“I Dare Not Go Back”

“But Jesus said unto him, No man, having put his hand to the plow, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God.” — Luke 9:62 (ASV)

In August 1903, fifteen years after she walked into Okoyong, the first communion service in the district was held at Akpap. Seven young Christians were baptised, and Mary presented eleven children for baptism, six of them children she had rescued. The people sang Psalm 103 in Efik: “Who redeemeth thy life from destruction.” She had watched lives taken there for fifteen years. Now Okoyong people were singing about a God who rescues life. She told the newly baptised, “Okoyong now looks to you more than to me for proof of the power of the Gospel.”

One of the first Christians was Akom, a woman who had once helped send a chief's wives and slaves to their deaths. When a man who had falsely accused her of witchcraft came to make friends, she said, “I sometimes wanted to take revenge, but I have got it from God, and His revenge is of a sweeter kind than that of the Consul.”

That year Mary also did something new. Itu, on the Cross River, had been a slave market for centuries. She took three young people there and left them: two boys, Esien and Effiom, and Mana, a girl who had been kidnapped as a child and sold as a slave. Esien was to lead services, Effiom the singing, and Mana to teach the girls. Within months the congregation numbered more than three hundred, in a church the people built themselves. Her biographer says plainly who was behind it: Mana, “a black slave-girl,” who had taught and nursed the women of Itu “as a mother might.” The church at Itu owed its first life not to a Scottish missionary but to an African girl who had once been bought and sold.

Up the Enyong Creek lived a chief named Onoyom. Grieving a dead child and hunting the man he believed had bewitched him, he met a former mission teacher who had fallen into drink and was homeless. “Where can I find this God?” Onoyom asked. “I am not worthy to say,” the man answered, “but go to the white Ma at Itu, and she will tell you.” Onoyom later built a church with his own savings, and chose for its seats a great tree his town treated as a shrine. “God is stronger than juju,” he said.

Mary built too. She laid cement floors herself. “I just stir it like porridge, turn it out, smooth it with a stick, and all the time keep praying, 'Lord, here's the cement, if to Thy glory, set it,' and it has never once gone wrong.”

Mary first reached Arochukwu, the Aro heartland, in 1903 under the escort of the colonel whose army had conquered it, and partly to get there before Roman Catholic missionaries. Historians who see her as a servant of empire have fair evidence on their side.

By 1906 the mission's rules said she had to return to Okoyong. She was nearly sixty, ill, and could no longer walk far. But she had people begging, “Give us even a boy!” “There is an impelling power behind me, and I dare not look backward,” she said. “Even if it cost me my connection with the Church of my heart's love, I feel I must go forward.” In the end the Church gave way and freed her to work as a pioneer.

The verse at the top is one of Jesus' hardest sayings. A ploughman who keeps looking over his shoulder cuts a crooked line. Mary loved Okoyong and was afraid of losing her Church, and it made her “mutinous” and hard to manage. It also opened the Creek to the gospel.

Notice too how the gospel actually travelled: a homeless drunk, a former slave girl, two teenage boys. God uses the people nobody puts on a poster.

One thing to do this week: do one thing this week you've been putting off because it's new and uncomfortable: a conversation, a club, an apology. Put your hand to the plough and don't look back.