Pastor William Kumuyi, the General Superintendent of the Deeper Christian Life Ministry, has announced changes to the Church’s marriage regulations, emphasizing that they are administrative rather than scriptural.
Speaking on Sunday, August 31, at the 2025 Global Family and Marriage Conference, Kumuyi announced the repeal of the law that prohibited women from traveling to see a man they planned to marry.
According to him, as long as an elder is present, intended spouses are now allowed to visit one another throughout courtship.
The six-month mandated wooing time that the church instituted is no longer required, according to Pastor Kumuyi, who emphasized that it was a human arrangement rather than a scriptural 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,” he said.
Kumuyi said it is important for Christians to differentiate between God’s commandments and church traditions. He also warned against treating human regulations as divine.
“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.
He further explained that the church’s marriage committees were created only to provide guidance and not to replace 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 said.
Kumuyi cautioned leaders against overstepping their limits, warning that marriage committees should not exercise authority beyond what is written in the scriptures.
