I had this conversation with someone yesterday, a Christian leader I very much respect, and that conversation scarred me more than it healed me. I cried myself to sleep. Woke up at midnight and cried again, from a lot of pain. Woke up in the morning and tried to do the usual business of praying (more like, talking AT God), only to end up crying again. It wasn’t tears of remorse; it was just pain, pain, and pain, the pain of keeling over to a burden I had long decided was not mine to bear. It was pain I didn’t need to bother myself with, but pain my body buckled to anyway because of muscle memory. Because of the crippling fear that all I had hoped to grow out of was everything I still was neck deep in. Because of the crippling fear that, after all these years of unlearning, I might have been wrong all along.

The conversation, it was about spiritual life. Like a good parent, the kind who can see sitting down what a child cannot see standing up, he gave me an accurate breakdown of my current Christian existence. Conversationally mucked about in the waters of my transition from how I started out questioning the needless, the intangibles, changing the inconsequentials, and how it led me to question and rebel against the fundamentals. I don’t think he knew he was doing it but no matter how gentle he tried to sound, all I could hear was, “Funmi, you are no longer spiritually vibrant, and this is leading you down the path of destruction. Funmi, bad things will start happening to you now that you are not as spiritually sound as before. Funmi, you could literally lose your life, lose your all because God is mad at you.”

Of course, I heard him loud and clear. I don’t live like the Christian he is familiar with. If we go by the books of my denomination or even the brand of missionary righteousness that has characterized Pentecostalism, I am unChristian in every way. But I have never felt more Christian than now. This recent self, an adulterated version of who I used to be, it has been freeing. The anxieties, the pain, the miseries of trying to follow a set of doctrines that defied common sense, that were too strange to be true, all of that is gone, and all that is left is a thirst, a desire, to not ‘serve’ God, but to love him. Serving him within the context of a missionary religion like Christianity has meant putting the horse before the cart – following him, obeying him, before seeking and finding him. And this has come with a damning feeling of unselfness. For the most part of life, all I have felt like is that I, human, is supposed to be subsumed into the deep abyss of an infinite, undefined Godness, when it should be the unknown yet knowing God seeing me in all my humanness and revealing himself to me still.

I tried to explain this (I wish I didn’t; I catch myself always trying to justify my actions to others) but he didn’t even seem to hear me, probably because I rambled too much to even convince myself. He kept talking about how you will know a Christian by their fruits and how those fruits will not only be visible to the naked eyes but will be guided by the Holy Spirit and the Scripture.

“Be a scriptural believer,” he said and I wanted to scream into his ears, “I am a scriptural believer. I am just not your kind of scriptural believer. Can’t you see – I am just not who you think a Christian should be. I am not who many people think a Christian should be. Just like I think many people don’t do Christianity the way it should be done (maybe Christianity is not something that should be DONE). It’s a difference in perceptions and perspectives, not a difference in intentions.”

What’s more, I am convinced that people don’t really listen to the Holy Spirit and the Scripture, they listen to the sound of what is familiar. A familiar voice. A pastor’s voice. The voice of their mother. A father. A friend they secretly admire. Their own voice, a culmination of conventional, societally verified approaches towards Christianity calcified into a spiritual baritone from years of receiving and consuming certain messages, and specific interpretations of the scripture. 

What I am trying to do is shed all that and truly dial into God by starting with the basics – what does it mean to be with God, what does it mean to be of God? The God I know is the God we clearly pretend to understand but do not, a God that has been captured by many books including the Bible but whose identity has been shaped by man’s cultural, societal, and mythological backgrounds and desires for what God should be like. The Bible speaks of a Judeo-Christian God just as the Quran speaks of a Mohammadan God, but they share such similarities because they emerged out of similar cultures. The God of Buddhism having come from a Sino-Indian cultural background is different, hence our inability to relate to this God as Christians. 

And I think it’s completely fine to understand God in a certain way – either acquired through determined knowledge or the knowledge one intentionally comes into.

So who is to come for me if I decide to follow and worship a God that is an amalgamation of my acquired desires and all the religious experiences I have been exposed to as well as the ones I want to disavow myself from because of said experiences? 

GOD SAYS…

I have to speak to how terribly crippling it is to be told off as not spiritually vibrant especially at a time when you are more attuned to the prospect of finding God through your own voice. What’s more paralyzing and mentally weakening is being told that this message of damnation because of a spiritual lack of vibrancy comes from God himself. I was praying, and God told me this… this God that can take away everything you have and love told me that you are not doing right by him. This God that can punish you within the blink of an eye and make your life miserable if he so wishes told me to tell you this – you are not spiritually vibrant. This God you were once scared of because of how powerful he is and have only come to start loving because of how powerful he is told me his power will manifest in a negative direction because you are spiritually weak and it shows, because you are not bearing fruits.

It shows because there is this LinkedIn post where you spoke of all your achievements but did not so much as mention a thing about God…

It shows because you are setting your eyes on being with, and marrying someone who is not godly…

It shows because you keep going down the rabbit hole of dressing that raises questions from godly people…

It shows because you don’t attend weekly church services and pay your tithes…

It shows because you seem to talk freely about entertaining pornography and ungodly sexual orientations in your lived experiences…

It shows because you just don’t move like a child of God in your social life. You don’t have the bearing and doings of a godly person, of a person with God in mind and heaven in view…

It shows so much yet God told me to tell you… I am not telling you these based on what I have seen or heard or the changes you are clearly manifesting, but based on what God told me to tell you…

Nothing is more crippling than this… Nothing is more crippling than when this comes from a stranger who has formed a perception of you from your online activities. Nothing is more crippling than when this comes from someone who knows and loves you and has seen you and wants the best for you but thinks everything they say to you is only because God has asked them to say it.

I wish it was actually coming from you, the messenger, the Christian leader, someone who is human and fallible and chaotic like me, to say that your warning about my spiritual life is coming from God, doesn’t that spell damnation out for me? To say God is warning me, don’t you see that what you are reading from is a scroll of judgment and condemnation? How many people have God warned in the Bible and eventually spared? The people of Nineveh? People who had to fast and pray for forty days in sackcloth before even getting through to God? When you say your message comes from God, you are asking me to go into full Nineveh mode to avert judgment. And it particularly hurts, knowing that very morning, I took a walk down my favorite street on campus, praying to God for help and purpose and wisdom and strength to keep asking him for help.

It hurts knowing that I might very well be all that to God, yet he can ask someone to come tell me that I am screwing up really bad and heading down the same path I prayed to him that morning to protect me from.

It hurts because it could very well be God inferring that… I am not good enough. That nothing I do or don’t do will be good enough. Pray, fast, roll on the ground in the middle of a field in OAU, on the cold and hard floor of the parking lot in a campus hall, in the attic of a building on campus. Do all that and more, you still will have things I will require of your hand. And then when you suddenly get tired of going to church services because the routine kills you, because you are lazy and indulgent in your vices, because some message/prayers make you feel complicit in the business of condemning the world to hell, because the new times do not fit into your schedule, because you are backsliding and don’t think weekly services are important to your spiritual growth even though you know damn well that they are, it’s all proof that you were never good enough in the first place. After all, there was that day when I went to church in my younger years, I was late and a man looked me with pity and said, “You should have grown past this” as if to say “you are not doing your best, weak human child seeking God. You never were. You will never find God.”

It hurts because, as you were speaking, I kept wondering why God couldn’t send people to tell me, “Funmi, I see you. I see what you are about. You might be a little delinquent in your actions, but you have the softest, kindest human heart, and I see you. I know you are trying to seek me out. I am here, listening… I just wish you would speak louder. I just wish you would seek me out more boldly. But I see you.”

Even then, even as you were speaking, even as I was retorting fiercely yet meekly, even as I was feeling queasy, a bit hurt from wanting to hear something different, I couldn’t help but think of this song that my mind had fallen in love with that day, the very same one I am listening to on repeat, even now.

YOU SAY…

Or what if your words, the way you have chosen to phrase them isn’t all of God’s because you are human, because you have seen me, known me, heard rumors about me, seen stuff I have posted online, gotten a good feel of my spiritual struggles based on my presence or absence in church service, and it just shows that I am not what you think God would be pleased with. What if it’s just the fruits you are not seeing, the lack of fruits itself warrants being called out as an unChristian, but to say God says, God told me to tell you, God has this message for you… Such mental devastation!

You say to bear fruits, but you say to seek God personally, scripturally, away from the distractions of stark denominational differences (denominations who claim to all follow the same scripture) and the catastrophes of Christian history. How can you bear fruits if you don’t go through the agonizing process of being seedless, of being watered, of not growing despite being watered because you are not in the right soil, of being repotted, of having no leaves due to autumn, of going through dry spells due to drought, of showing forth signs of fruit, of bearing fruits, and then losing them to bear other kinds of fruits, of being harvested of these fruits, and then having to start all over again? The Christian life is often explained using the example of the life of a tree. But why are we not fully and truly committed to that analogy? 

Much of what Christianity has become does not allow for hesitations, doubts, re-evaluations, re-consecration, discovery, re-discovery, exploration, for sin, for sin that is specific to a moment in history, for sin that you then discover is sin only because it has been determined through time and space to be so… Much of what Christianity has become does not allow you to question people who have inserted themselves into their interpretation (and successfully replicated this interpretation) of how God should be served and followed. Much of what Christianity has become is that you give your life to Christ and you are supposed to continue on this straight, narrow path, not looking left and right. To shift ground is to backslide, like Lot’s wife. But even Lot who escaped Sodom and Gomorrah wasn’t any better despite not looking back. More so, life in its sheer mundanity does not work that way – we get distracted, we are divisive, we digress, we divert other people’s attentions, we dilly-dally, we delay, we delude ourselves into untruth, we distress ourselves with unnecessities, we die daily. Every day is indeed a new day, sparkling, sparkling new. Why then should our commitment to a guiding force that is so powerfully grounded yet unbound by time and space be undeterred by other deterrent forces? A mere human who has been plunged into a tradition that has been in existence 2000 years before, that has gone through several historical trajectories, should be allowed to ask questions about what is real, what is true, and what is not. Who is God and who is not? They should be allowed to plop down on this straight, narrow road and sulk.

God might not change as is often said but humans do. Humans have changed so much over the centuries, what makes us think that their ways of serving a God who has given his creatures the free will to subject him to their imaginations have not changed? 

AND ABOUT THE BIBLE…

What makes us think what we consider scriptural has not been influenced by years and years of unstopping, relentless interpretations and re-interpretations loaded into the Bible, the same Bible that was collected like antique scrapbooks over many years in different iterations and its existing form only discovered in the 1850s in a monastery, years after Christianity has already been a thing. Even more, the Bible was literally written over a century after Jesus’ death, that is, over the course of 100 years after Jesus has died, after the apostles have been left struggling to understand their past and reconcile it to the future! What then does it mean to be a scriptural believer if the scripture is as recent as fallible man itself? What kinds of believers were the Christians who existed before the Bible was compiled into such a neat anthology in the early 20th century? Unscriptural? These people thrived on oral and rendered understandings of Jesus and God, they formed their beliefs and doctrines based on letters. I am sure they made as many mistakes as we are making now in our conceptualizations of what it means to be Christian, but they were at least not burdened by singular, insular interpretations of God.

They knew they wanted to serve the Christian God, different from whatever other Gods they had been serving, but it was the passion that sustained them, not the knowingness. They embraced confusion, they reverenced their leaders way too much, they were as fallible as we are now, they raised temples to the heavens, they razed temples to the ground, they went to fellowship in secret one too many times, they preached in public one too many times, they sinned and received condemnations, but at least they knew what they were – Christians who had discovered a new way of serving God and were not about to relent in the serving of this God.

Now, we don’t treat Christianity as an inquiry, as a belief, like science, a knowledge that you pick up and refuse to relent on, we treat it as a matter of fact and the danger in doing this is that it does not allow for differences in practice, for differences in temperance, it does not allow for fanaticism to read as fanaticism, it does not allow for uncanny, personal streaks of dedication to read as such, it does not allow you to be chill if you wanna be chill with the knowledge of Christianity, it does not allow for Christianity to manifest in the same vein as your human temperament, your human idiosyncrasies. If you are not Christian, the matter-of-fact Christian shown in the scriptures, you just are not Christian.

If you are not like Paul or John the Beloved or Jesus, what are you if not Demas or Judas? You can’t be Abram or Abraham after Keturah, you have to be Abraham, the one God called and said “Walk before me and be thou perfect.” You can’t be confused David, just roaming around, running from his archenemy, feeling intensely for Jonathan without knowing what to do with the feeling and yet knowing certainly what to make of it, you have to be David facing Goliath, untethered, young and restless and carefree about his belief in God. You can’t be old, worn-out David or Gideon asking God stupid questions, expressing unbelief, praying without surety of an answer, you have to be David, dancing like a mad person, dancing to the point that God commanded barrenness to fall on his hater.

You can’t be a Peter, with ADHD, changing with the tides, loving Jesus, but wanting so badly to fish, having biases and prejudices shaped by his culture, you have to be Peter, going all the way to preach to Cornelius, it doesn’t matter that it took a whole ass divine interventional trance to do what he did, what matters is that you do what he did without having to go through the arduous process of the mental re-engineering he went through.

You have to be John the Beloved without necessarily being dipped in a hot, boiling cauldron of oil. You have to be Paul – forget that he reeks of misogyny, patriarchy, classism, and the extremist mentality, classic ‘oversabi’ guy, considering his educational and religious background shaped him up to be just this. You have to be Paul nonetheless – scripturally eloquent, fervent, untethered to the world, just striving and thriving despite the flesh you are contending with. Nobody has stopped to ask, “How did Paul fare with his flesh in moments when he was not writing to the Romans and the Corinthians and all those folks? When he was alone and in prison and battered and unwriting, what was he saying to God?” If he was as human as I am, I bet there were times when Paul just didn’t Paul himself out of difficult, fleshy situations, when he didn’t just praise and worship himself out of persecution. But none of this has ever truly mattered to Christians now. Same for John the Beloved. When he wasn’t bursting with revelations, who was he?

Having the scripture in hand makes us feel we know everything, that everything we need is in there. And because we are seeing entire fragments of people’s lives in one swoop, from a bird’s eye view, because we have a drone shot of Paul’s story, Abraham’s story, we forget that they lived lives in ‘everydays’ just like we do.  Today, we curate what we can be, what our Christian lives should consistently look like. Today, we can just as well ignore those nitty-gritty details that led up to the transformation each Bible character had. We can be Abraham, full of faith, Moses, full of meekness, Elijah, full of power, and not be the human weaklings they were before that or after that.

We can settle on the scenario of Jacob praying like a mad man, wrestling with an angel, and ignore all the 20 years he didn’t even think to pray. All the 20 years he lived life on his own terms, using his own strength. Even when we talk about these things, we render them from instructional lenses – “Don’t not pray like Jacob. Don’t lose faith like Elijah, don’t lose your patience like Moses, don’t doubt God like Abraham did when he took in Hagar… Don’t, don’t, don’t.”

As if to say there won’t be times when these could be our realities, will be our realities. As if to say life is just about unboxing instructions and applying them readily to arising situations. When actually life is just life lifing.

Why can’t we say this? – “As seen in this story, this could be you, might be you one day, might be you right now, but this is not the end. God has got you and he is going to make an Israel out of your Jacob, not because you will do anything to offset the process but just because he is God and that’s kinda what he is about.”

Why can’t we say? “Oh you see David and Abraham, God really was on their matter. He sent them help along the way when they fell hard. He fell hard with them too, loving them, listening to them, helping them manage their frailties, and helping them to never forget that he is God.”

Why can’t we say? – “Oh, he is going to another church whose doctrines we don’t agree with? Oh I see, Paul and Peter were both pastors who could not see eye to eye but they both had love for God. Let’s leave him be then.”

Why can’t we say? – “Oh she has not been coming to church for a while or has been doing things we think are unbiblical but is actually still full of love and kindness and other such Godfearing attributes? Oh, wow. Many people in the Bible – Gideon, Deborah, Esther, Joshua, Mary of Mary and Martha, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Jonah, the Apostles, and Jesus – had unconventional beliefs that did not tally with the norms and values of their times. People thought they were out of line, both religiously and righteously, but they were actually onto something. Why not let her be while we check up to make sure she is communicating about her new lifestyle and belief systems with God?” 

The bottom line of my inquiry – What is more important than what is in the Bible if not the agelong spirit of the Word personified contained in the Bible? What should you listen to if not the voice behind the text, the one still, small voice that is hardly audible in an age filled with prescriptive noises? This same scripture, this same Bible everyone claims is unchanging compels me to seek change. I ask always when I read different accounts of people who believed in God one way or another but led different lives and believed different things and sought God in different ways, “Who is this unchanging God amidst all the changing ways, beliefs, knowledge banks, and people of the world?” Who is God to man NOT who does man say God is?

Postscript

Moments after writing this in the haze of being a hot mess, I stumbled on this article written by Ibrahim Williams, a brilliant scholar I recently met at MLA 2025: https://republic.com.ng/december-24-january-25/the-africans-lost-in-the-diaspora/

And honestly, it’s all connected. The fact that Christianity has become my Roman empire, I fear I have been groomed into it. After all, it’s one of the legacies of the historical processes that have made us desire exile even in our own countries. In fact, heaven is the zenith of all forms of exile.

“Everything I could turn to pointed toward the exit door” – Ibrahim Williams.

What is the Christian aspiration to get to heaven if not this?