Christiana Abiodun Emmanuel

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Christiana Abiodun Emmanuel b. Akinsowon (born December 25, 1907 in Abeokuta ; † 1994 ) was a Nigerian church founder and missionary .

Life

As the daughter of a father from Abeokuta and a mother from Porto-Novo , in today's Benin , she belonged to the Yoruba of Nigeria. She was a practicing Methodist , but, as was quite common in Africa at the time, she also took part in church services and celebrations of other Christian denominations. At a Catholic Corpus Christi celebration in 1925, she tried to look into the chalice that the archbishop was holding. She fell into a deep trance from which she was no longer threatened to wake up. Abiodun Emmanuel described the following weeks later as an initiation in which she was instructed by angels, namely the Archangel Michael , in her future spiritual tasks. After three weeks, the charismatic preacher Moses Orimolade Tunolase from Lagos finally managed to end the permanent trance. Tunolase and Abiodun Emmanuel - at that time still Abiodun Akinsowan - got together and founded a prayer group within the Anglican Church, which dedicated itself to missionary tasks and charismatic help for spiritually distressed families. The organization, which was named Cherubim and Seraphim Society the following year , soon left the Anglican Church and grew into an independent church with millions of members. In their doctrine, which was essentially based on the inspiration of Emmanuel, Cherubim and Seraphim often linked pre-Christian ideas and practices within the Yoruba culture, but placed them in a Christian context. Captain Abiodun , as she was respectfully called, undertook extensive so-called "evangelism trips" within western Nigeria, alone or together with Tunolase, in order to proselytize, as well as to track down witches or wizards and subject them to public exorcism.

In 1929 there was a falling out between Emmanuel and Tunolase, which led to a schism. An arbitration court decided at that time that the group around Emmanuel could continue to use the name Cherubim and Seraphim Society. The church then experienced further fragmentation, in up to at times more than 50 different congregations, but it was thanks to the discipline and authority of Emmanuel that the majority of the apostate churches reunited under their leadership.

Abiodun Emmanuel left a daughter who today holds a leading position within the denominations of the Cherubim and Seraphim in the United States.

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