'Why we focus on family and leadership'
By FEMI MACAULAY
Tuesday, April 22, 2008

“How can you be in charge of wealth, how can you be in charge of a lot of power and not abuse it? Nobody is born with that automatically. You have to be trained properly. You have to be taught properly.” This reasoning by Pastor Yinka Ojo is the soul of an upcoming programme powered by Grace Family International Church, Alausa-Ikeja, Lagos. Organized by an arm of the church known as the Institute of Governmental and Entrepreneurial Leadership, it will chart a course for developing Nigeria through inspiring teachings by distinguished achievers in politics and business.

The programme is scheduled for 26 April, 2008, at Oyo Hall, Airport Hotel, Ikeja, Lagos. Its goal, according to church leader Ojo, is “to sow the seed of a change of mentality, and to raise leaders of integrity and moral uprightness.”

Grace Family started in1996 in Lagos and has branches in Africa and Europe. As part of its re-branding strategy, it recently launched a new logo to replace the old one that it had used for 17 years. With vibrant multi-colours , the new logo captures the essence of the church, Ojo said, explaining, “It contains the family – the father, mother and children. We’re a family church. The basic unit of the society is the family. There’s no human being that didn’t come from one family or another. You can trace your roots to a family structure. God led us to target every part of the family, wherever you are.”

Family church
The greatest way Jesus Christ described God was to call him “Father”. In fact, one of the reasons the Pharisees were against him was – “How can he call God, father?” The word ‘father’ connotes family – a family man, a father. The church is a family. God is our father. We want to reach out to people and bring them into this great family of God. If you study the word of God very well, you’ll find out that God is a family God. And anyone who gives his life to Christ is actually born anew or born by the father into this great family of God.

We want people to know that they have a God who wants them to be involved in His family. Also, we reach out to one another and to the world with a family love. In a family you look out for one another. In very good families, if something is happening to one, they care, they rally round, and they help. We want people to understand that this is a spiritual family, but we are a family nonetheless. And they say that blood is thicker than water.

Core values
Our core values are the foundation the church is built on; and they are basically four: Holiness; Excellence; Accountability; Love. And if you take the first letter of each, it forms HEAL, which stands for “Heal”. This is a church where God can heal – spiritually, mentally and physically. Family, relationships, financially – God can heal. This is a healing centre. And God is transforming our members into healing agents, to go out into the society and heal our community, heal our government, heal the economic sector, heal the entertainment sector, heal the educational sector, heal all the various sectors of the society. That is what we stand for: leading holy lives, excellent lives, being accountable to God and to one another, truly loving one another as we love ourselves.

Institute of Governmental and Entrepreneurial Leadership
We are living in a third world country, and it is sad. My desire and goal is to see Nigeria become a first world nation in my lifetime. Clean streets, water everywhere, every child goes to school and is literate, no beggars on our streets, phones functioning excellently, parks where children can go and play games, crime reduced to a negligible minimum in our country, even people that don’t have jobs can receive money from government until they get jobs; to live in a country that is sane, that is my desire in my lifetime, and it can happen.

Nigeria is blessed with resources, but there are certain issues that are fundamentally wrong – these are the things that we must change in our society. We’re not talking about violent change or radical change. We’re talking about change in our mentality, change in our approach. For instance, why should I steal government money, public money, if I understand that even after I’m dead and gone it does not mean my children will not still be poor because they may still try me in abstentia and my children may suffer for it. Apart from that, the Bible says that we don’t live to ourselves nor die to ourselves. In other words, no man is an island.

If I do something to injure you, a part of me has been injured. Whether you’re from my ethnic group or not, you’re a human being in the image and likeness of God who created all of us. We must begin to understand that we must do what is right because it is right. How much money do I want to amass? If I have all the money, how many rooms can I sleep in one night? If I have all the cars, how many of them can I ride in at a time? We must begin to change our mentality. It is motivation that makes people desperate to acquire. That’s why we are where we have found ourselves. We’re ruling ourselves. Why are we doing this to ourselves? We need to talk to ourselves.

Spirit of change
This is a forum where we can have real heart to heart talk with ourselves. And it must start somewhere. A few years ago I was praying for Nigeria. And the Lord spoke to me and said, “You’ve been praying for your country for years- when are you going to start doing something about changing your country?” And I said, “God, I don’t know what to do.” That’s when I had this idea: call people together and talk. You’re doing a little, but little drops of water make a mighty ocean. You never know. Those who are governors today, 25-30 years ago none of them knew they would be governors. The man who is our president today, eight years ago he didn’t know he would be president.

You never know who could have met them then and made a proper impact on them from which they got some core values, some ways of leading that would be useful to them now that they have become rulers. Who knows what would happen to anybody that comes to this programme 10-15 years down the line? We never know.

So we want to do our little bit to change this nation, to send out the kind of information that can make a person potentially ripe to lead in the world of economics and the world of governance. We want to deal with policy makers and would-be policy makers, build them up so that if they find themselves in governance they can change the entire society using the vehicle of civil governance to transform the land.