The Secret Place of Benson Idahosa

Benson Andrew Idahosa was born on September 11, 1938 in Benin City in present day Edo State in Nigeria. His early years were marked by weakness of body and by a poverty that pressed the family hard. He later told how illness and rejection nearly ended his life in infancy and how work began early with little hope of schooling. The boy who labored and learned in snatches found a different future when the gospel reached him on a football field in Benin City. A local pastor named Okpo preached Christ and the teenage Benson yielded and began at once to witness, to gather friends for prayer, and to take the message from village to village with the zeal of a new heart. He spoke of a night vision that confirmed his calling with a command to carry the gospel and a promise that the Lord would confirm His word. The young convert made prayer the furnace of his days and Scripture the map in his hands.

From those beginnings a public work took shape that was simple in method and strong in faith. He moved across villages and towns with a bicycle and an open Bible and learned to fast, to pray, and to act when assurance came. His motto became Evangelism our Supreme Task and the habits behind that sentence were fixed. Pray first. Preach Christ. Call sinners. Lay hands on the sick. Give God the glory. In time meetings in Benin City gathered into a fellowship that became Church of God Mission International with services first along Forestry Road and then in larger halls as the congregation multiplied. The work grew from a prayer group into a registered church body and the same emphasis on the altar remained. The man who preached in the evening had been on his face in the morning and the workers who ushered and sang had already entered the day with Scripture and supplication.

Idahosa's ministry widened with training and with institutions born in prayer. In 1968 he launched what became All Nations for Christ Bible Institute in Benin City to form men and women in Scripture, prayer, and evangelism for the work of the gospel. From short sessions for converts it grew into a steady school that sent workers to towns and nations and kept the morning hour with God at the center of every day. He also formed Idahosa World Outreach and other arms devoted to mission and mercy, yet none of these were ends in themselves. They were channels to carry a life message that began with the secret place and ended with a call to win the lost.

The new media of the age became tools in his hands. He pioneered regular Christian broadcasting from Benin City with Redemption Television Ministry and with weekly programs that carried preaching and testimony into sitting rooms far beyond the reach of a tent or a crusade ground. He insisted that a camera could never replace a prayer meeting and that a microphone is only a trumpet for a heart already bowed. When crowds swelled in Lagos in 1985 and in other cities across West Africa he kept the rhythm that had carried him from the start. Morning instruction for workers and pastors. Afternoons given to planning and to intercession. Evenings that preached Jesus simply and pressed for repentance and faith. Reports tell of multitudes responding and of many testimonies of healing, and Idahosa answered such reports by directing people back to Scripture, to their pastors, and to truthful verification.

In leadership he helped gather Pentecostal pastors into fellowship in a nation where the movement had grown quickly and needed bonds of prayer and counsel. The Pentecostal Fellowship of Nigeria took shape in the mid 1980s and he later served as its third national president. His own church continued to expand with new congregations and a large worship center in Benin City, while the Bible institute trained workers for parishes across Nigeria and beyond. In his fifties he added a vision for Christian higher education that would serve the nation with scholarship under the lordship of Christ and that vision became a university that now bears his name. He called the church to pray for rulers and to serve the poor and he urged a generation of young preachers to keep their hearts clean and their knees bent.

He spoke plainly about faith, work, and integrity. He taught that boldness in proclamation must be matched by honesty in finances and humility in the worker. He kept a schedule that began early with Scripture and intercession and he measured a campaign not by numbers on a field but by the spirit of prayer that remained in a city when the loudspeakers fell silent. He often taught pastors to establish prayer bands, to restore morning and evening family worship, and to build inquiry rooms with open Bibles where new believers could be grounded in the Word. He believed that authority in the pulpit comes from submission in the secret place and he told young evangelists that private holiness weighs more than public applause. Accounts from colleagues and from the institute record a leader who studied, who prayed, and who expected God to act when His promises were pleaded with clean hands.

On March 12, 1998 he went to be with the Lord in Benin City. His wife Margaret Idahosa succeeded him in the leadership of Church of God Mission International and continued the same commitments to prayer, to training, and to the service of the church. The university vision matured and his Bible institute kept sending workers. In obituaries and in studies of Nigerian church life he is remembered as a chief voice in the rise of Pentecostal Christianity in the country and as a pioneer who used media, crusades, and schools without losing the primacy of the altar. The pattern he left can be read in a sentence that governed his days. Evangelism our Supreme Task. The strength in that sentence can be found where he found it first. On his knees with an open Bible.