the US Yoruba names at their naming ceremony because the names have meanings.

What is your take on usage of use of oil, mantle and candle to pray? What is your understanding of this trend? Some people believe it is a fallout of our native ways of worship?

I have nothing against the use of elements as points of contact. People were used to emblems before they became Christians; the argument is that they need something to replace what they were used to.

But that should not be a doctrine. The Christian should mature to the point of doing away with those elements. People have come to ask me to sell oil because others do it. But I won’t allow that. There has to be a limit to faith extenders. We have to grow believers to the point of holding to the word of God.

Your ministry is about 18 years old in the US. How do you feel about the progress?

God has been good to us. Harvest Point Ministries is the mother of the Dagunduro Prayer Family. It is a prayer ministry that holds every month. We saw the need and started the Yoruba Christian fellowship on Sunday. We don’t interpret to English. The fellowship has been growing.

It was when we started the programme that we discovered that some Yoruba-speaking population, especially mothers who come to take care of their grandchildren who are qualified to be citizens of the US could do their qualifying test in Yoruba.

The test was usually in English. But the Chinese are allowed to do their test in Mandarin their native language; Spanish, do theirs in their language. The Vietnamese also use their language. So we had to make a case for the Yoruba speaking population. We approached the government of the US that we want the Yoruba population who can’t use English very well to do their qualifying test to become US citizens, in Yoruba. The US government agreed, but they monitored the process. So, we were able to achieve that feat. The Yoruba language is the first language in Nigeria to get that privilege.

We helped our people to get the COVID-19 vaccine. We have been involved in a lot of social engineering. Because of our activities, the then Mayor of Houston, Texas, declared December 6 as Harvest Point Ministries Dagunduro Day. That is a milestone achievement I must confess. It’s now left for us to celebrate that day in-house. It shows the extent to which the Yoruba language has been accepted in Houston, Texas.

What is the future like for Harvest Point Ministries?

There are greater things ahead. We are currently in partnership with some schools to give theological instructions to pastors in their local languages. Some pastors preach well in the Yoruba language but then when it comes to going back for theological education they do so in English. So I discovered the need for theological education in their native language. I work with a ministry in the US that has been able to translate the books and resources of great ministers of the gospel like TL Osborn, ReinhardBonke and a host of others into 52 languages in video format.

In Nigeria, we established a school of ministry where theological education is done in both English and Yoruba. Our vision is to equip people in their own language, so they could impact their congregation. We also have such school in Benin Republic where pastors are being taught in French, their native language and Yoruba. We also have a school of ministry in Tanzania where Swahili is used for theological education for the first time. We have one in Uganda too. We will be having one in Mexico too. We have a missionary mandate to reach the world with the gospel and to spread theological education to church leaders.