Toro and Akin Osuntoki

Biography

We have both been Christians for many years, having made individual decisions for Christ in 1974 and 1986 respectively. We met at the University of Ife Nigeria in the early 80s, where we were both students. We got married in 1989 and are blessed with three children. For a long time, our passion has been to serve God and to make His name known. Now that our children are grown up (the youngest being 19) we feel called to serve God in full-time mission abroad.

We have worshiped at the Ealing Christian Centre since 1991 and have both played active roles in the life of the church. Akin has served as an elder since 2008 and worked as the PA to the church’s Senior Minister from October 2010 to date whilst Toro has been actively involved with the Prayer Ministry and with the prayer life of the church. Before joining the ECC staff, Akin worked in the private sector. Toro currently works as an Education Technologist in the University sector.

Our Journey

Soren Kierkegaard, Danish 19th Century theologian wrote that “A possibility is a hint from God. One must follow it." The inspiration for our missional journey started in 2009 when God started filling our hearts with compassion for the multitude of people in our direct world faced with different struggles for survival. By 2011, the consciousness of the struggling humanity had led to the dream that God could use us in different ways to help such people and inspired the passion to act. God used the words of Isaiah 58 verses 6b to 7 as a catalyst to act. “The kind of fasting I want is this: Remove the chains of oppression and the yoke of injustice, and let the oppressed go free. Share your food with the hungry and open your homes to the homeless poor. Give clothes to those who have nothing to wear, and do not refuse to help your own relatives."

Since then we have done the best we can in our little way to bring Christian compassion to a suffering world! However, God used two disparate events at the tail end of 2015 to direct our attention towards full time mission. One of these was Akin making a short-term mission to the Philippines in October 2015 where God opened his eyes to the model of the love and compassion He requires us to demonstrate to others. The second was a subsequent personal visit to Nigeria in November of the same year where God opened his eyes once again to the sufferings of many and particularly to the plight of pensioners and the aged in that country. After this visit, we felt an overwhelming mandate to return to Nigeria and to make a change in the lives of this target group.

Our mission is thus to act as facilitators of God’s love and compassion to the aged in Nigeria who are suffering from neglect. To achieve this, we are setting up an expression of church in the form of a Day Centre where the aged can have fun, fellowship and food. More importantly, we want the centre to be a place for them to belong and a place where they can be pointed towards Christ and helped to develop a relationship with Him. 1 John 3:17-18 “If anyone has material possessions and sees his brother in need, but has no pity on him, how can the love of God be in him?” “… let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth”.

Mission Statement

Our mission is to witness God’s love to the needy and to the disadvantaged; to provide a shoulder for them to lean on as well as help to release them from oppression.