Too Severe

“For it was not an enemy that reproached me; Then I could have borne it: Neither was it he that hated me that did magnify himself against me; Then I would have hid myself from him: But it was thou, a man mine equal, My companion, and my familiar friend.” — Psalm 55:12-13 (ASV)

This is the hardest chapter in Crowther’s story, and it’s easy to tell it one-sidedly in either direction. So here are the facts.

The problems were real. By the late 1870s the Niger mission stretched over three hundred miles of river. Its African staff, mostly recruited from Sierra Leone, worked far from any supervision, and the bishop could visit each station once a year at most. Many were faithful. Some were not. Worst of all, two of the mission’s African employees were convicted of treating a girl at Onitsha so cruelly that she died. One of them had been dismissed by Crowther and then, out of pity, taken back. No source suggests Crowther knew of the crime. But by common consent he was too lenient a disciplinarian. He found it hard to believe the worst of men he had trained.

He didn’t pretend all was well. He listed the agents he had suspended and dismissed. He wrote that the mission needed “decided spiritual men, because spiritual men can only teach spiritual things.” In 1884 he even offered to step aside as manager and keep working as a pioneer. The society said no. For a few years an older English secretary named James Hamilton worked alongside him, reforming the mission with firmness and without contempt. It worked.

Then a new generation arrived: young, brilliant, intensely devoted English missionaries, ready to die for Christ, and with very little patience. In August 1890, at a committee meeting at Onitsha, they and the African members “entirely failed to agree.” The English secretary, acting in the society’s name, suspended African clergy whom Crowther had ordained, in his presence. One was a veteran who had served for decades. Another was his own son, Archdeacon Dandeson Crowther. The old bishop rose to his feet to dissociate himself from what had been done and withdrew from the committee. (He was not deposed, as some retellings say. He stayed bishop until he died.)

The young men soon died or resigned, and their plans collapsed. Eight years later the society’s own historian wrote that they “were, indeed, too severe,” and “not patient enough with those who, like the venerable bishop himself, honestly differed from them.” Even then he blamed “racial weaknesses,” as if Africans as a race were weaker. That assumption, held even by kind people, was the real enemy of Crowther’s work. In 1864 the society had believed Africans could lead their own churches. By 1890 many no longer did.

How did Crowther respond? Not with the weapons used on him. The churches of the Niger Delta, led by Dandeson, stopped taking the society’s money and supported their own clergy, with the bishop’s full approval. It wasn’t a walkout from the church. It was exactly what Venn had hoped for: a church that paid its own way and ran its own affairs. Crowther accepted the society’s decisions even though he was “deeply dissatisfied” with them, and kept serving.

Psalm 55 says the worst wounds come from your own side. “It was not an enemy … Then I could have borne it.” Crowther had faced raiders, slavers and kidnappers. What nearly broke him came from fellow Christians he had blessed and sailed with. If that happens to you, and in churches it sometimes does, you can be honest that it was wrong without becoming the kind of person who did it.

One thing to do this week: if a fellow Christian has hurt you, write down plainly what happened and why it was wrong. Then write down one way you are tempted to hit back, and choose not to. If you are the one who has been too severe with someone, go and put it right.