What is The Jesus Movement?
Get to Know Us!
Introduction
The Jesus Movement [TJM] is a community of believers of the Evangelical and Charismatic persuasion. We affirm that salvation is by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone, as revealed in Scripture alone, to the glory of God alone.
We identify with and profess belief in one holy Catholic (i.e. universal) and Apostolic Church of Jesus Christ. In light of this, we affirm the Apostolic Creed, the Nicene Creed, and the Chalcedonian Definition, which together embody and briefly articulate the orthodox Christian beliefs.
This article aims to introduce our ministry: who we are, what we believe, our vision, our mission, and the kinds of activities we run and the motivation behind them.
As you read this, we hope you gain a deeper understanding of who we are beyond our activities. We hope you get to know the real us. But even more importantly, we hope you come to know the Lord better in a real and powerful way.
Who We Are
The Jesus Movement is a community of believers with a high view of God, a deep love for His church, and a burning passion to see men and women everywhere become disciples of Christ.
But words have meaning, and the word “disciple” is not unclear.
To be a disciple in the Christian context means to be taught Christ — the things He did and taught at a fixed point in history, which are therefore not open to evolution or change.
To change them even in the slightest would mean to depart from the historic teachings of Christ, seeing as the departure would no longer refer to those things which Christ did and taught at a fixed point in history but to something that never happened at all.
If this happens, then neither saving faith nor sanctification can exist, and this is why we worry.
God Himself revealed His nature through the redemptive story of the Gospel: the very foundation of the Church, and the only means by which men can be saved. We have become deeply concerned by exploding trends within the Nigerian Church that appear to be disconnecting us from the rich heritage of biblical doctrine and tradition that the Old Testament Prophets and New Testament Apostles passed down to us.
False gospels have overthrown the true Gospel of Christ from its rightfully supreme position on our pulpits and have replaced it. These false gospels cannot save a man nor conform him to the image of Christ.
Movements founded on false teachings such as the Prosperity Gospel, Word of Faith movement, Hypergrace theology, 7 Mountains Movement, and others like them have become so widespread in the Nigerian Church today. People now champion and contend for these perversions as truth while shunning and rejecting the true Gospel of Christ.
Meanwhile, cries for a false ecumenism (i.e. interdenominational cooperation) silence the warning bells that should alert us to the false teachers who have crept into our midst unnoticed. People hail syncretism and pluralism as virtues to be sought after and praised while neglecting the Gospel that we should contend for.
If faith in the Gospel is the only means to salvation as revealed in Scripture, then our belief that the Nigerian Church is in a state of emergency is not baseless. True believers have every right to worry.
But even more than that, we have a holy obligation to do our part as God helps us to contend for the true faith and pass it down to the next generation just as it was passed down to us through blood and tears.
This holy desire forms the pulse and the philosophy of our ministry as a community of believers. It explains, animates, energizes, and purifies everything we do as a people.
With a specific passion for the next generation church (tweens, teens, and young adults) whom we love so deeply, TJM desires to equip believers with education, encouragement, and fellowship that ultimately help them advance the Lord’s mandate to make disciples of all nations.
We have the assurance that God will keep His church. He has been doing so for 2000 years and will not stop now. For this reason, we labor all the more joyfully and diligently, knowing that our efforts in the Lord will never be in vain.
All such who share this passion and confidence are our brothers, sisters, and co-laborers, and we long to link arms with them as we give ourselves wholly to the work that we’ve all been called to.
History
To understand where we are presently, we need to look back at how it all began.
TJM started as this passion to guide young people and help them become more knowledgeable and passionate about God and his work. We realized that a lot of young people around us were growing in zeal without knowledge, and we didn’t want that. So, we started with a camp–Revved Up!
That was the thrust of the whole team.
Another leg on which the vision stood was to make these things completely free because we didn’t want a situation where the hindrance to people getting these things would be a lack of financial resources. So right from that point, we made that decision that everything we do as a ministry, or an organization, has to be completely free because we just didn’t want that barrier.
And that’s how we started in 2022. We decided to hold the camp in September and with God’s help and provision we were able to pull through. Our first camp had about 15 attendees in total and since then, we’ve learned a lot and reformed our views.
On this journey, God has brought many wonderful people into our lives who have helped us on our journey to become more biblical. We look at where we started and where we are now, and we’ve seen how our theology has evolved. So, it’s not just that we are teaching others, it’s that even through these things that we do, God has taught us Himself to become more biblical and more faithful to apostolic and historic Christianity.
Vision
As a community of believers, we burn with a passion to see the revival of our churches to doctrinal purity and the reconciliation of our culture to Christ to the end that God glorifies Himself as men find their deepest satisfactions in Him alone.
Mission
TJM supports the Church by equipping young believers with access to free and faithful Christian scholarship.
We exist to make disciple-making disciples who, through sound teaching, are first grounded in Biblical and Apostolic doctrine themselves and are therefore equipped to contend for it and pass it on to the next generation.
We are therefore committed to continuously reforming our individual and collective views and practices to conform fully with the Scriptures.
What We Believe [The TJM Charter]
In this section, we articulate how our theological vision and doctrinal standards shape us to discharge our ministry with biblical faithfulness and theological fidelity.
A Big God Theology
We believe in one living and true God, who is simple, holy, loving, eternal, and boundless in power, wisdom, and goodness, the Creator and Sustainer of everything. This Being is tri-personal, and of one essence, substance, and eternity — the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
How This Shapes Us and Our Ministry
As a ministry, TJM strives to display God as ultimately great both in our projects and in the way we plan and execute them. He calls and qualifies us for this work, and only He can convict the sinner and sanctify the believer.
Because He is all wise and all good, we submit to and are content with the ordinances He has set down for Gospel ministry because we do this for His glory alone.
We reject all ambitions, goals, strategies, and methodologies for ministry that neither Scripture stipulates nor proves. We are content to be who God wants us to be, in the place He wants us to be, at the time He wants us to be.
And we have unshakable confidence that the Sovereign God will provide all that we need (both men and resources) to do all that He demands per time. When our Father does not provide, we understand that we do not need such things. Though we might think we do need them, our Father is all wise and all good, and we are therefore content to resign ourselves to His wiser determinations.
Ultimately, in the discharge of our ministry, we hope to always keep asking ourselves, “How may we further decrease that Christ may increase?” Therefore, our primary means of planning and preparing for projects will always be through prayer. We will do this while we ensure not to neglect the place of responsibility as stewards who wisely set our house in order, as God sovereignly moves as He pleases to edify His people.
A High View of Scripture
We believe that the books of the Old and New Testaments comprise the Holy Scriptures, inspired and flawlessly written by God. They are fully without error in their original manuscripts, surpassing all human authority, and people have faithfully preserved them to this day without corruption of essential doctrine. We affirm that these Scriptures contain everything necessary for salvation; therefore, whatever cannot be proven by them should not be required of anyone to be believed as a matter of faith, or deemed necessary for salvation.
In both the Old and New Testaments, life is ultimately offered through Christ, the sole Mediator between God and humanity. The New Testament guides Christians in fulfilling the moral principles of the Old Testament, emphasizing loving obedience to God enabled by the indwelling presence of His Holy Spirit.
How This Shapes Us and Our Ministry
The Jesus Movement is committed to carefully reading and faithfully interpreting Scripture using reliable hermeneutic principles and exegetical rules (i.e. principles for bible interpretation) while depending on the Holy Spirit to illuminate our understanding that we may live these words as we ought to.
Since God is the source and author of truth, and that truth has been specially revealed in Scripture, we are not satisfied with a “good enough” or “close enough” understanding of Scripture.
While we believe that even our most accurate knowledge of God’s truth is still partial at best (therefore calling for humility), we are also committed to giving our very best to develop and articulate our understanding of all that God has revealed in the most precise and accurate way that is possible for us as regenerated but limited humans.
We acknowledge that secret things belong to the Lord. We do not presumptuously seek to peer into such realms for we are abundantly satisfied and even overwhelmed by the abundance of doctrinal treasures God has mercifully made available to us in His Word.
The Jesus Movement primarily relies on the grammatical-historical principle of hermeneutics used by the vast majority of biblically faithful evangelical churches. We also utilize the redemptive-historical principle that emphasizes interpreting all of Scripture in light of its place in redemptive history. In this principle, all stories, teachings, and prophecies find their fulfillment in the redemptive sacrifice of Christ, without which Scripture has no center.
A Grounded Theology of Man and Sin
We believe that through the disobedience of Adam and Eve, sin entered the world, affecting all creation. The consequences of sin include a breach in the relationship between humanity and God, upsetting of the natural order, and the abuse of individuals by corrupt or misguided social systems. The entire creation eagerly awaits redemption.
We believe that sin is the primary problem of humanity and the world, and the Gospel is the only solution. Outside of the Gospel, there is no hope for man or the world.
For this reason, we are decisively committed to communicating and proclaiming the Gospel clearly, faithfully, and joyfully, both within our culture evangelistically and outside our culture missionally.
We appreciate that doing this effectively requires proper contextualization, neither compromising to gain the approval of society nor resorting to legalism and thus making the gospel inaccessible.
We aim to maintain our countercultural disposition while working to make the gospel more accessible to culture, not only for people’s eternal good but also for their temporal good.
The Sacraments: Means of Grace
We believe that baptism and the Lord’s Supper are sacraments that Christ commanded and ordained as means of grace when received through faith. They are expressions of our Christian faith and signs of God’s gracious work in us. Through them, He quickens, strengthens, and confirms our faith.
How This Shapes Us and Our Ministry
Because Christ ordained the sacraments as means of grace for us as believers, we eagerly and devotedly partake of them to the degree that we can as a body that operates as a ministry rather than a local church.
We aim to partake of the Lord’s Table as often as possible in our gatherings.
Because we are not a church, TJM does not administer the sacrament of baptism. We do acknowledge baptism (by immersion) as a public declaration of personal faith in Christ. Nevertheless, since baptism is a sacred command that welcomes the new convert into the family of God, we believe that a local church and qualified elders should carry it out.
Gospel-Centered Ministry
God has given this visible catholic church the ministry, oracles, and ordinances of Christ, for the gathering and perfecting of the saints in this life until the end of the world. By His own presence and Spirit, according to His promise, He makes them effective for His purposes.
We strive to demonstrate the marks of a gospel-centered ministry as outlined below:
Equipping
By providing free education on biblical and theological subjects, we hope to equip the average believer with God’s truth on which to build their lives. We also hope to, through this means, display God’s worth, beauty, and glory so that students are moved to worship and strengthened to live for God.
Evangelism
TJM hopes to make disciples who can speak truth to culture in loving ways that do not compromise the truth or add unnecessary offense to the message. We are staunch in our commitment to contend for the faith, which inadvertently involves controversy. We neither relish nor draw back from controversy as we are duty-bound to defend the faith. We desire to grow deeper in our love for God and one another in a way that makes the gospel attractive to those outside the faith.
Fellowship
As a redeemed people, the Bible calls us to self-sacrificial love and holiness. Thus, we humbly love and serve one another sacrificially just as Christ gave Himself for us. We also lovingly keep one another accountable and enforce discipline for each one’s temporal and eternal good, knowing that the Day of Judgment is coming when each one will give account for their deeds on the earth.
Our Activities
Below is a brief rundown of our most prominent activities. If you stick around much longer, you will get to find out more about them and the others we have on the way.
Revved Up!
Revved Up! is our annual, weeklong summer vacation camp primarily targeted at intending and current undergraduates. Currently, the camp is the quintessential expression of the mission of TJM, gathering young people together to learn, fellowship, and get equipped to passionately defend the faith and make disciples.
Revved Up! PRIME
For those who can’t afford to take a full week off from school or work, Revved Up! PRIME offers a convenient weekend option. This version condenses the Revved Up! curriculum into a shorter format, often making the most of public holidays to maximize accessibility.
Campus* Lay Seminary & Other School Events
The Jesus Movement (TJM) is concerned about the spread of false teachings on Nigerian college campuses. To address this, TJM plans to launch Campus Lay Seminary (C*LS), a free training program for campus fellowship leaders. The program will cover topics like Bible interpretation, theology, and pastoral ethics.
TJM’s goal is to equip campus leaders with sound biblical knowledge, enabling them to lead healthier, Christ-centered fellowships. Additionally, TJM hopes to reach Nigerian college students with the Gospel through various events, conferences, and school outreach programs, ultimately praying for a campus-wide revival of biblical Christianity.
Leadership
The Jesus Movement was founded and is led by George and Adaolisa Laleye. George provides spiritual leadership and oversight for the ministry, while Adaolisa sees to the administrative oversight of events and projects.
Conclusion
Our aim at TJM is to glorify God by helping people know about Jesus, sharing His love and living by His teachings. We are excited to grow in the faith and make a difference while trusting God to guide us along the way.
If you would like to learn more about us, and be a part of our journey, make sure to stick around. To be the first to receive our updates, do well to subscribe to this newsletter.
See you around!
I'll be praying for an outreach or conference in OAU, God willing.