COVID-19: Churches closed in 1918, stop misinterpreting pandemic – Pastor Sam Adeyemi

Sam Adeyemi, the senior pastor of the Daystar Christian Centre, has warned leaders to stop giving extreme interpretations to the Coronavirus epidemic ravaging the world.

Adeyemi said this following debates and conspiracy theories about 5G, the anti-Christ and coronavirus.

He debunked Pastor Chris Oyakhilome’s claim of government shutting down churches to install the 5G network.

Oyakhilome in a viral video linked the Coronavirus and the 5G network to antichrist.

But making reference to 1918, Adeyemi said churches, mosques, schools and markets were also shut in Nigeria during the influenza pandemic and it was not anti-Christ.

He urged leaders to use the opportunities in every crisis, and not to project extreme interpretation that causes fear to their followers.

The senior pastor said this on Tuesday night during a live Instagram chat with Poju Oyemade, the senior pastor of The Covenant Nation.

“Some leaders are giving extreme interpretations to the crisis.I studied the last global pandemic before COVID-19 to give the right perspective.

“There was a pandemic 100 years ago I read online because the interpretation that people are giving to this pandemic, they range from one extreme to the other.

“I don’t even want to go into the details now, but there’s quarrel on social media now, from 5G to 10G and other things. I decided to check, how it affects Nigeria and came across a research article by a history lecturer at the University at Birnin Kebbi.

“In 1918 September, when the influenza epidemic hit, it was sea travel that spread the influenza around unlike air travel spreading Coronavirus now.

“The ships brought sick people into the Lagos port.

“I was shocked and screamed when I saw they closed churches, mosques, schools and markets in 1918. So, some of us now think it is the anti-christ that is at work, he does not want us to gather together and fellowship.

“We should just be grateful to God that we have internet now and we can be relating without meeting together. They shut churches in 1918.

“A leader should take a perspective like that, then calm people down and tell them there will be life after this thing,” he said.

The 1918 pandemic was the Spanish flu crisis which was from January 1918 to December 1920.

The flu killed about 50million people and infected about 500 million people (about a quarter of the world’s population at the time).