The host of #WithChude, Chude Jideonwo, sits down with Bolaji Idowu, the lead pastor of Harvesters International Christian Center, to talk about how the Next Level Prayers prayer meeting went viral, the beginning of his ministry, and his near-death experience.
The best sometimes emerges from suffering; the treasure or gift is in your mess.
That’s why you sometimes go through seasons of pain. Next Level Prayer came out from a place of pain. I had just gone through a season where people that were close to me – from my perspective because stories have 2 or 3 sides – betrayed me.
I felt disappointed, I felt hurt. There were things that they thought (maybe from their perspective), that was totally not true from my own perspective. And that drove me to a season of prayer. I literally spent maybe about 200 days in the year fasting because I was frustrated.
I was broken. All of us are different, the way I was raised was that I depended on people emotionally. Some people don’t have that kind of background but that is the kind of background I have. And if the people you depend on for some reason betray, disappoint, lie, hurt, …I was being ripped apart. At some point, I could say I was suicidal. But the beauty is this, the truth is that the end of yourself has a beginning that is not that place. I began to pray.
Of course, I’m a pastor and a lot of that
situation had to do with the church. So, I gathered the leaders in the
church for us to pray, in the morning. Then one of my pastors said, ‘Why
are you only praying with the leaders of this particular church that
you’re in, why not pray with all of us?’ and someone said, ‘Why not pray
with all the members, after all, we’re home then I began to pray with
everybody. It was becoming big, then someone says, ‘Why not put it on a
social media platform?’ Then I said okay let’s put it on social media
platforms and I remember the first time we were a thousand, I was like
‘Wow, we are a thousand!’ But now we have 500,000 people joining the
prayer, we have hundreds of thousands of people that join the prayer
right now.”
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