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Barnes in Commonthe magazine of Churches Together in Barnes
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Barnes welcomes Dr Ebute Obiabo, the new minister at Barnes Methodist Churchby Susan Gibson
The new minister at Barnes Methodist Church, Dr Ebute Obiabo, is a Biblical scholar. He hails from Nigeria, although he has lived in the UK for the last twenty years. In 1980 he embarked on translating the whole Bible from Hebrew and Greek into his own language, Idoma, spoken by the Idoma people in the Benue state of Nigeria, and he hopes that his translation will shortly be published. Ebute trained originally in Theological Studies in Ibadan and Ilorin in Nigeria. In 1988 he and his family came to Britain where at Queen’s University, Belfast, he read for a Bachelor of Divinity and an MA in Semetics (in case you don’t know, that’s a study of the Hebrew texts of Exodus). In 1995 the family moved from Belfast to Edinburgh where he did a doctorate in Philosophy and Divinity. Seven and a half years later, in 2002, he left Scotland with his wife Ene, who is now a midwife at Queen Charlotte’s Hospital, and their children and moved to London where they lived in Battersea and where he worked with the Battersea Mission, the Clapham Church of the Nazarene and also with the Battersea Riverside group of Churches Together. In 2005 the family moved again, this time to Luton where Ebute worked in the Luton Methodist Circuit. He also had more time to concentrate on his translation of the Bible. Now he has come to live in Barnes where, in addition to Barnes Methodist Church, he will also have responsibility for the Methodist churches in Brentford and Chiswick. We wish him and his family a very warm welcome! |
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