As soon as he surrendered his life to the Lord as a teenager, Victor Adeyemi sensed that God was calling him into ministry. He began praying for God’s direction, and God provided a mentor who discipled him personally in how to win souls and how to pastor a church.
While this was happening, he was influenced by many books on evangelism—from authors in his home country of Nigeria such as Elijah Oludele Abina to Western authors like Oswald J. Smith. “I came to believe that I was called to be an evangelist,” he says, “thinking I should lead evangelistic crusades.”
Then he read Jim Montgomery’s DAWN 2000 (DAWN stands for “Disciple a Whole Nation.”). “This led me to study the Book of Acts in a new way, and I concluded that church planting is the most effective method of world evangelism,” Adeyemi says. “My paradigm changed from crusades to planting churches—and to inspire others to do the same.”
Branching Out
Adeyemi received an opportunity to pastor and sought permission from his network leader to plant other churches. However, his church network limited his ability to expand as quickly and broadly as he envisioned—even though he planted two churches in a one-year period. He eventually left that group and started Global Harvest Church in Ibadan, which is Nigeria’s third most populous city, 75 miles outside of Lagos, the country’s largest city.
By Global Harvest’s third anniversary, it had planted two other churches and also sent out ministers who planted other independent but associated churches. By its fifth anniversary, the network celebrated five total church plants, which Adeyemi calls branches. “They function like multisites do in the United States, except that each church has its own preaching pastor,” he says. “We are dreaming of becoming thousands of churches.”
To do so, they emphasize two qualities:
1. Fasting and prayer
“Our approach has always been to precede everything with prayer to receive divine guidance on how the Lord wants us to start,” Adeyemi says. “So many of our churches have begun with a nucleus of praying believers. With the leading of the Holy Spirit, we see communities open up faster.”
The role of intercession continues throughout the life of each church. “We must be persistent in prayer even after the work is birthed so that Christ can be fully formed in us and the new believers, as Galatians 4:19 promises,” he says.
2. The development of apprentices.
This idea has been transformational for him, especially helped by training from the NewThing network (NewThing.org). “They taught us to start in simpler ways, not renting a fancy big hall with primary focus on Sunday growth,” Adeyemi says. “If discipleship is the mission of the church, then missional communities—where discipleship happens best—are the structure. We now emphasize how many disciples are in a missional community more than how many are in Sunday attendance.”
A Church of Apprentices
To Adeyemi, the idea of discipleship is closely related to apprenticeship. “If a discipling culture runs through a church, then everyone can reproduce themselves in a short time,” he says.
“We have always encouraged that whatever role people have in leadership, they should develop apprentices who take over for them so that they can move to more responsibilities,” he says. “That way they are able to develop even more leaders so that they can plant even more churches.”
This emphasis on apprenticeship requires constant training. Given the geographic spread of Global Harvest’s leaders, they meet monthly for online webinars on Saturdays. “These involve prayer, Q&A, mentoring and everything else we need to discuss,” he says.
Apprenticeship also requires one-on-one development, such as for those who are struggling to reproduce. “We work hard to develop people’s capacity for reproduction,” he says. “We ask where we need to go the extra mile in how they’re being personally apprenticed, in how we’re building them up and in how we’re training them.”
Adaptation Without Compromise
When prayer, evangelistic passion and apprenticeship are high, the outcome can be the launching of many new churches. “We encourage that every church, within every three years, should birth at least one new church,” Adeyemi says.
To date, Global Harvest and The Discovery—the church’s youth expression—have planted almost 40 churches, many of them through churches planting other churches, and only three of which Adeyemi himself planted. Besides Nigeria, five of their plants are in Canada, two are in the United Kingdom and two are in the United States. These locations are chosen in part because they are places young Nigerians tend to immigrate or seek work assignments, so why not send them to plant churches there? “Our church attracts young, vibrant, upwardly mobile people, but we leverage that to plant churches,” Adeyemi says.
Other locations for new churches are shaped by felt needs. For example, “One reason why the African church has grown very rapidly is widespread poverty, which predisposes people to seek God,” he says. “We must make our methods adaptable to our times without compromising our values,” he adds, “but we do look to show how the gospel is relevant to the needs of today.”
Many churches start small, such as with a missional community of just a dozen believers. Some grow large, such as the original church in Ibadan that Adeyemi planted in 1995, which draws 1,500–2,000 adults and children on a typical weekend. “But to whom much is given, much is expected,” Adeyemi observes of the larger churches in the Global Harvest network. Yet for everyone, whatever their church’s size or age, “Training continually needs to go to the next level.”
GLOBAL HARVEST CHURCH
Ibadan, Nigeria
Senior Pastors: Victor Adeyemi
Website: GlobalHarvestChurch.org
Founded: 1995
Denomination: Nondenominational
Attendance: 1,500 at the main campus
Churches Planted: 39