CAC Registers Brethren University Nigeria as EYN Takes Its Century-Old Educational Mission to the Next Level

When the Church of the Brethren Mission arrived in Garkida, Gombi Local Government Area, in March 1923, one of its first acts was educational. In 1928, Pilesar Sawa started a small school in Dille, holding classes for boys in the mornings. That instinct, to pair faith with the structured transmission of knowledge, has defined EYN’s presence in Nigeria for over a century. The Corporate Affairs Commission’s registration of Brethren University Nigeria, with its proposed site in Gombi, is the fullest institutional expression yet of an impulse that began with a handful of children, a teacher, and a morning routine.

EYN President Rev. Daniel Y. C. Mbaya, PhD, announced the development during a morning devotion with staff, describing the CAC approval as a breakthrough moment in the church’s history. His choice of a morning devotion as the venue for the announcement was appropriate. The rhythm of morning, gathering, and the pursuit of knowledge is as old as the mission itself.

A Church Built on Education, From Garkida to the World

The significance of the Gombi site selection for Brethren University Nigeria is not incidental. The Church of the Brethren in Nigeria was founded in Garkida, Gombi Local Government Area, in March 1923, making Gombi the geographic cradle of everything EYN has become. To build a university on that same soil is to complete a narrative arc that began more than a century ago, when the mission’s founders understood that a church without schools was a church without a future.

With more than one million members, EYN is today the largest national body of the Church of the Brethren worldwide. Its headquarters is located in Kwarhi, near the city of Mubi in Adamawa State, and its primary area of influence extends across the rural northeast of Nigeria, from Maiduguri on the Cameroonian border through to Biu and Yola. A denomination of that size, with that geographic footprint, and with that depth of roots in communities that have historically had limited access to tertiary education, has both the institutional justification and the communal obligation to pursue a university of its own.

Since the mid-1980s, churches in northeast Nigeria have filled the gaps left by insufficient state provision in health and education. EYN became an important part of the Nigerian social system through training centres, a literacy programme, women’s work, an integrated rural development programme, and humanitarian aid. A university represents the logical extension of that social infrastructure role into the tertiary level, where the gap between community need and available provision remains widest.

EYN currently operates eight Bible colleges that train pastors for the ordained ministry, with Bible schools at the district level providing certificates for Christian ministry. Brethren University Nigeria would extend the denomination’s educational architecture beyond ministerial training into the full range of academic disciplines, creating a faith-based institution capable of producing graduates in sciences, humanities, engineering, health, and beyond.

The Spirit of the Moment, Sacrifice and Urgency

Rev. Mbaya’s announcement was accompanied by a story that captured the spirit the university project has begun to generate within the EYN community. A church member, unnamed in the announcement, had initially agreed to design the university’s site plan at a reduced fee of eleven million naira, a concession in itself. He later decided to offer the service entirely free of charge.

That gesture is not merely a financial contribution. It is a statement about what the Brethren University Nigeria project means to the people who have been watching it develop. When a professional waives a fee not for publicity but for a cause, it signals a level of ownership that no fundraising campaign can manufacture. It suggests that the vision has already moved beyond the leadership that articulated it and taken root in the wider community.

Rev. Mbaya called on members who have not yet supported the project to do so immediately, warning that delays could slow the realisation of a vision with the potential to transform lives, strengthen communities, and expand the educational footprint of EYN nationwide. That urgency is grounded in reality. CAC registration is a milestone, not a completion. The distance between an approved corporate name and a functioning university with accreditation, a built campus, trained faculty, and enrolled students is measured in years of sustained institutional effort, consistent funding, and the kind of collective will that the site plan donation exemplifies at a small scale.

What Gombi and the Northeast Stand to Gain

EYN is a Christian denomination with a strong presence in Nigeria, known for its commitment to community service, education, and social justice, and its constituency is concentrated in some of the most educationally underserved communities in the country. The northeast geopolitical zone has for years recorded the lowest school enrolment rates, the highest out-of-school children numbers, and the sharpest deficits in tertiary institution access of any region in Nigeria. A faith-based university sited in Gombi, drawing from and serving the communities of Adamawa, Borno, Gombe, Taraba, Yobe, and Bauchi, would represent the kind of regionally anchored higher education investment that government policy has repeatedly promised and only partially delivered.

The Boko Haram insurgency, which EYN endured with particular severity through the displacement of its members, the burning of its churches, and the kidnapping of its congregants, made the northeast’s educational infrastructure even more fragile. At times, EYN had to move its headquarters to the city of Jos because of the violence before returning to Kwarhi in August 2016. The decision to now build a university in the same region from which the church was displaced is a declaration of permanence and of the refusal to allow violence to determine where knowledge is pursued.

Brethren University Nigeria is not yet built. Its accreditation has not yet been sought. Its faculty has not yet been appointed. But a vision that has survived a century of mission work, two generations of Boko Haram violence, the displacement and return of an entire denomination’s headquarters, and the painstaking work of CAC registration has already demonstrated something that no accreditation can confer: the will to persist.

The morning classes that Pilesar Sawa held for boys in Dille in 1928 were the beginning of something that took a hundred years to name a university. The name is now registered. The rest, as EYN’s own history shows, will follow.