Juliana Olayode, the deeply reflective Nigerian actress whose faith journey has been one of the most publicly documented in Nigerian entertainment, opened up to Chude Jideonwo on “With Chude” about the unusual and deeply intentional approach she took to rebuilding her relationship with God after spiritual abuse had shattered her trust in church and religious institutions completely.
She explained that rather than jumping back into regular adult church services, she made the deliberate decision to start from the very beginning of her faith as though she were a child encountering it for the first time. She downloaded a children’s Bible, watched the Christian animated series Superbook, and listened exclusively to sermons delivered for children, believing that returning to the simplest foundations was the only honest way to rebuild something that had been so deeply broken.
According to Juliana Olayode, even after taking those first tentative steps, attending in-person church gatherings remained extremely difficult. She described going from one church to another, sitting in different services without feeling any connection, until she finally found a community where she felt safe enough to stay. She also credited the worship experience at Opera Room, led by Dunsin Oyekan, as one of the early environments where her healing began to take tangible shape.
She said: “I went back to reading a children’s Bible because I wanted to start all over again. I downloaded a children’s Bible. I watched Super Book. I listened to children’s church sermons. I wanted to start from the very beginning. Then gradually I started going to church once in a while and I became a church prostitute, going from one church to another and not feeling it and not feeling it until I finally found the place and I was like yeah, this is the place. And I feel like just the fact that God did not let me go, even when I didn’t even want to go back.”…….See More
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