The Turning

He was twenty-five years old when he gave his life to Christ, in April 1977, through the Deeper Life Christian Ministry. By December of that year he had received the baptism of the Holy Spirit at a retreat in Onitsha. He was water baptised in 1978.

He was already working at ECWA Production Ltd., the parent company of Challenge Bookshops, when the conversion happened. He was selling Bibles and Christian literature, which meant he spent his working days handling the very things that were reshaping his inner life. He rose to Branch Manager at the head office in Lagos.

The Deeper Life movement shaped those years. The emphasis on personal holiness, the seriousness about the Word, the culture of prayer: these were not abstract ideas in a Deeper Life congregation in the late 1970s. They were the daily air the serious believer breathed, and he breathed it deliberately.

When he left Challenge Bookshops in 1987, he did not leave the work. He registered Tayo Aderemi Jubilee Enterprises, known as TAJE, and continued distributing Bibles and Christian books on his own terms. He was also corresponding with publishers in America, exploring distributorship arrangements. He imagined Nigeria as a country where the Word of God was in every home. He acted on the imagination.