Nigeria’s Ex-pastor Awakening Africa’s Young Minds Through Deep Retrospection
Eight years ago, from his hotel room in Nigeria’s largest commercial center, Lagos, Charles Awuzie made a phone call to his family in frustration.
“I can’t do this anymore. I am coming back,” he said, marking his abrupt break from organized religion to pursue his faith and spirituality outside the church walls.
The trigger? Well, a fellow pastor had gotten angry when Awuzie refused to fabricate a divine message to defraud worshippers.
“‘I will give you names of people in the congregation. Call them out like it’s a prophecy and ask them to give seeds (money). It’s Christmas season, and this program is to help me sort out my family’,” said the pastor, who had invited Awuzie from the country’s capital, Abuja, to preach at his church program in Lagos.
After Awuzie preached without making the false call, the pastor told him, “The money I used to host you was a waste… You disappointed me.”
Since abandoning congregational worship, Awuzie has turned his attention to helping young Africans grow, not with sermons, but by building platforms and networks that promote their mental, economic, social, and spiritual evolution.
Why It Mattered… Personal Conviction Against Corrupt Religion
Awuzie’s refusal to be used as “a tool for mass manipulation” stemmed from a vow he made to himself when he first encountered Christianity at age nine. Inspired by Moses leading the Israelites out of captivity, he vowed, “I might not deliver an entire nation physically or politically, but I will someday lead generations out of mental slavery to freedom and prosperity.”
Before leaving the pulpit, he founded and led a successful church ministry — the Rescue Mission International — and preached across Africa and Asia.
Christianity has provided meaning to nearly 80 million Nigerian Christians. However, in recent decades, megachurch sermons that promise wealth and healing through seed sowing and large offerings have taken root.
Hope is in short supply following worsening national economic conditions that have left 133 million citizens extremely poor. Making matters worse, some religious leaders operate worship centers as personal businesses. The poor and desperate are their most loyal customers.
Starting Afresh: A Man Who “Is Making Sense”
After the Lagos encounter, Awuzie spent weeks in isolation, deciding that his new faith and spirituality would be connecting with the sacred through meditation and introspection.
“In my evolved state, there is more power in tranquility and silence than in shouting,” Awuzie, now in his 40s, said. “We used to exclude the brain and mind from spiritual matters, but we can’t talk about spirituality without talking about consciousness.”
With this new resolve, he then turned to fulfilling his childhood promise more seriously, beginning with exposing religious scams using his Facebook page and tech skills.
“I tapped into my background as a cybersecurity specialist to conduct OSINT (open-source intelligence) and exposed some of these people. We helped people recover millions stolen through prophetic manipulations,” said the father of two, who has lived in South Africa for nearly 15 years.
As his Facebook following and popularity grew, he expanded his message and built a community hungry for change. His teachings now include intentional living, open-mindedness, entrepreneurship, networking, self-sacrifice, and tech skills.
He called this initiative the Charles Awuzie Mentorship Program (Evolve CAMP), an open coaching model that reaches 15 million young Africans monthly and offers personalized guidance to dozens.
While he was at it, Awuzie prioritized his personal financial freedom for the task ahead, spending more time growing his South Africa-based information technology company, Gemsbok Group, which has 21 IT and energy products in the market.
Though he works to blur religious fault lines, he encourages the community to meditate daily to boost intelligence, focus, memory, and logic.
“I want God to use me as that figure the Muslim, atheist, and Christian can all relate to and say, ‘He is making sense,’” he said.
What endears Awuzie the most to the community is his refusal to portray himself as a superhero. He shares his vulnerabilities, business failures, and even his struggle with pulmonary embolism, a blood clot in the lung.
‘Evolve Tribe’: Freedom to Think, Question, and Discover Self
Members of Awuzie’s community consider themselves awakened to higher thinking and call themselves “Evolve Tribe,” a derivation from “Evolve CAMP.”
The moniker became popular two years ago when Awuzie launched the annual “Evolve Conference” in Abuja. For the first time, he gathered community members in person — 570 in 2023 and 700 in 2024 — for networking and collaboration.
The conferences also linked the community to business networks and opportunities outside Nigeria. As an extension, in 2024, he took seven community members on a business tour to China, connecting them to Chinese manufacturers and suppliers.
“I have done a lot of big business with the people I met at the conference,” says 34-year-old mentee, Kel Armstrong Amobi. “Once you are part of that community, you are trusted because of the founder’s name. People even meet and marry in the community. It’s a platform for all kinds of transformation.”
But Awuzie’s biggest gift to the community is not the networking; it is his manual — “Evolve in 30 Days.” The 160-page devotional leads readers on a 30-day journey of solitude and self-transformation. From “Believe You Can Recreate Your Life” to “Forgive Yourself,” “Embrace Your Vulnerability,” and “Master Your Emotions,” each day’s theme challenges the reader to daily rituals and meditation for self-rebirth.
“Stand in front of a mirror — the window to your soul — and affirm, ‘I believe in my ability to recreate my life. I am the architect of my destiny,’” reads the instruction for Day One’s ritual. “When you state these affirmations, you are not just speaking to your reflection, but you are speaking to your subconscious, reshaping your self-perception, and reaffirming your belief in your transformative power.”
With 7,000 copies in circulation, Awuzie’s vision is to see the community reach higher consciousness.
“People have no idea what can happen in their subconscious mind when they sit down and think deeply. If you can get one person to think, you can set a generation on fire. But we are too busy with activities with low productivity. We don’t have time to think, meditate, and create. That is the bane of Africa.”
While no formal survey has been conducted to determine the devotional’s impact on the community, a simple “Evolve in 30 Days” Facebook search reveals hundreds of reviews testifying to its transformative power.
“I’m reawakened,” declared Chioma Christiana Okorie. Her words summarize the two most common testimonies among Awuzie’s mentees: the freedom to think critically and question things, as well as self-discovery resulting in improved living outcomes.
For Amobi, the biggest takeaway was critical thinking and the appreciation of the sacred within him. Like Awuzie, he was a pastor and witnessed staged miracles and prophecies firsthand. When he started questioning the practice, he also doubted if he was doing the right thing.
But “when I listened to Charles, I thought, ‘So I am not mad? There are people out there who think the way I do and are bold enough to ask some of these critical questions?’” said Amobi, who hosts the Kaa Truths, a podcast exposing religious scams in Nigeria. “I now see myself as the praise of God. I see everything that has life, including the trees, as the praises of God. Wherever there is life, there must be a trace to the source of that life. I don’t struggle to connect with God. I simply connect with myself because when I connect with myself, I am connecting with God because there is life in me.”
For 24-year-old Cynthia Ofonedu, her transformation was self-discovery. She credits her career success to Awuzie’s 2018 Facebook post about aviation opportunities for Africans. The post motivated her to research the industry, and she decided to become a flight attendant. She then enrolled at a local aviation school where she trained and received her license.
Today, she manages the Abuja chapter of the Evolve Camp. Over the past two years, community members across Nigeria and African countries have formed state and national chapters to coordinate community services. Most of Nigeria’s 36 states now have chapters.
In May 2024, Ofonedu led her chapter’s first health outreach. Partnering with doctors and organizations, they reached 500 people within the Apo-Dutse community in Abuja with free tests, medications, and dental care.
“We see the Evolve CAMP as a humanitarian community — like network states,” said Ofonedu,
“giving back to society and teaching them to evolve into their higher selves
Meanwhile, as Awuzie works to expand the community’s influence, he admits that difficulty accessing corporate sponsorship remains a major limitation. Nevertheless, the work he has done through his own faith journey, as well as the ever-growing impact of Evolve Tribe, remains a powerful testament to the influence a single individual can have on groups, tribes, and even entire nations when they seek the Sacred, even in the face of religious fraud and abuse. It is a standard required for shared flourishing, and one that Awuzie intimately understands from both the highs and lows of personal experience.
By Innocent Eteng