By Emmanuel Afonne
The Senior Pastor, Kingdom Lifeline Ministry (KLAM), Michael Adefarasin, has blamed the current security and social challenges facing the country on loss of family values.
Adefarasin said this in Abuja on Saturday, at a three-day programme tagged: “Fight for your family” organised by Lifeline Family Institute, to highlight the importance of family and Church in the development of Society.
He said societal values were fast deteriorating in the country, and as such urgent steps needed to be taken to correct the wrongs and save the society and country in general from total collapse.
“We have lost our value system in the Church, and much of the Church has become very superficial, as we have not made the necessary impact on our society and nation.
“We are into the Church, but qualitatively, our communities are not really changing as life is getting worse economically and politically with all the prayers, so there is something wrong,’’ the cleric said.
He further noted that value systems were fast eroding and the purpose for which God raised the Church, which was to change society positively, was also being lost.
“We are talking about the value system and how do we go into the cultures of our societies and change the values to effect a kingdom.
“So the Church’s responsibility is to advocate a value system for the family because it is the most basic subset of any society; and societies comprise of families.
“If we can change the value system of one family at a time, we can change the whole society to effect the right values,” Adefarasin said.
According to him, education is supposed to reinforce those family and societal values, while government and law define the parameters within which those values are practiced; and that sports and entertainment should be used to celebrate the values.
“History has proven that arts and music are the fastest way to change a culture, while business and finance are meant to fund the value systems.
“Science and technology provide the vehicle within which we can cause those value systems to progress; it is all about the value and belief system.
“And these value systems are the principles, tenets, laws and scriptures, advocated by God Almighty so that we can conform to his character, to his nature and to his principles to live a lifestyle like Jesus Christ.
“That is what we need to do because our nation cannot change unless we are transformational, which means we are shifting our value systems from circular ideology to kingdom principles so that there can be reformation,’’ Adefarasin said.
Dr Lanre Olusola, behavioural change crusader and guest speaker at the programme, urged parents to ensure good morals were inculcated into their children to guarantee a better society.
“I have statistics that seven in 10 marriages in Nigeria end up in one form of separation or the other; and in Nigeria we are very religious, so we do not like divorce.
“So we stay in that dysfunctional home and create dysfunctional children.
“These dysfunctional children go into the society and create problems, so the Nigeria we see today is as a result of failed families and failed marriages.
“And because 70 per cent of Nigerians are under the age of 32, and so we call them millennial.
“They are the ones we call Malians also, and some of them are misbehaving and doing things that are abnormal, which earlier generations did not do.
“So it is time for us to pause and ask ourselves where we went wrong and restore; and where we need restoration is the family and marriage,” Olusola said.
He explained that nation building had a lot to do with the family and not squarely rested on government.
Olusola urged Nigerians not to put the whole blame on government, but instead to take responsibility for the security and social challenges currently being experienced in the country.
He said: “Every family needs to sit down and reconstruct, reconvene, recreate and re-launch a value system that would transform the country and set it on the path of development.” (NAN)