CHRIST REVIVAL MISSION INTERDENOMINATIONAL
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| About the Founder DR. LENKE G. CHINKE The Late Dr. Lenke G. Gobel Chinke, was a civil servant all his life, until he retired voluntarily and became a full time minister. He had served as an ordained Elder and Pastor of the Worldwide Church of God for 13 years before his service as the pioneer of the Christ Revival Mission Interdenominational, Bukuru Jos Plateau State. A faith based NGO which was established to not only preach and propagate the gospel of Jesus Christ but also to enbark on social ministry to the poor and needy, this was a life he had been accostomed with as a child and felt God was leading him to help people in need. He died on the 18 of Aplil 2013 leaving behind his wife, Mrs. Hannah Chinke a co-founder of the ministry, five children, many grand children and numerous brothers and sisters. Dr. L.G. Chinke had written many books and has left a budding ministry behind which is being built upon by the present leadership! Christ Revival Mission puts at it focus a ministry to the Mind, Body and Spirit and believes if we are to tackle human problems we must not neglect any of these three aspects of Humanity. |
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WHY DEVELOPING COUNTRIES STRUGGLE WITH LEADERSHIP
As a little boy my father told me stories of the pattern of leadership that existed within the traditional African society. His grand father was a chief and this meant that he knew much about the issues that were involved in the governance of their old African communities. The stories he told me were that of a society that depended much on the ability of heads of households being able to maintain their hold on individual and clan assets. In that light they were many at times involved in simple economic activities like asset reacquisition in the case of unpaid loans which usually consisted of farm lands. They were involved in legal battles for kingship, domestic issues, and even in the case of murder. In such legal battles animals were usually slaughtered in the shrine to determine cases in child custody – in a specific case my father himself was going to be adopted since his father had married a second wife and his aunt needed assurance that her own children’s birthrights would not be at stake vis-à-vis such adoption. A case of accidental deaths or otherwise if it could be resolved usually involved a recompense or an animal in exchange. Such animals or pieces of land where valid as currency in any of such transactions. In my fathers view the traditional leaders of the time were ruthless and this created a hatred and apprehension among the followership for their rule.
This form of traditional leadership in my research has global ramifications, when one looks closely, one can observe forms of capitalism and socialism within these ancient traditional practices. The issue at stake in this article is to try to demystify the reasons developing societies often struggle as compared to their more developed counterparts. While many scholars have disputed with this categorization claiming that many of these ancient societies were as developed as any modern society, the reality, gives validity to the debate. The question in my view is why the current leaders in development were able to device technology and the others could not. Technology it seems is the only factor that differentiates the two. Yet on closer investigation, one would observe a little more difference which exists in the law that governs human rights. It can be observed that a cow can be exchanged for the life of a martyr in the old traditional systems. A dowry is usually exchanged for the matrimonial (possibly eternal) rights of a young maiden. These differences stem from how those ancient leaders valued human life. Inadvertently saying that human life can be bought and sold.
In the modern/western legal system which stems from Judeo-Christian traditions human life is sacred and to be valued above that of an animal and thus cannot be exchangeable. While dowry is not totally condemned, it is not emphasized and marriage is elevated to eternal companionship on earth. These values are arguably the foundations of what moved western society based on the fundamental precepts of moral and intellectual independence giving rise to free trade which fast tracked innovation and thus development.
It begs the question that in every society there was a rigorous process of governmental formation which often takes hundreds and thousands of years. Historically Europe itself has been the epicenter of conflict while in the process of churning out its own development, America was victim of this process harboring European immigrants who colonized the former Indian tribes to create a modern developed nation. In all this one can observe violence and the suppression of poorer and weaker peoples. My focus in this is to point that the popular reasons often given for underdevelopment in Africa are global in nature. Thus, in trying to churn out a solution, one must be more concise and introspective so as not to cut a tree from the stem leaving the roots to re-emerge.
The long and short of it all is that, civilization was built on a pile of bodies and bones but yet one part of the world reached the conclusion that the reverse was a more sustainable value. The only problem is in the realistic nature of things. It is observed that though these values are preached and upheld in the public space by these western leaders, secretly they still embark on a rampage of death and destruction. As such this hypocrisy is seen by observers as only a smokescreen to deny other leaders around the world of their right to superintend over their own constituents albeit occasionally wielding such wanton violence.
This has been a paradox to me in these few years I have had to study leadership. In this I have discovered that it is indeed true that human beings do not easily value good leadership. Thus, I have often wondered if it may suffice to allow a little tyranny to prosper? The Bible itself says “spare the rod and spoil the child”, thus if the constituents are proverbial children of the leaders, the rod of punishment would suffice from time to time. A torrent of elemental exhaustion just passed through my mind as I try to understand the implications of this. My conclusions are simple:
That is why the legal system churned from Judeo-Christian biblical values remains in place to guide all be it conscientiously the implementation of such discipline. I have observed with humorous disgust as leaders who looted my country Nigeria to a standstill claim that so-called traditional methods are best in handling a Nigeria currently existing in the 21st century. On a daily basis I observe that simple human weaknesses such as, the penchant to lie, to covet others belongings and to show favoritism still superintend over the system as it did during these long years of looting of Nigerian resources. Democracy thus seems to be working to our detriment if we do not commit to the foundational aims of spiritual and ethical reformation of the human mind which focus is the transformation of the perverseness churned from the depravity of the human mind.
My conclusion; developing societies including the African society should look again into what constitutes leadership values and re-engage them in putting people who truly value integrity and not just copyists who have invaded our societies in the last two decades who in a bizarre show of childish nativity seem to be borrowing from the western pop-culture clandestine patterns of governance, in an attempt to imprison the true leaders and use their minds claiming it as a “national resource” to stabilize government. This is leading my country Nigeria into sure destabilization and violent extremism.
David Dungji Chinke HOW GOD IS USUALLY APPRECIATED – THE EPIPHANY OF OUR HUMAN GODSThe heavens tell of his glory says Psalm 19:1. The firmament showeth his handiworks. Without really speaking, day and night they tell of the presence of God even though he seems invisible. As much as we want to deny the presence of God because we humans have been able to harness these natural resources to create technology that make our lives easier and more prosperous; the truth remains that all these boasts are still reliant on the natural created world we did not have any hand in making. We beat our chests saying we can do and undo, we take from the poor and give the rich, we kill those that stand in our way, we make their lives unlivable if they do not banter to our ways. Just because we have these natural resources which over generations our ancestors have been able to harness. Yet if we only knew where these resources actually came from, we would be very willing to bow unequivocally to the source of creation itself. But if by any means he is absent then we become all in all in his place. After the attack on Sunday at Gari Ya Waye, Angwan Rukuba, Jos, I watched a video that not only got me thinking but almost got me saying “I told you so”. Not that I wanted to boast but only that this was a script I had seen repeat itself over and over again. Over the past 25 years since I matured to become a man, a new level of responsibility was put on me that I had never known. I began to understand that certain things had shifted base, from things I could take for granted to things I had to either try to create or my life was at stake. I had to try to feed myself, accommodate myself and be part of a world with so many expectations of me. As if that was not enough, I physically witnessed another epiphany, I saw my father, who taught me all I know, who I still depended on for some support in life breath his last. Right there and then It was like that door to the safe of my life was locked and the keys thrown away. Though I had almost gained independence from him at that time, events had proven to try to reverse this progress, and then his sudden death. The next three years of my life were spent trying to unlock this safe – of course I had to find the key; it was not in his grave, after all we were responsible for packaging his body and burying it – there was no need to go a grave digging. It was not in his drawers or personal safe however blindly I had followed my mother around trying to recover his assets. To my amazement and literal astoundment, they were locked deep within me. After five to six years in this discovery my dead father came back to life again confirming my fear that he had literally become a god in his own rights. From the grave (God’s side) he was doing things that up to today, I wonder if I am giving the right person the credit – things only a god could do. But as God himself would have it, the culmination was a final revelation of all his points of weakness. His aim; God alone would be glorified. Yesterday as I watched people heckle, people who would have hitherto hailed their governor; a great man who had just a few months back celebrated his achievements by organizing a series of Christmas events that culminated in the celebration of the new year; I thought to myself; there goes the epiphany of our human gods. In the past three years of this man’s adventure into governance, I had appreciated and admired his never before seen ability to make decisions one could hardly fault. He had and wielded a knack at diplomacy I have not recently seen in Plateau state within the political sphere. With every move he made, he surprised and often impressed observers and yet all this time I harbored a fear. A fear I had developed since that day I lost my dad; a man of integrity, intelligence, grit, diplomacy and a professional often respected for his matter of factly and well informed views. He was a Christian who often gave all he had for the sake of the service of God. All this slowly faded into that epiphany just because without knowing it he found himself repeating a lie often told by a false god – called community. We ourselves repeated that lie as much as our naïve eyes could convince us of it. But soon enough as a family we were forced to see things as they really were. Today as I realize that this crises in not limited to Plateau state, nor Nigeria but to the whole world. I am forced to admit another truth; the reason creation stands on its own; so perfect as created by God, who in his mercy frequently allows us to arrogantly claim we are the reason it exists, in perceived prosperity. The reason it is so sublime and available to us for life and sustainability, itself, is that in the end, God himself actually created us in His own image. We are blessed with his creativity, and a little measure of his intelligence; we are blessed with his ability to visualize what we want and practicalize it in physical terms and yet what we lack is his patience, his integrity and his tenacity. Through these 13 years since my dad died, I have been forced to see that indeed God looks to me, expectant, that only if I would take his word seriously, I would be able to make the world I want to live in. But even more so I have been forced to be aware that the influence of the community will either make or mar this potential. David Dungji Chinke +2348065721408 |