UK-based Nigerian pastor Tomi Arayomi opens up on childhood abuse
The Founder of the RIG Nation and Pioneers Church, Tomi Arayomi, has revealed how he was abused at the age of five.
He also spoke about his subsequent struggle with addiction while being a prophet, and his journey to healing and deliverance.
The British-Nigerian cleric disclosed this in an interview with Dr Sharon Stone which was aired on his YouTube page on Friday.
The prophet revealed that he was sexually abused at the age of five by a family friend which left him with feelings of shame and confusion, especially after his mother’s reaction to a news report about homosexuality.
He said, “I was born with rickets, I had leg disease which made me fairly immobile and there was a sexual exploitation that took place when I was five.
“A friend of the family who at times took care of us would sexually molest me. I didn’t know what he was doing at that age, really because I wasn’t in any way awakened sexually but I knew it wasn’t right because he made sure that whenever my parents came home I didn’t tell them what happened.
“It came with shame, a lot of shame, immediately. I knew one day when my parents left us with them, they didn’t know what was going on of course, that the abuse was going to continue and it wasn’t until one day, I was watching this BBC news where homosexuality was a taboo. I didn’t know the term homosexuality but I saw this news piece talking about homosexuality increasing.”
He added that a greater sense of shame overwhelmed him when he asked his mum who was glued to the television ironing, “Mum what happens to homosexuals?” to which she laughed and “she said in a charismatic way ‘Oh, they go to hell.’”
This exchange plunged him into a deep internal struggle. “Now, I’m going to hell,” he recalled. “I remember my last encounter with that man. My parents had left the house, again we were in the house by ourselves and he cornered me in the bathroom and told me to pull my trousers down and I remember I just said no to him for the first time. I pushed him into the bathtub and I ran down the street crying my heart out because I didn’t know what was going to happen next. I didn’t know where I was running to. All I knew was I was running.”
Arayomi went ahead to explain how his conversion brought a sense of affirmation, but the trauma remained unresolved.
He said, “When I got saved or born again, there was a new sense of affirmation. I got saved and I started serving almost right away. So, there’s a new sense of affirmation, this is a different Tomi Arayomi and it’s not that shameful five-year-old that was sexually abused.”
He noted that he, however, experienced a struggle with sexual identity and addiction despite being born again. “I think I tried to prove to myself that I wasn’t homosexual. What happened to me had tried to form my identity at such a young age that I just decided that I was going to date every girl in the world,” he said.
The cleric continued, “I got introduced to pornography by my school teacher, and all of sudden what became a remedy for a diagnosis from BBC became an addiction that once saved the addiction didn’t go away, it just got suppressed and the secrets were suppressed. I never told my parents what happened to me till I rededicated my life to the Lord when I was about 17, or 18 years old. I didn’t tell my twin brother, I just carried the secret.”
As he and his twin brother were later ordained pastors as teenagers, Arayomi noted that the pressures of ministry amplified his internal conflict saying, “The pressure of ministry turned the crack into a crater, it just made it bigger and bigger because the persona, Facebook at the time, grew, the offline persona grew.
“People knew me as some pastor with a prophetic voice and it was completely different from the person I came to at home, who was struggling with sexual sin and sexual identity and the loss of innocence as a young boy and that shame of those two polarising people haunted me.”
Given the responsibility to plant churches while on campus, Arayomi recounted how he authored a book detailing his struggles with the intention of being transparent about his experiences. “In fact, the back of the book read, ‘I’d rather embarrass my mess than my mess embarrass me,’” he noted.
He recalled his journey to freedom saying, “It was me and my twin brother that got to that place. We were ordained as pastors very young in our teens. It was wonderful and messy at the same time. There was no terminology in our church as ‘Apostles’ so we were appointed as ‘National Secretariat.’ We both studied law and were given this assignment.
“I, at the time, wrote a book, it was called ‘Sex Talk’ and people wondered ‘What does a teenager know about sex?’ but it was my story. It was a book I never wanted my mum to read, so I always kept it from them because it was raw like ‘This is Tomi Arayomi. This is who you think I am but this is what is really going on.’ I wasn’t caught, I was catching myself.”
Arayomi noted that a pivotal moment occurred during his first sermon titled “Pastor’s Confessions,” where he, at the age of 18, publicly revealed his past abuse and ongoing struggles.
“I remember crying at the centre of the stage. I had no idea that my mum was going to come. That was the worst part. The Lord told me to expose myself, to be transparent. I was 18, I think, and it was called Pastor’s Confessions. It was my first sermon. Everybody came I mean the place was packed.
“I’m weeping not just because of the many people but because my mum is so proud of me, standing there in the bleachers she’s like ‘My son is attracting this crowd?’ I said I didn’t want to go out and my team prayed for me. They had no idea what I was going to do and I had no idea what I was going to do. All I knew was that I needed to share my story.
“I was in this ‘make mistakes and learn as I go along’ season. I got up from there and shared everything: who it was, where it was, how it was. My mum is standing there, her mouth open, I catch glimpses of her and look away. The anointing comes upon me at some point and all of a sudden, she zones out and I’m just there ministering. I remember I just started weeping profusely, I feel like I’m receiving some level of deliverance as well,” he recalled.
The prophet added that the sermon triggered an outpouring of honesty and deliverance within the congregation as midway through his tears an altar call broke out. “It was the first altar call that I never called. People were running out, screaming ‘God, deliver me from homosexuality.’ ‘God, I’m a lesbian and I’m singing in the worship team.’ ‘God, I’m gay and I’m a pastor,’” he recounted, stressing the unfiltered nature of the moment.
“It was raw, no camouflages, no hiding sins behind tongues, no mystery, just yelling and screaming gut-wrenching tears that we were all crying, it felt like such a cleaning took place that I had never encountered before.”
While acknowledging that his struggles with addiction did not immediately disappear, Arayomi stressed that the act of sharing his story began a significant journey toward healing and freedom. “I don’t know if it dealt with my struggle but it definitely dealt with my shame,” he said.
“I carried that tour for three years and we went to 16 campuses. People were buying my book. It set me in motion by doing the opposite of what I wanted to do. It made me more known, it made the polarising of things that were crippling me personally in terms of lust, pornography, and sexual immorality. It just didn’t go away; it didn’t inflame it but it definitely made me more known in that way.”
Arayomi added that his mother’s subsequent embrace and affirmation reinforced the power of vulnerability and transparency.
“I remember my mum come to meet me after and she was like ‘I’m so proud of you’ and she gave me a hug.”
