Toye & Eniye Oshunbiyi
·
Founders, LifesPriority
LifesPriority did not begin with a strategy or a business plan. It began with a redundancy, a coffee shop, and a question neither of us had ever seriously considered before.
More than twenty years ago, Eniye and I were both working full-time for our local church. We were young, engaged to be married, and if you had asked me then what my future looked like, I would have answered without hesitation.
I believed God had called me into full-time ministry. That was my career. That was my purpose. That was where I expected to spend the rest of my life.
Then something happened that neither of us expected.
The church was going through financial difficulties and, through no fault of our own, we were both made redundant. We got married. We went on our honeymoon. We came home without jobs.
I still remember sitting with Eniye in a coffee shop, asking myself a question I had never seriously considered before: what do I do now, and where do I go from here?
At first, I thought my biggest challenge was finding work.
It wasn't.
My biggest challenge was discovering that my understanding of God had quietly become much smaller than I realised.
During the years I had worked full-time for the church, I had unconsciously built a hierarchy. I believed that some work was more spiritual than other work. If I am being honest, I had come to see ordinary employment as something of a demotion, a necessary season before God brought me back to what really mattered.
I had made the same mistake in my marriage.
As a young husband, I often placed church activities above time with Eniye, until I was confronted by a biblical picture I had somehow missed. I was called to lay my life down for my wife as Christ laid his life down for the church. Not to sacrifice my wife for the church.
God was dismantling something in me that I had not realised was there.
Little by little, through that season of uncertainty, a simple but life-changing conviction began to form.
The problem was never that God had a narrow view of life. The problem was that I did.
God values every area of life. Our work. Our marriages. Our families. Our gifts. Our finances. Our relationships. Our ordinary Tuesday mornings.
And I had never been equipped to believe that. Not truly, not practically, not in a way that changed how I lived Monday to Saturday.
For Eniye, the gap showed up differently. But it was the same gap.
She had trained in law. She was capable, gifted, and drawn to areas of practice that carried real weight. Work that had the potential to shape how organisations behaved, how people were treated, how justice was applied.
But she did not have the language for what she was feeling.
Nobody had ever helped her see that her work in law was sacred. That the gifts she was bringing into that environment were placed there intentionally, not accidentally. That God was just as present in government offices, NGOs, courtrooms and boardrooms as he was in any church service.
"I didn't have the language for the sacredness of secular work. And because I didn't have that language, I didn't have the spiritual confidence to fully occupy the space God had placed me in."
Eniye OshunbiyiShe understood stewardship, but only in one dimension. Giving to church. Giving to charity. What she had never been given was a framework for stewarding her gifts, her abilities, her professional calling, her finances as acts of Kingdom faithfulness.
Relationships and money were the same. She had the values. She did not have the framework to connect those values to the life she was actually living.
That is not a personal failure. That is a discipleship gap. And it is one of the most common experiences among followers of Christ today.
That season of uncertainty planted something in me that never left.
I started journaling. I sketched ideas. I wrote down things I was discovering and questions I could not stop asking. I began to see that what Eniye and I had experienced was not unusual.
Millions of followers of Christ spend the majority of their waking hours in workplaces, businesses, schools, hospitals, homes and communities without ever being helped to believe that these places matter deeply to God. Many live as quiet exiles. Trying to honour God in their everyday lives, but never quite believing that they belong where he has placed them.
One of those early journal pages still exists. On it I wrote that I wanted to create a resource that would help believers see life differently. I filled pages trying to find the right name.
Eventually one stood out.
LifesPriority. Not because any single area of life is more important than another. But because God has priorities for the whole of life, and every area finds its proper place when he is at the centre.
Eniye and I started running marriage workshops in our local church, one of the younger married couples doing so. But we had discovered something we wished someone had helped us understand much earlier. That ordinary life matters to God. And that the people around us needed to hear it too.
That was more than twenty years ago.
A great deal has happened between that coffee shop and today. Careers were built. A marriage deepened. Children grew up. Toye worked for years as a coach to founders and leaders in the marketplace, and quietly noticed, in conversation after conversation, that the same gap kept appearing. Gifted, capable, faith-filled people who had never been equipped to integrate who they were with what they did.
The conviction grew. The timing was never right. And then it was.
Eniye and I have been followers of Christ for over thirty years. We have lived long enough to know what it costs to carry a calling without a community to sustain it. We have also lived long enough to know that the gap between Sunday and Monday does not close by itself.
Someone has to build the bridge.
LifesPriority is that bridge.
We are not trying to build another platform for its own sake. We are not trying to replace the local church. We are not here to tell people that one area of life matters more than another.
We are here because we believe that you are not an exile.
We registered that domain name over twenty years ago because we believed this message mattered.
We still believe that.
The gap Toye and Eniye felt is the gap LifesPriority exists to close. Join the founding community, or begin by taking the Whole-Life Assessment to see where you are across all seven areas of life.