Bola Aderele (nee Ayamolowo) may not be a house hold name; her face may not be a regular feature on the pages of the newspapers, but her contributions in the church speaks volume of what commitment to the things of God should be.

As an interpreter in God of Glory Christian Church, and having done that in about three different cChurches, she has mounted the pulpit with more than 40 reputable and powerful Nigerian and foreign preachers of the gospel. For this, she holds the record of the first and only interpreter in the Nigeria church to have had such opportunity.

Since 1991 when she mounted the pulpit for the first time along side Bola Are, an evangelist and gospel musician in an evening revival at a church in Ketu, Lagos, Bola has witnessed enough heavy billows and poignant buffeting peculiar to the spiritual world.

Some of these buffeting, according to Bola include the constant attacks preachers and their interpreters are constantly subjected to right on the pulpit by the devil and his agents who are always present in the church.

Vicious are some of these attacks that in her 12-year sojourn as an interpreter, she once collapsed right on the pulpit and has seen another interpreter in another church collapsed and never to be revived to life again. “Most pastors”, according to Bola “have experienced these but they hardly say it in public. I hear these stories because I am always in their midst.

Some preachers who are well prepared with their sermons often get to the pulpit and forget what they plan to preach. A pastor once told me that while on the pulpit, immediately his eyes meet with a particular woman in the church, he loses his balance and forgets what to say. All he resorted to was start speaking in tongues as a way out of the embarrassment”

On her first experience of attack right on the pulpit, Bola recalled that Sunday morning in a church she would not mention. “I was hale and hearty immediately I mounted the pulpit; I fainted and was carried out. The next person who took over from me also fainted. That confirmed to me that it was an attack and that was what generated my leaving the church”

"...Some preachers, who are well prepared with their sermons often get to the pulpit and forget what they plan to preach..."

A most virulent disruption of worship, according to Bola, would have also occurred in a church where the interpreter on duty was tempted to slap the preacher. “The interpreter told me that a negative spirit overwhelmed him, telling him that the preacher was lying and so he should slap him right there on the pulpit.

He said he became so confused and began to shake. He said the spirit came the second and the third time. And as he was about to raise his hand, the preacher came under the discerning power of God and gave a word of wisdom that someone in the congregation had come under the influence of the spirit of error which was telling him to misbehave.

The preacher now said every body should close their eyes and start to pray. Immediately the preacher said this, he felt cool and composed in his spirit”.

But a most shocking experience in Christendom, according to Bola, happened around the Mile12 area of Lagos State, Nigeria when an elderly man who was interpreting at a vigil collapsed and died. “It happened shortly after the preacher said every body should be praying because there was darkness in their midst.

Before the preacher could expose the evil, the interpreter on duty collapsed and before they got to the hospital in Ketu, the interpreter died and was certified dead”.

".....The interpreter told me that a negative spirit overwhelmed him, telling him that the preacher was lying and so he should slap him right there on the pulpit."

However, the challenges facing interpreters on duty transcend the spiritual attack. CChurches in society like ours where more people are sub-literate, most cChurches cannot over look the need of interpretation, and for this reason interpreters must be alive to the challenges involved.

These challenges, according to Mrs. Aderele include the aptitude to covey sentences made by preachers properly and effectively from one language to another such that it will depict the same understanding and elicit the same reaction amongst the entire church members irrespective of the individual languages.

Bola, the Idanre-born school teacher with a good dress-sense got married in 2003. Interpretation, which has now become her ministry, began as a challenge she picked up on the spur of the moment when a challenge was thrown to all the graduates and schoolteachers in the church.

“It all started one evening in 1991 at Evangelist Bola Are’s Church when the regular interpreter was transferred out of Lagos at his place of work. When it was time for sermon and there was no interpreter, the evangelist wondered aloud that would the work of God run aground because a single soul was transferred out of Lagos.

She then said where were the teachers and the graduates in the church? That evening, the church was poorly lightened having suffered power failure. I walked out to the pulpit and began interpreting for the preacher.

Though I was an anonymous person in the church, that night, probably because of the near darkness, which hindered people from seeing me properly, I was not shy. I performed well that after service, the Evangelist was crossed with me. “Bola, so you are this blessed and you’ve been hiding it? Go and seek the face of God for forgiveness for hiding the talent He gave you”. Ever since then I have not looked back.

For some people in the church, interpretation is a waste of time that lengthens the period of service and makes it uninteresting. Other observers have also maintained that it is an unnecessary indulgence meant to pamper illiterates in the church.

Still, some see it as a needless complex exercise because very few are language experts who could covey some words the way the preacher said it. “Let us all speak English the lingua franca” they seem to say, but Bola disagreed with this.

“I don’t consider it a waste of time. This is not because I am involved in it but I believe we should be able to communicate with God in the language we understand best.

Despite the fact that we are in a modern age, not every body in the church is literate. Not even all pastors can speak English fluently. Are we now saying they should bury their anointing on the platter of grammar?”

“When talking to God, Bola continued, “We should speak in the language that we understand best. We should be able to make our feelings clear to God. There is a brother in my church, in spite of his eminent education, he still says all his prayer points which were dictated in English, in his Igbo language.

In Africa we have myriads of challenges that can best be communicated to God in your language. We can’t deprive any body the right to understand the sermon because we are in jet age. Pastors,” Bola reiterated “should understand the composition of their congregation and try as much as possible not to exclude any body”