By Tomide Marv

Once a recent U.K tour called Polydipsia Concert Worship, produced by the Nigerian-owned organisers The Worshippers, Ajibola Oluwatobiloba Abigail, a worship leader, ministered two covers that deserves close attention: Israel Houghton and New Breed’s “You Are Good” and MOG Music’s “Be Lifted.”

Both songs have long since settled into the canon of contemporary worship. They have become pillars using many churches across West Africa and the global diaspora for many years. But what Ajibola does with them isn’t reproduction. She slows them, strips them of their original speed and rebuilds them into a pace that privileges meditation over celebration. 

Houghton and New Breed’s “You Are Good” is a song rooted in Psalm 136, built for congregational euphoria. The song has rock music style and multilayered orchestration that are designed to fill arenas and megachurches. Ajibola takes the song somewhere almost entirely different. In her hands, the piano assumes the lead role that Houghton’s horn once occupied. The keys move in wide, deliberate intervals and each chord hangs in the air. The guitar features almost every part of the song and plays in clean and sustained tones. The drum set is almost non-existent as it doesn’t drive the song forward so much as it underlines it in the original song which demanded full energy. 

This slow-down is deliberate, even if Ajibola might not articulate it as a strategy. In Nigerian Pentecostal worship, tempo is theology. A fast song suggests praise and a declaration victory. A slow song suggests surrender and an acknowledgement that God is near, almighty and incredulous in ways that’s beyond the worshipper’s understanding. By taking “You Are Good” and tweaking it into this slower version, Ajibola repositions a jubilant thanksgiving song into a song of intimate experience.

With MOG Music’s “Be Lifted”, the change follows a similar pattern but gives a bit different texture. The Ghanaian worship Minister’s original is already reverent. Ajibola taps into this circularity. Her arrangement lets the guitar hum underneath, and the piano throws down keys and chords similar to the original song, just that here, it goes around the central melody. Ajibola’s cover has commendable appeal, though not the same weight that MOG Music’s live full-band version pulls.

Like many other worship ministers working in the church space, Ajibola does a thing between lyrics. In the middle of the songs, her voice shifts from music into glossolalia. This is a distinctly Pentecostal practice of speaking in tongues that become both aesthetics and spiritual signature of Nigeria in worship music. This is described as a way for a minister to assert their identity as a Pentecostal and invoke the active participation of the divine. In Ajibola’s ministry, the tongues do not interrupt the song, rather an extension.

She moves from singing to speaking in tongues to beseeching and back to music in a single arc. The band follows her. The backup vocalists bring out the soul in the music, and the instrumentalists read her body language for cues. The whole arrangement orbits her direction.

Something can be said about an unquenchable thirst. Ajibola performs these covers under the banner of The Worshippers, whose Polydipsia brand takes from an insatiable thirst. And to an extent, the music yearns deeply to worship.

When a worship minister picks songs that are this embedded in collective memories and performs them before diaspora congregations thousands of miles from home, it’s less about introducing something new and more about getting a community to return to something similar through a different format. The familiarity gets and keeps the audience going, but the reinterpretation is the destination. Whether we like it or not, for Nigerians, or perhaps African, gathered in the British city, hearing “You Are Good” slowed down and tweaked in Nigerian or African flavour is a cultural reaffirmation. The cover song, including “Be Lifted”, becomes a bridge between two places. The church or worship hall in the U.K temporarily becomes the house of worship they left behind, or the ones they still carry around in their head.

This is the tradition that Ajibola operates within, whether knowingly or not. She understands that a cover isn’t merely a cover. In the context where worship music is expected to create experience, where the success of a ministry is measured in devotion and surrender and not just applause, the worship minister should carry a peculiar weight.

Although these borrowed songs are slowed down and piano-led, Ajibola takes them and makes you feel as though you are it for the very first time.