WHAT KEEPS ME STRONG @ 77 – APOSTLE JOHN OKORIKO
Apostle Dr. John Okoriko is one of the foremost Gospel preachers Akwa Ibom State is blessed with. At 77, he has recorded unimaginable impact in thousands of lives, communities and nations of the world. He is very unique and endowed with special unction to free people from the clutches of ignorance.
Apostle Dr. John Okoriko, founder of Solid Rock Kingdom Church, will be marking his 77th birthday on Sunday 19th October, 2025. Despite his age, he is very agile, inspiring and futuristic. Our team sought to know the secret of his strength, his life and ministry. Quest Inspirational is delighted to serve our readers with excerpts of the interview with a man who delights in helping people fulfilled and purpose-driven life.
What is it that pushes you out early in the morning at 77, you are in office at 9am, even when some younger people don’t get up early nowadays?
It’s a very simple answer – energy! Energy propels every action. The first energy is the thought energy.
When you don’t have a propelling thought, the energy cannot be activated. That is why any people have a lot of overwhelming thoughts (anxiety), they don’t sleep. So I have a different thought pattern; I told myself, ‘This is where I’ll be at this time and at this place.’ So that energy propels my emotion.
Can you explain this further?
The young people you refer to are sluggish, they are lazy people; their minds, their emotions, their energies are not directed to a certain cause, that’s why many people are not focused. So they cannot easily activate the energy that is within them. First, the thoughts, the emotion, the action.
You are a preacher, you are an evangelist, you are a father, you are a pastor, you are also an entrepreneur. How do you combine all this and you are still effective in the ministry?
It boils down to the very thing that I made mention of in the first statement. Everybody is being activated by the dominant thought within that person. The thinking pattern of individual will propel the action of the individual. If anything is not originating from thought, that force, if it’s not there, the person cannot be activated. You would beat the person, you would talk and talk; when the person is not in the propelling force of the thought, he cannot do anything. The thought determines what happens to the individual.
In our environment, people dwell a lot more on the negative, they have the notion that a particular force that is negative will not let them to excel. What kind of thought pattern should we dwell on?
I know what you are asking about, I was born here, all my life has been here. If I travel out, it will not be more than six months, one month, three days; so I know what you are talking about. Majority of the people are negative, they maintain a narrowing thought. Thoughts that would tell them that ‘they are not able, they will not succeed’ because there is element of opposition. They believe their parents or neighbours or the world itself is against them. So, these self-limiting thoughts are the problem of our people.
Nothing stops you except yourself and that yourself is the thought image you make out of yourself and the thought image you make out of your environment.
If you believe that there are demons, there are devils, there are wicked people that will stop you, and if you believe that long, you will not be able to do anything. There’s no way you will be born into this world without facing adversity, negativity. Joseph was born in the house of a founder of faith. We believe that Abraham, Isaac and Jacob were founders of faith and Joseph was one of the children of these fathers. He had a vision. So it depends on what you see within you, what you know about yourself, and when knowing and how you can push what you know about yourself through without thinking that other people will stop you.
So it starts within the thoughts of people and I owe respect to my father because my father was a very strong-minded man. He was positive and I’m the first son of my father. I had seen and heard him went through a lot of adversities and came out. My father was a preacher, he was the first pioneer counsellor in Ibiaku in Mkpat Enin, he built two different churches. He died in 1990.
So you mean you inherited this type of thinking, watching your father overcome some of the struggles?
Yes, that is the best education anyone can get. How you were brought up, what you saw your father, your parents doing, has so much impression in your life.
Would you give us a little window into the struggles your father was able to overcome as a preacher?
In those days, you must belong to a cult, like Idiong, Mbiam, Ekpo. My great-grandfather and my great-grandmother were pagans, only my father was a Christian. So, how my father came out from that paganism is another story for another day. How he came out, being one of the children of a great warrior, a pagan, I grew up to see the shrine that my greatgrandfather built, I grew up to see the human skull that he attended to and my father coming out from there to become a church leader was miraculous. So, I cannot betray myself being a son from that stock.
Your father coming from that stock, was he not affected by the spirits so-called? Many worry about such foundation.
Yes, they believe in familiar spirits. The spirit of the parents, the spirit of the family. That is a very popular belief in our community. Our orientation is based on, ‘If your father was a Juju man, you ought to be or be influenced by Juju spirit. Or if there is mbiam or any strong occultic influence, you believe that it may influence you. It may influence your marriage, your business, your education.’ No, it doesn’t operate that way. It depends on what you grow up to think about yourself. So, everything boils down to what you think about yourself.
The Bible says, ‘As a man thinks, so he is…’ Whatever a person is unable to do, his thought pattern has determined so. His action, his association with other people would determine what happens to an individual.
So, my father was born in a very typical pagan family and his father and his mother were great pagans. We came from Uruan here, we came from Ibiaku. Ibiaku and Mkpat Enin forms Ibiaku Uruan. If I call the names of my great-great-great-grandfather, it will end up at Ikpa Ndem Inyang Atakpo. I was a very young child when I used to see the great men from Uruan here coming to see my great-grandfather in the 40s. I was born in 1948.
Our people believe in the permanency of evil but no evil is permanent because of the reason of the fact that God is good. And in the universe, the goodness of God superintends everything.
I want to trace how evil begins. God never created evil from Genesis. You don’t see where God created evil, everything He created, He saw that it was good. So there’s a God of all goodness; if you look for Him, He’s there! Evil came in from man. So whatever is known as Satan, demon, evil spirit are creations of man. They are not permanent, that’s why they can be cast out. Anything that is permanent cannot be cast out.
At what stage did man begin to create evil? How do you trace it?
My Bible says, “Let this mind be in you, even as he was in Christ Jesus…” That means God began speaking and you cannot speak something that is not in your mind. He created the whole thing that we have seen, the whole universe through His words. Word is the sound that came from the thoughts, when we are thinking, nobody knows. When we speak, what we think will manifest and become creative energy. So that is the typical divine nature that we inherited from our creator. So all demons, Satan, evil spirit, enemies are created by human beings.
By our culture, you were not supposed to succeed but you have broken through all the limitations. Are these the kind of thoughts that have propelled you to success?
Well, I tell you from the beginning that thought is an energy. Another aspect of thought as an energy is word, these two things you see in divinity. The Bible says, ‘I know the thought I have for you,’ God never entertained any evil thought, if He does, the whole world would collapse. God has good thoughts and when He speaks, his thought comes out verbally and vocally, and it creates something. So, man is just like that. You know, you need to believe in this fundamental truth because you cannot see the devil or Satan coming out from anywhere, or a witch that is not a human, or represented by a human. You cannot see demons coming up, looking like anything, you can’t because God has never created them.
So, what we are fighting with all the time is the dominant thoughts that our forefathers, (fore-parents) deposited in us, which are thoughts that are against us, causing adversity. We become afraid when there’s nothing to be afraid of. You went to school; science will never tell you that there is a Satan or a personality of evil.
What scientists are doing, creating, they don’t create it as if they build an aeroplane, they don’t build it as if the aeroplane will succeed, it will be at the mercy of demons, they don’t do that, the same thing goes with medicine. Everything about evil is in religion, and we are too religious. That’s why we have a lot of adversities because of what we think our religion means to us. To believe in the devil, to believe in witches are religious doctrines, they are not scientific doctrines. So when you become a religious person in Nigeria or in Africa, you tend to believe in the entities that you only or your parents have created.
Now let’s look at this dimension, someone would say, I dreamt and I saw this evil about to happen. Is that also a function of thought?
Every dream has something to do with your belief and belief is spiritual and religious. There’s nobody without the power of belief, so whenever a man dreams, it has something to do with his or her belief or his or her religious values. That’s why dream always needs interpretation, you cannot have a dream unless it has roots from your belief and from your thoughts, including traditional values that you have. Because every dream needs interpretation and unless you are spiritually inclined, you cannot even know what you believe or you dream of.
Joseph told his parents and his brethren that the stars, eleven stars, bowed down to him and the sun and the moon bowed down. The father told him, don’t you know that that sun is my person and that moon is your mother? Do you want to tell me that myself, your father and your mother being sun and moon, in your dream will come and bow down to you?
Others may not know, but the father told him, stop this preaching about your dreams, because that sun in your dream is myself and the moon there and the eleven stars are your mother and brothers. There is no dream without connotation with what you believe and it has something to do with your future. Every dream, unless it is interpreted well, has something to do with the persons that dream it and it has religious as well as cultural values.
If it is negative, how can it be handled?
It depends on the negativity that the person who dreams if filled with, because most of the dreams portray our spirituality, who we are. To be negative in the dream depends on the
value of that person that has the dream because he could see the negativity in others or what will happen around him. But if he sees negativity of himself, that means the level of negativity is the one that he builds with his hand.
Now, let’s look at the Apostle John Okoriko. He has got a global mega image that looks as though he’s just starting but the man is 77. What are the things that keep you strong?
It is what I think. The first energy of any body is resident in the thoughts, the prevalent thought in that person. That energy will determine what the person will manifest.
How do you feel at 77?
I feel loved, I feel appreciated, I feel strong. I feel young inside but when I get to my mirror, my mirror says something different but I love myself, I love my family, I love the church, I love my society. I see goodness in everybody, including even evil men because all evil people are evil temporarily else Moses would never be a prophet. He was an evil man, Paul too was an evil man. Evil is created by human beings and they are not permanent. Anybody can repent, being evil is not permanent, there’s an end to evil else wicked people in the past would never repent.
How do you compare your life at 77 to when you were 17 or 27? Can you just compare events around those times?
So many things that the time we have may not permit us to mention some of them but man is just like any other creature. Let me take a man or a human to be a tree. Every tree has a seed and there is a determining factor in every seed to grow to as long as it wishes and to bring fruits and multiply itself. Unless something bad happens, that seed would manifest to the full and populate the earth.
When I was born, I saw negativity; I lived in the midst of negativity. My father went through a lot of heartbreaking experiences: my mother had died when I was six years old. I grew up with my stepmothers, about seven of them. Imagine when the first son in the family lost his mother and then had to live among seven stepmothers before he was about 26.
But God revealed Himself to me when I was 26, so if you add 50 years to my 26, now that is why I’ll be 77 years on October 18, the church is 51 by today. I had already given my life to the Lord when I was 26.
Those days were great days, there were also sorrowful days, days of struggle. In fact, I thank God I never committed crime that was around me. In those days because if I had committed those crimes that I intended, I would not be sitting with you here because I would have rotted in the prison or killed.
It was not an easy environment, I am still seeing young people going through that. That’s why I devote my time for God to help me reach them and I cannot reach them except by going through the church. I know what I went through and I know that many young people are going through that because of their environment.
This evil, was it like occultism? What was it like?
When you are born to a family that your father would tell you stories and you saw their parents in poverty, in hedonism, in paganism, and they didn’t worth anything. And you saw your father who attempted to come out, built a church, then his first wife died, and he got married to the second one, she died while giving birth, and the third one, and the fourth one, then he continued to marry. And because of all these negative events, the church in its compound closed down. Then the compound that you grew up, you came to see that people were not living again, the church had fallen, and your father became hopeless and didn’t have any other brother, then what he hoped to use as a vehicle to raise him as a church, events about him, took the church, and you are the first son.
How do you compare your life at 77 to when you were 17 or 27? Can you just compare events around those times?
Later, he moved out from that location to another location, started another church. Yet, forces of this world: politics, paganism, Ekpo society, came over and you saw it all. Nevertheless, the church grew again, then it started making some waves. Before he died, I saw prosperity, I saw truthfulness, I saw hope. Before he died, five years or thereabout, I started having dreams about myself, and I started working on these dreams. And the dream I’m working on is fundamental, it doesn’t fail me.
My church does not have any headquarters anywhere, I don’t have anybody overseas. So I’m trying to manifest the dream God gave to me and if you don’t come, God never wanted you to come. If you don’t give me money, God never wanted you to give me money, I don’t go begging. I know the huge commission that God commissioned me into requires money, it requires personalities, material things, location and intelligence, but I started from nothing.
You don’t have headquarters, how do you coordinate the activities of the numerous branches of Solid Rock?
Maybe in the future we shall have. Do you call that village hut at Mkpat Enin headquarters? I know the definition of headquarters.
Solid Rock is so big. Was it a deliberate decision not to build headquarters?
No money! How can you build headquarters without material?
But you’ve been building lives?
That is the beginning of the building; it’s building people. I’m yet to build the number of people that would rise to build the headquarters, that’s in future. We know what headquarters means, but Mkpat Enin is not the headquarters, if you say that is a headquarter, you kill the vision. You don’t expect people who have built their churches and then committed to developing their churches to come and build you a new church. So if you want people to build you, you build them and that is what I’m doing. I’m building people to build.
Let’s come to your birthday event which is coming up on the 19th of this month. What is it like?
My actual birthday is Saturday 18th but we are celebrating it on Sunday 19th October; organising a ceremony on Saturday is not really good for me. Let people go to the market on Saturday, so Sunday is better. So we will bring people, all our churches will organise their little appreciation celebrations.
One of the painful experiences you’ve had was when you were kidnapped. You went through painful period in the hands of evil men. How was it?
Many people do lose their lives in similar case, but to me, it was not painful. God wanted me to have an experience to be able to help others, in case they run into such a situation because I learned a lot. That I remained with those violent people for four days and they allowed me to go, there were lots of lessons to learn. In fact, I had a vision that I would not have had while remaining with them. The two of them who were constantly day and night with me with this pump-action gun; my happiness was that before they released me, they knelt down and allowed me to pray for them, they kept their guns down and confessed.
What do we expect on the 19th of October apart from your church gathering?
Well, I think if I have an opportunity, I would tell any young man or maybe a woman that has lost hope of her children, maybe only one child, if I give my testimony, it will help people. I remember before my mother died, there was a struggle between my father and my mother. I remember in some occasion, my mother would be struggling me with my father, my father would take my legs and my mother would hold my hand and struggled over me for the fear that if my mother was not continuing the marriage, that I would die. Because I was the first son to both of them, she gave three girls to my father before she had me. As the first son, she was afraid the marriage wouldn’t work, she was afraid that if she was not there, I would die and my father also.
So I’m here, both of them died, but me, that they were afraid of dying, I’m still here alive. So that’s my piece of testimony and other events, which many people have seen, who never hoped that I would come out of it, so I reserve my testimony. If I have an opportunity, I’ll give my testimony because the things that happened in those days are still happening and many people are still going through the same experiences.
What’s your word on marriage and how have you been able to build a model marriage with your beautiful wife?
Well, that question seems to be having multiple answers. Many people do marry for other purposes but the reason I was married to my wife is to fulfil divine obligation to build God’s people which is the church of God. I wanted my marriage to help me build the church and because of that, I simply allow love to prevail because of the church. Many others marry because of sentiments, and to be honest, I married for the purpose of the church. The church is my major issue in life and if you don’t have a friendly home, it will reflect in the church. So my wife and I are friends. My children are friends, no one is a terror to each other, that also reflects in the church. We never fought, we never disagreed in the past 30 something years. My first wife died, I have two children from my first wife, all my children are six now. Like I said, many people marry for different reasons but I know that my marriage determines how I will take care of the church.
You’ve been in Akwa Ibom State from its creation 38 years ago. From the benefit of hindsight, what is your assessment on Akwa Ibom State?
Akwa Ibom is fairer and more progressive, unless you compare it to states that have been there, like Lagos and Oyo States, which have had the attention of the Federal Government long before Akwa Ibom was created. But among the recently created ones in the last 40 years, I believe Akwa Ibom is manifesting a reputation of being a peaceful nation inside a nation, it is a very prosperous state. And it’s a desired destination for people who like good things and I believe nothing is stopping it in maintaining this status into the future, especially when leaders are brought in from a very good background. Today, we have a pastor as a leader, with pastors working with him. The sky may not be the limit, I don’t think it would take too long for Akwa Ibom to become like a nation of Kuwait, which is a beautiful place. I’m praying to see this vision come to pass. I have been seeing such vision for Akwa Ibom State and I have I shared this with some political figures. Akwa Ibom is a beautiful place.
The past two years of Pastor Umo Eno has moved the State forward. The governor is doing extremely well. But he cannot satisfy everybody, but he will do to the very of his vision for the State. He has a vision, we are praying for him to pursue the vision. I know it is a human weakness that you don’t call people while alive a saint, we call people a saint when they die. He has brought down the tension that used to be in the middle name of Akwa Ibom State, the criminality, the stiff opposition. In most of the meetings that I attend with him and the rest of political principalities, there’s calmness. And in the midst of this calmness, whatever you do will be stable, because you cannot build in the midst of conflict. In the past two years, he has been able to stabilise whatever the plan of the government would be in the next six years, but he deserves our prayers.
