Founder of Living Faith Church Worldwide, Bishop David Oyedepo, has urged members of his congregation to share his phone number with kidnappers if abducted, declaring that such encounters would end in their release.
Speaking during a church service at the Canaanland headquarters of his church in Ota, Ogun State, on Thursday, the cleric said his intervention in past kidnap incidents demonstrated what he described as spiritual authority over such situations.
“If anybody picks you, give them my number, give them my number,” he said.
The cleric backed the instruction with two accounts of what he described as divine intervention in past kidnapping incidents involving members of his church.
In the first, he said a pastor attached to the church was abducted and he was handed the kidnapper’s phone.
He claimed he warned the abductor that he would be dead within 24 hours if the pastor was not released.
He said, “One time one of our pastors was carried off by, what do you call them, kidnappers.
“I said, ‘Give them the phone. I told them, “In 24 hours, if you don’t release him, you will be dead.”
“The place was vibrating. On the spot.”
In the second account, he said a female member of the church was held captive but declared by faith that she would be free by 7 a.m.
He said the captors did not receive any call from him but began harming themselves before eventually releasing her.
“She said, ‘My father said I’m getting out of here latest by 7 a.m. They didn’t call. They started cutting themselves,” he said.
Oyedepo told members they carried the same spiritual force and needed only to discover and deploy it to overcome the challenges they face in their spiritual lives.
“You have been raised far above the devil. If the church does not conquer these devils, God has left heaven,” he said.
The clip, tagged under the hashtag #SupersonicSunday by the church social media accounts, appeared to be from a service held in the days before it began circulating widely on Thursday.
Packaged by Mayowa Owogbade
