There is a particular kind of judgement reserved, often quietly but sometimes loudly, for widowed men of God who choose to remarry — especially when they do so within what society considers an indecently short timeframe. Pastor Amos Fenwa, senior pastor of a ministry he has led for three decades, knows that judgement well. He once held it himself.
Speaking with disarming honesty on the Morayo Show, Pastor Fenwa revealed that before personal loss reshaped his perspective, he had quietly questioned why highly respected men of faith would choose to remarry so soon after the death of their wives. “Pastor W.F. Kumuyi got married 18 months after his wife died,” he recounted. “I felt in my mind — this man is 71, what is he looking for?”
It was a thought he admitted to holding with quiet conviction — until grief became his own teacher.
When his wife of 33 years passed away, Pastor Fenwa found himself walking the very road he had once struggled to understand. Having married at just 23 years old, he had never known adult life outside of companionship. The first six months following his wife’s passing were, by his own account, manageable. But as the months stretched toward a full year and beyond, the reality of sustained solitude began to press hard. “After one year, I started seeing that it is very difficult,” he said.
It was at this point that his earlier judgements gave way to empathy. He recalled also reading about Prophet S.K. Abiara and others who had remarried after loss, men he had observed from a distance and assessed through the lens of someone who had not yet experienced what they had endured. But experience, as it so often does, revised his position entirely.
“When you are used to being with your partner, used to doing ministry together, used to going to things together — it is very difficult,” he said, his reflection serving as both a personal testimony and a quiet apology to the men he had once misjudged. For Pastor Fenwa, the rediscovery of that truth was not just emotional — it was vocational. As a man he described as “domestically very challenged,” he had always relied deeply on the partnership of marriage to sustain the demands of pastoral life.
The lesson Pastor Fenwa now carries — and shared openly before the Morayo Show audience — is one of suspended judgement. Until a person stands in the shoes of a grieving spouse who has built their entire adult life, their home, and their calling around companionship, he suggests, the instinct to question their choices deserves to be tempered with grace.
“I said it,” he acknowledged, reflecting on his earlier thoughts about Pastor Kumuyi. But time, loss, and lived experience had taught him what no observation from the outside ever could: that what looks like urgency to the onlooker is often nothing more than the quiet, aching need to not be alone……See More
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