The General Superintendent of the Deeper Christian Life Ministry, Pastor William Kumuyi, has announced significant changes to the church’s long-standing marriage rules, stressing that many of them were administrative rather than scriptural.
Speaking at the 2025 Global Family and Marriage Conference on Sunday, August 31, Kumuyi said that the regulation which forbade women from visiting men they intended to marry had been scrapped.
Intending couples are now permitted to visit one another during courtship, provided they are accompanied by a church elder.
He further revealed that the six-month compulsory courtship period, once enforced by the church, will no longer be binding.
According to him, the duration was a human guideline and not a biblical mandate
“We just felt you need some time to know one another. And then we said one month will be too short, two months too short. So why not six months? But it is not from the Bible,” Kumuyi explained.
The cleric urged Christians to distinguish between divine commandments and church traditions, cautioning against treating human regulations as though they were sacred.
“As a Christian, you need to be so mature that you know the difference between the law of God and the principles in the church. Six months is all right, but it’s not something inflexible. If we change it to three months, we’re not changing the Bible, because six months is not in the Bible,” he said.
Kumuyi also clarified the role of the church’s marriage committees, stating they were created for guidance, not as replacements for biblical authority.
“There’s no marriage committee in the New Testament. We created it to help you, not because we can give you a chapter and a verse. It is church administration,” he added.
He cautioned leaders against overstepping their roles, warning that marriage committees should not exercise authority beyond what is written in the scriptures.
