I did not set out to write a story about a fallen minister. I set out to write about myself, and then I gave the story to a man named Nathaniel because it was easier to be honest about him than about me.
For many years I have watched, in my own life and in the lives of people I love, a particular kind of danger that rarely gets named plainly enough in our churches. We are quick to warn young people against obvious sin. We are far slower to warn them against the quiet, respectable sin of wanting to be used by God more than we want to be shaped by Him.
I have sat in services where the preaching was powerful and the preacher’s private life was thin. I have watched gifted men and women rise quickly, admired widely, and then wondered, privately, why their inner world felt so far from the confidence of their public voice. I have asked that question of myself more times than I am comfortable admitting.
This book grew out of a simple, uncomfortable observation. Gifting can carry a person a very long way before character is ever tested. A person can preach powerfully, pray publicly, quote Scripture accurately, and still be, underneath all of it, a person who has quietly stopped listening to God. The frightening part is that such a person can often continue succeeding for a long time before anyone, including himself, notices what has happened.
Nathaniel Adekunle is not a real man, but he is not entirely invented either. He is what I have seen happen, slowly, to good and sincere people, myself sometimes included, when success arrives faster than maturity, and when correction begins to feel like an attack rather than a mercy.
I wrote this story as a novel and not as a sermon because I believe some truths are better felt than explained. I did not want to tell you that pride is dangerous. I wanted you to watch a sincere young man lose himself to it one small decision at a time, so that by the time his life finally comes undone, you understand exactly how it happened, and perhaps recognise, uncomfortably, a decision or two of your own along the way.
I want to be honest with you. I am not writing from a place of having arrived. I have had my own seasons of confusing activity with obedience, and visibility with usefulness. I have had my own Pastor Emmanuels, people who loved me enough to tell me something I did not want to hear, and I have not always listened well. This book is, in some part, my own confession, dressed in fiction.
If you are in ministry, in leadership, or simply in a season where God’s hand on your life is becoming visible to others, I hope Nathaniel’s story reaches you early rather than late. If you are further along than Nathaniel was when his story began, and you already sense the distance he only discovered after everything fell apart, I hope this book meets you gently and points you back toward the God who has not stopped loving you.
This is a Nigerian story, set among Nigerian Christians, because that is the world I know and the world I write from. But the danger at the centre of it belongs to every believer, everywhere, who has ever asked God to use him without first asking God to change him.
Thank you for reading. My prayer is that you close this book wanting to open your Bible, and that you close your Bible wanting to obey what you find there, whatever it may cost you.
Sam Obayemi
