The West African Faith Believers Convention (WAFBEC) commenced in February 2013 as an annual convention for believers in West Africa and beyond to be nurtured in the fundamental truths that birthed and established the charismatic movement in West Africa. The online viewership speaks for the increasing significance of this hub of African Christianity. Within the first three years, the online audience grew from 1,300 individuals in six different countries to 37,000 in 25 countries. By 2022, over 1.1 million people viewed the event online across 117 countries. Over the past decade, the convention has not only grown in participation—physically and online—but also in spiritual significance. Holding the event at the beginning of each new year has made it a pilgrimage and retreat for some to set the spiritual tone for the rest of the year. Notable speakers at the event over the years include Bishop Francis Wale Oke, Pastor Matthew Ashimolowo, Apostle Joshua Selman, and Rev. Funke Felix-Adejumo (from Nigeria); Dr Mensa Otabil, Bishop Tudor Bismark, and Apostle Grace Lubega (from other African countries); Dr Bill Winston, Dr Creflo Dollar, and Rev. Scott Webb (from the US). The meetings emphasise the preaching of the Word of God, the salvation of souls, prophetic declarations, healing, deliverance, worship, impartation, and honouring men and women who have made a lasting impact on Christianity in Nigeria—living or dead. A lot of testimonies from every corner of the globe also attend the events.
Pastor Poju Oyemade and the church he pioneered, The Covenant Nation (formerly known as Covenant Christian Centre), host WAFBEC. The church leader is renowned in the Nigerian Christian community for organising events that build bridges. Besides WAFBEC which links the older generation of Christian trailblazers in the country to the younger, his other flagship event, The Platform Nigeria, is a non-political, non-partisan national development fair, which holds as a global media event on Workers’ Day and Nigeria’s Independence Day. It links entrepreneurs, business professionals, government officials, and the populace. According to Oyemade, WAFBEC was conceived to be a convention designed to teach Christians the foundational truths that produced the charismatic movement of West Africa in the 1970s and ‘80s. Thus, it features some of the living fathers of faith from Tulsa and Nigeria, who had direct contact with the Word of Faith movement in North America under Kenneth Hagin and Kenneth Copeland’s ministries—before the contaminations of what has now attracted ‘the Prosperity Gospel’ label. In his words,
“We are hosting WAFBEC [because we] believe that the move of the Spirit in Nigeria ‘exploded’ when the message Paul termed ‘the word of faith’ started getting preached and taught in its purity. It birthed the golden decade of the ’80s, where [sic] some of the largest ministries till date in [Nigeria] were born.”
A brief history of Pentecostalism in Africa, particularly in Nigeria, sheds light on the vision behind WAFBEC. Modern African Christianity has experienced growth in waves over the past few centuries, beginning with African Indigenous Churches that emerged largely as reactions against missionary (European) Christianity. This was followed by ‘Classical Pentecostal Churches’ that trace their roots to American or European Pentecostal ministries. The most recent wave can be traced back to the 1970s and ‘80s and brought about what some have referred to as the neo-Pentecostal or neo-Charismatic movement. Notably, the last two waves have to do with a fusion of a foreign influence (especially from America) and an African context, often leading to something new. The common denominator to all three waves, of course, is an emphasis on the Spirit, which is very much at home with the African worldview. In fact, one can argue that any form of Christianity that is domiciled outside of an acknowledgement of and engagement with the spirit world will struggle to grow in the African context.
Similarly, the growth of Pentecostalism in Nigeria has occurred in waves, each with its own unique characteristics. The first wave was the Aladura prayer groups that emerged during the 1918 influenza pandemic (e.g. the Precious Stone Society), which later evolved into classical Pentecostal denominations upon their affiliation with a Western Pentecostal denomination in the second wave (e.g. The Apostolic Church Nigeria). The third wave began in the 1950s with the Latter Rain Revivals, initiated by Rev. S.G. Elton, a member of The Apostolic Church missionary group from Great Britain who invited American evangelists through his contacts in the United States. They conducted crusades in Lagos and other towns, performing miraculous healings that gained significant publicity. Then in the 1960s, evangelical revivals and evangelistic meetings swept through the southern region of Nigeria, primarily in Yorubaland, led by North American evangelists. Billy Graham visited in 1960 at the invitation of the Christian Council of Nigeria, followed by T.L. Osborn in 1961. Others such as Oral Roberts, Morris Cerullo, and Brother Argemiro followed in the early 1970s. These revivals led to the exposure of students in tertiary institutions to a wide range of Pentecostal literature from the United States, which emphasised healing, evangelism, and the baptism of the Holy Spirit—the primary doctrinal point of the emerging neo-Pentecostal movement and arguably the least controversial doctrine among the emerging spectrum of Pentecostals and Charismatics. (The understanding of other Pentecostal doctrines varies widely among them.)
Many of the students who were exposed to foreign Pentecostal literature would go on to pioneer charismatic organisations that would later become new churches and denominations like the Living Faith Church Worldwide (also known as Winners Chapel), Mountain of Fire and Miracles Ministries, Christ Embassy, House on the Rock, Daystar Christian Centre, Dunamis International Gospel Centre, and Covenant Christian Centre (now known as The Covenant Nation), among others. These churches place a strong emphasis on spiritual warfare, faith, prosperity, and healing, and their founders often report miraculous experiences with the Holy Spirit.
While many of the young ministers that emerged from this charismatic wave had been mentored by Elton (including popular figures like Benson Idahosa, Enoch Adeboye, David Oyedepo, Gbile Akanni, and many others), he would later distance himself from some of them in his later years. Ayodeji Abodunde notes in his biography of Elton that, “[Elton’s] message began to assume dimensions that the charismatic movement he had helped nurture became uncomfortable with.” So, he had to repeatedly denounce many of the practices that began to emerge in some streams of the movement. Essentially, WAFBEC is one of the initiatives that is seeking to recapture the balance between righteousness, kingdom-mindedness and prosperity that were the hallmarks of those early days of the neo-Pentecostal wave in Nigeria.
The convictions undergirding WAFBEC include the fact that Nigeria’s position as the home to some of the world’s largest and most influential ministries today is the result of the seed sown by the likes of Elton and the teachings of the leading figures of the American Faith Movement, especially through Hagin’s camp meetings. Additionally, Nigeria is in another planting season, begging the need to sow seeds of unadulterated biblical truths upheld by the older generation and contextualising them to shape the faith of generations to come, anticipating a bountiful end-time harvest. While these persuasions and WAFBEC’s strategies are for the future to justify, it is undeniable that the local platform has become a global stage for world Christianity. Indeed, at the end of the 2023 edition, WAFBEC transformed into WOFBEC—World Faith Believers Convention.
Surely, Pentecostalism will continue to grow as a religious movement, especially from the global South. However, its impact on adherents and society will likely continue to generate both commendations and criticisms because of the tendencies to overemphasise materialism and miracles, commercialisation of the gospel, charlatanism, and a lack of accountability among some proponents of the movement. Notwithstanding, the age of Christendom has surely given way to the era of World Christianity, and as respected British historian of missions, Andrew Walls notably said, “If you want to learn something about Christianity today, you must know something about Africa.”