Sunday Adelaja, "How I learned to pray"

Sunday Adelaja is the senior pastor of the Embassy of God church in Kiev, Ukraine. Under his leadership, it has grown to more than 25,000 members since 1994. The church is considered one of the largest evangelical churches in Europe.

Pastor Sunday and his church were active in the Orange revolution of Ukraine in December, 2004, that overthrew the corrupt government that was supported by Moscow.

In Pastor Sunday's own words about prayer:

Now, anywhere you see a visitation, a genuine visitation, somebody has been found who stood in the gap. That’s why I said, we prayed, not just some sweety-sweety prayer. We must learn to pray the kind of prayer that James was talking about, that, you know, the fervent prayer of the righteous cannot but avail much. It must bring results. It must produce the rain of righteousness.

In our church, you know, in Ukraine, when I went to the Ukraine in 1993, the first time when I went to visit, I was coming from Belarus. I started in Belarus. And when I entered Ukraine, where I am today, I felt like there was a dark cloud over the whole city, over the country. And I would say, "My, are there no churches in this city? Why is it so bad?" I could feel the heaviness. Maybe some people went to Russia in the ‘90s. In the early ‘90s. You could see the cloud. It was even worse than Belarus at that point.

Then I was walking the streets and I was praying, "Oh God, raise up men to pray this thing through." And I never knew a year later, God was going to send me there. So when God sent me there, I knew the first thing I needed to do was to pray through.

Now God had taught me to pray through while I was a student, just years before then, during communism. I was a student. There was no church. We couldn’t have any relations with the underground church so we were just isolated on the campus, the student campus. And at the point when I knew I was giving up, I was defeated, I couldn’t hold on any longer, communism was shrinking me and brothers and sisters who came as believers were all backsliding. You know, people were being sent to the psychiatric hospital, people were being sent to mental hospitals because they were Christians and others were leaving the country, and so when it was so difficult, there was another believer. We made a covenant and we said, "We are going to meet every day. No matter what we do. No matter where we go. No matter what happens. We are going to meet every day until God does something or heaven opens."

So we made a covenant with ourselves to meet together, not to talk, not to preach. Not to do anything else. Just to intercede and pray together for two hours minimum. Minimum from two, three, four.

That was the most difficult one year in my whole life. I could pray before then for two hours, but to do it every day? Everything fought it. My professors would ask me to come to class. I was a student, then, in the university. My classmates would come and you couldn’t pray openly. You were being watched. You were being monitored. To find a place of isolation – oh yeah, my God, we needed to go through hell just to keep that covenant. But we did.

When it was one year, after we were praying two hours every single day, heaven broke loose. It was like we were no more under communism. The Spirit of God descended on us like mad. People began to get saved through us. God broke the chains and led us supernaturally to the believers, to the Russian believers in the underground church. We got a breakthrough. We began to fellowship together, preach together.

That was how my ministry began in 1991. The Holy Ghost began to appear. When I woke up in the morning, I would lie on my bed, cover myself and I just prayed one hour, straight in tongues, no English, no Russian, just wake up, and... (here he began praying in tongues to demonstrate and in the next 20 minutes or so, a fire of prayer swept through the room).

More information, purchase his books in English, can be found at one of his book sites, Sunday Adelaja.com.


The preceeding narrative was transcribed by Violet Nesdoly at Christian Life Assembly, Langley, B.C., Canada in September, 2005, when Pastor Sunday was speaking at the church. Used with permission.