Ituah Ighodalo is a man of many parts. A chartered accountant of many years experience, he is also the Senior Pastor of Trinity House, Lagos. He speaks with TEMITOPE OJO on many issues, including politics and divorce among Christians.
Did you set out to be a pastor?
No. I just wanted do my business, make money, live a good life, and be the best. I also wanted to help people. However, like most people, when my dreams were not being actualised and some things seemed insoluble, I began to get stressed up. That led me to seek a higher help.
On my way to work one day, I said to God that if He was there, I needed His help. And I just forgot about it. In the next two to three weeks, everybody that came to talk to me spoke to me about Jesus. Unsolicited, unexpected, people I had never met before were all telling me to try Jesus, go to church. Also, my mother, who had become born again despite that we had an Anglican background, had been praying for me. I think she realised that I must have been going through tension.
That year, she decided to come and spend some days around my birthday period. If you knew her, all she wanted was for us to pray at midnight. After the prayers that night I felt better. Subsequently, she brought her pastor friend that spoke to me about Christ. I asked the pastor all the difficult questions I could think of, and for the first time in my life, he seemed to have all the answers. He later asked me if I wanted to give my life to Jesus. That was how I gave my life to Christ in 1993. It’s been a wonderful experience since then.
How did you get the inspiration for Trinity House?
About five years ago, for some reason or another, I had to leave the Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG) where I had served since 1993. So, I went back home and began to ask whether after pastoring for almost 12 years, I was no longer useful to God. So, it was a time to rest, meditate, think and ask God what next. So, I spent the first six months just resting and calming down. I had to adjust to another routine in life of not having to wake up around 4am, prepare sermon, dash to Church at 6am and preach in two or three services.
I remember in those days that I would wake up on Sundays and be thinking of what church to attend. I may then decide I would go to this church this week and then another next week and so on. For me, it was very refreshing because I began to see how different people did their own things in different churches. The only problem was that once I entered the church, people won’t let me rest; they would begin to pull me here and there, whereas all I wanted was to enter into the church, be ministered to and then go away. Again, it was bothering me because I couldn’t move around freely. Anyway, sometimes, I got to sneak in and get away unnoticed. It was very amusing to me each time I succeeded and nobody recognised me.
So, after six months, I took a trip to Israel and London. On my return, I began to have that feeling that the Lord still has need for me and that this was not the end of the road, because I was really at a point where I wondered whether I should just return fully to my profession and start chasing after money, making money aggressively. But I began to hear the Lord say that “there is life after money; yes you have left Redeemed, but you haven’t left me and I can use you”. Then I asked how? One day, it dropped in my spirit: Trinity House; “build me a House where they will dwell and change the world.” And then, God began to bring people to me. I started with a small group of four people, praying regularly for about six months and then eventually, the strategy to open began to unfold and we opened. And it has not been the same.
What is your relationship with Pastor Enoch Adeboye now?
Very good! I have no problem with Baba. We are good friends; relatives. I can walk up to him for anything at any time. We have no problem at all.
What else do you do apart from pastoral work?
I have one or two businesses that I am involved in. I am chairman of several companies and non-governmental organisations (NGOs). So, my plate is full.
Is it right for Christians to be involved in politics? If so, what are you doing to get more Christians involved?
Absolutely critical! One of the biggest failings of the early Christian teaching was that good people should not get involved in politics. This explains why bad people have taken over the political space. As long as bad people are in government, you can only have bad governance. So, good people must get into politics. Those days, when you tell your mother you’re going into politics, she would just break down in tears, saying she doesn’t want to lose you. But anybody who doesn’t want to lose their life is not ready to live.
So Christians and good people must get involved in politics. That is one of the passions of Trinity House; getting good people into leadership, encouraging them to get involved at whatever level. Let us get good people involved in leadership, not just in Nigeria but also in Africa and in other parts of the world. That is one of my callings. We must change this world and leave the world a better place. We want good people of other faiths to get involved too; people who have ethical basis of leading the people. The Bible says “when the righteous rule, the people rejoice; but when the evil are in power, the people begin to moan”. In Nigeria, we have moaned for too long.
Personally, I may not get involved because I believe my role is more of encouraging others and praying for them. But if there is an opening for a significant leadership position where I can influence anyone to get into, I will be happy to do that. For me, you don’t have to be in government to influence more people. I am already doing a decent job within the Christian fold.
Marriages are under attack, with divorce rate increasing on daily basis. Where do you think Christians are getting it wrong?
I have had my fair share also, having been divorced. What I think is that even as Christians, we don’t understand the fundamentals of marriage and we don’t teach about marriage properly. So people get into marriage and they don’t understand it.
From my own personal experience, I became born again and there was a whole lot of pressure on me to get married because they knew my antecedent. They were afraid that if I didn’t get married, I might begin to misbehave. They were just saying this girl is nice, marry her. It is not being nice that one needs in marriage; there are many nice girls that are marriageable but not every nice marriageable girl is quite suited for you. What about compatibility, vision, direction, communication and other issues.
Another mistake is that they think once you are born again, everything is alright. No! You still have your fundamental character, your desire and behaviour.
Another thought is that when you marry, the girl or boy will change. People don’t change. So, a lot of churches and pastors have mistakenly forced people into wrong marriages.
And then the other thing is that once you’ve found somebody, go and tell your pastor let him or her pray about it. Once he says it’s okay, then, it is. Sometimes, it’s all not quite like that. Some people think a pastor is infallible; how can he be? He is just a man. Elisha was working with the Shunamite woman and her son died, and the woman came running to him. Elisha said God has killed this boy and He didn’t show me. Meaning that God must always be God. There are some things about you that He will never show me, because it is not my business. It doesn’t matter whether I am your pastor or not. God has to continue to be God. Sometimes, He can just tell the woman, this is the process you must follow to receive my miracle.
There are other reasons like self-deceit, razzmatazz, camouflage and all sorts in the name of God.
There is also this teaching that God hates divorce, which is correct and important. But if you are going to manage a marriage situation that is difficult, it must be from a place of understanding and not from a place of God hates divorce and so you mustn’t divorce, without trying to understand what the issues are, how to unravel the issues, how to work out some understanding. So, a lot of people are under pressure and people can’t tell the truth.
Then there is a place of prayer.
So, we must all go back to the drawing board and begin to tell ourselves the truth. Some marriages were mistakes from the beginning. One of the things the church will not admit is that it was a mistake from the beginning because they’ll say God does not make a mistake. It wasn’t God that made the mistake; you made a mistake. David slept with Bathsheba; God was there and didn’t stop it. But the good thing about God is that He makes everything work together for the good of those that love him. So, ab initio, it was a mistake, but God can find a way to turn it around. So what we need do now is to look at the mind of God and try and see how He wants to turn it into something good.
So, this is where we are, and it is a deep thing. We all need to look at it and try to work around it. It’s not an irreparable situation.
The first thing is that we should be honest; if the marriage was not a good idea, admit it. Second, let’s identify the fundamentals of each person. The third thing is how we manage ourselves forward together or even separate if necessary. If the marriage is a threat to life, emotion or a potential possibility of depression and death, then we have to be realistic.