Go Forth and Prosper

Between 2018 and 2022, my dad sent hundreds of short voice notes - prayers, declarations, and pastoral reflections - to WhatsApp groups of friends, family, and church members spread across Nigeria, the UK, the US, and beyond. He recorded most of them early in the morning, usually before 9am, from the house in Ibadan. Many of them were part of his series, Strength for the Journey.

Because he wanted them to be preserved, he typically recorded them as a voice note to me and then forwarded it on to the different WhatsApp groups he wanted to share them with. I have stored 92 of these voice notes, listened to them, transcribed them carefully, and selected twelve to share here. I will add more of them in the years to come.

These twelve span four years, different seasons of his life, and different modes of his pastoral voice: testimony, prayer, teaching, encouragement, and pure blessing. Some are two minutes long. Some stretch to ten. All of them honestly, unapologetically, bluntly, my dad. In most of them, he's sitting alone in his room. He's not constrained by, or speaking to, a specific audience. I often close my eyes and imagine him sitting there in his room upstairs in Olodo, embracing this new tool as a way to keep doing his life's work.

We hope they are a gift to everyone who knew him, and to everyone who is only now meeting him for the first time. - Mogbekeloluwa & the Koye-Ladele family.

———

This is the shortest note in the collection. No scripture exposition, no story, no convention announcement. Just his voice, and a blessing.

As you pursue this day, the presence of the Lord will go with you. The presence of God will tabernacle around you. The Holy Spirit will show you direction. You will pursue, overtake and recover. You will not meet evil and evil will not meet you. He closes with his sign-off — I remain your brother, Reverend Edward Koyeladele. Have a wonderful and a beautiful day. Bye. That's the whole note. Under a minute. It is, in some ways, the purest thing here: the daily pastoral work stripped of everything except the blessing itself, offered without conditions, without preamble. Just the laying on of hands, in words, across a WhatsApp group, at 10am on a Thursday morning in August.