Sunday Sunkanmi Adelaja was born in the village of Idomila Ijebu-Ode, Nigeria. He was raised by his grandmother and became Christian in March 1986 just before graduating from high school. After graduation Adelaja left Nigeria because he received a scholarship to study journalism at the Belarusian State University in Minsk, Byelorussian SSR. He claims he was threatened there by authorities for having a picture of Jesus in his house, but nevertheless, he began Christian activities in Belarus during his studies.He married and took a job in Kiev, where he eventually founded and became pastor of the Embassy of God church, initially with only a handful of fellow African students.Today he plays an active role in the political and social life of Ukraine and was an influencing factor in the Ukrainian Orange Revolution. Sunday speaks, preaches and teaches fluently in Russian.
By age 33, he had built the largest charismatic church in Europe, having started with only a few followers in a small apartment in downtown Kiev in 1994. Since then his church has grown to more than 700 churches in over 45 countries and has been instrumental in starting over 300 rehab centers for drug addicts and alcoholics, situated all over Ukraine and Russia.
Adelaja’s church, the Embassy of God, claims to have 25,000 members in Kiev alone. Adelaja’s church is also expanding abroad.1,000 to 2,000 people are fed daily at the church’s “Stephania” soup kitchens in Kiev. The church also has a program helping homeless people acquiring skills, thus helping them back to a normal life and work. According to the church 2,000 children have been helped off the street, and have been returned to their families. Furthermore the church runs a 24 hour hot-line, named “Trust line”,for people to call in need. The church also works with addicted people and has a program helping addicted people to be set free from various addictions. The main organization is called “Love Rehabilitation Center”.According to the church, more than 5000 drug and alcohol addicted people have been set free from their addiction through their work.
The New York Times made the following statement about Adelaja: “Could there be a more unlikely success story in the former Soviet Union than the Rev. Sunday Adelaja, an immigrant from Nigeria who has developed an ardent — and enormous — following across Ukraine?”
There are many educational institutions connected to the church, and among them the following are more known: the Joshua Missionary Bible Institute in Ukraine,the Center of Restoration of Personality and Transformation of the Society in Ukraine, the History Makers Bible School in the USA,the UK, Germany, France, and the Institute for National Transformation in Nigeria.
The Mayor of Kiev, Leonid Chernovetsky, is a prominent member of the church.
In October 2010, Sunday Adelaja was one of the foreigners in Ukraine who were awarded The Most Influential Expats 2010 by the Kyiv Post newspaper.
In May 2009, Sunday Adelaja became The Face of Kiev 2009. The annual competition was conducted by the magazine Afisha and Adelaja took the first place with more than 1/3 of the votes, beating to the second position, the most popular actor in Ukraine, Bohdan Stupka; to the third place, the Heavy weight boxer Vitali Klitschko; to the fourth place, one of the richest Entrepreneurs in Ukraine, Viktor Pinchuk; and to the fifth place the Mayor of Kiev, Leonid Chernovetskyi.
At the Azusa Street Revival Festival on Saturday April 25, 2009, Sunday Adelaja received the first International William J. Seymour Award. This award is given to ministers who exhibit the characteristics of William J. Seymour. A statement from the award committee said: “This year we will award an international and national recipient: The international recipient will be Pastor Sunday Adelaja who is a Nigerian-born leader with an apostolic gift for the 21st century. In his mid-thirties Pastor Sunday has already proven to be one of the world’s most dynamic communicators and church planters and is regarded as the most successful pastor in Europe with over 25,000 members as well as daughter and satellite churches in over 35 countries worldwide”.
MR. Adelaja, who has a boisterous laugh and a relentlessly sunny personality, tries to brush aside the insults. He said his church’s popularity showed that Ukrainians were on a spiritual quest after having weathered the state-mandated atheism of the Soviet era. He said that more than 100,000 people attended services regularly at the main arena in Kiev or his affiliates across Ukraine, which has a population of 46 million.
“I came to this country disadvantaged as a black person,” he said in an interview, adding that he was blistered with slurs and epithets. “But still, with all my disadvantages, with my accented Russian language, I went out and said, ‘Hey, this will help you.’ And people have responded to it.”
Mr. Adelaja, 43, arrived in the Soviet Union in 1986 as a college student, then stayed after the Soviet collapse in 1991, later moving to Kiev. His wife, Bose, is also Nigerian and often conducts services at the church. They speak fluent Russian, which is the native language for many here and is understood by most speakers of Ukrainian, the country’s other main language.
Embassy of God has sprouted affiliates throughout the world, and Mr. Adelaja has been praised by some American evangelicals for bringing their brand of Christianity to the former Soviet Union.
In Ukraine, Embassy of God undertakes a wide array of charitable activities, feeding thousands of people a month at soup kitchens and running treatment centers for alcohol and drug addiction. But it has also thrived because Mr. Adelaja has tapped into a desire of people in formerly Communist countries to learn entrepreneurial skills and make money.
Mr. Adelaja did not study in the United States, but says he has learned from the teachings of American pastors. His views sometimes reflect the so-called prosperity gospel — a belief among some strains of evangelical Christianity that God wants the faithful to attain material wealth.
On a recent Saturday night here, Mr. Adelaja conducted a seminar with a few dozen people in a church annex. Reading from an iPad, he recited passages from the Bible and discussed how Christian principles could assist in business.
Mr. Adelaja and a parishioner, Ishtvan Birov, 35, bantered about how to innovate in life, personally and professionally. The conversation veered from Jesus to Steve Jobs, the Apple chief executive, back to Jesus again.
“Apple takes a model and keeps improving on it,” Mr. Birov said.
Mr. Adelaja responded, “That is the principle of God — to always keep making it better.”
He added, “God is strategy, God is strategic thinking.”
AFTER the seminar, Mr. Adelaja explained that in the post-Soviet era, Ukrainians at first had only one major choice, the Orthodox church. But he maintained that many were turned off by Orthodox services because they were conducted by solemn, bearded priests chanting complicated liturgical texts.
“We are always thinking, how can we make the Bible still relevant?” he said. “The same values, the same product. But not doing it in the Orthodox old style. I don’t want to go to a church where I am just standing there and don’t know what is going on. We must make it interesting. We must change the packaging. Not communicate it in a way that pushes them away, but draws them close.”
Mr. Adelaja has never sought Ukrainian citizenship because he said he did not want to raise suspicions that he was interested in obtaining political power. Because he is not a citizen, the authorities could deport him at any time. But he said that they feared doing so because of a potential backlash from his many parishioners.
Prosecutors also seem reluctant to move forward on a 2009 criminal case against him, which alleges that he took part in a fraud scheme whose victims included his church members. Mr. Adelaja said the charges amounted to a political vendetta, and the case did not appear to have diminished his standing here.
In the interview, Mr. Adelaja said he did not live a life of luxury. He said his parishioners were encouraged to donate 10 percent of their salaries to the church, though there is no requirement that they do so to attend services, and many do not. Mr. Adelaja said that money goes toward the church’s activities, including plans for a new $50 million headquarters here. He earns a living largely from sales of his books, he said.
His opponents said whether or not he was exploiting parishioners financially, he was promoting false Christian ideals.
“His methodology, his Biblical views are twisted,” said Dmitri A. Rozet, who runs a Web site called Adelaja Watch. “He wants to use God for human benefit. That does not correspond to anything that Christians have believed for almost 2,000 years.”
Still, at services on a recent Sunday, many parishioners seemed enthralled.
“Before, I was depressed, and my life was a nightmare,” said Anna Vdovenko, 63. “Now, I am living. And it is all thanks to Pastor Sunday.”
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