The Cherubim and Seraphim Church of Zion, Ugbonla

The Cherubim and Seraphim Church of Zion was founded on 16th February 1948 in Ugbonla, Ilaje area on the eastern flank of Yorubaland in southwest Nigeria. It is an offshoot of the Cherubim and Seraphim (C & S) Society, a Christian movement which started as a praying group comprising crowds (people) who thronged the home where Abiodun Akinsowon was resident after she had a mysterious encounter. Abiodun had peeped into the chalice of a religious procession and had gone into a trance for days until Moses Tunolase Orimolade was contacted to help restore her to life. This occurred in 1925 in Lagos, Nigeria. As the society began to meet to pray and fellowship, two brothers of Ilaje origin who had visited Lagos and joined the C & S Society and had become very active members of the group. The two brothers (Alfred and Timothy Orogbemi) returned to Ilajeland in 1929 and introduced the C & S Society to their homeland. The society grew steadily till it began experiencing some internal crisis at about 1942. Some of her members had accused the church of its acquiescence with the local authority regarding the practice of twin infanticide sanctioned by the latter at the time. The aggrieved members began to pull out of the society as early as 1945 and had predicted that the church will lose its relevance in Ilajeland if it fails to rise to condemn the practice they considered unacceptable. It is widely believed among the antagonists of the practice that had the founder of the C & S Zion Church failed to pull out of the larger society in their homeland and established a reformed version of the church, the C & S Society in Ilajeland, the church would have lost currency with the people. While the Holy Apostles community, Ayetoro (the first successful theocratic community in Ilajeland) took on a unique description of the interconnectivity between faith and woks and thus had a successful economic and technological campaign, the C & S church of Zion, Ugbonla founded one year after Ayetoro had a spiritual expansionist outlook. The latter expanded its influence and dominance in the area by successfully galvanising the almost fifty other smaller theocratic settlements which sprang up after it. Saint Elisha Lene Ogunfeyimi, the founder of Ugbonla community laid the foundation for several of the doctrinal guidelines which most of the other theocratic communities in Ilajeland subsequently adopted. Ugbonla boasts of hundreds of branches across three continents of the world. The church has branches in most of the coastal states in Nigeria, Cameroon, Gabon and in the United States and Great Britain.