Good Night

“In peace will I both lay me down and sleep; For thou, Jehovah, alone makest me dwell in safety.” — Psalm 4:8 (ASV)

In the summer of 1891, at Bonny in the Niger Delta, Crowther stood up from his desk and had a stroke. It paralysed his right hand and leg and took his voice for days. He went to Lagos to recover at the home of his daughter Abigail. “I am thankful to say that I am improving,” he wrote, wanting “to spend the remainder of my days in the service of our Divine Master.” A visitor found him sitting for hours, looking out over the sea. The society’s own historian admitted that his death was “certainly hastened by anxiety and disappointment.”

He kept working. On Christmas morning he walked to church. In the last days of December he leaned on an old friend’s arm to bless seven new schoolmasters, “tenderly, fatherly, with slow and faltering speech.” After he died, a draft letter to the society was found in his diary, in a shaky hand, never sent. He didn’t defend himself or accuse anyone. He wrote: “Though I am single-handed, I like to be improved by the ideas of others.”

On 31 December he sat at his table with his Prayer Book and hymn book as usual, then had another stroke. That night Abigail gave him his medicine at midnight. “I said, ‘Good night, father,’ and he said, ‘Good night.’” Half an hour later he was gone. The boy who had lain awake in chains the night before he was marched to market lay down at last in peace.

For a while it looked as if his work had failed. The bishop who succeeded him was an Englishman, and for decades the African bishops on the Niger served only as assistants. The mission’s staff collapsed. Even the society’s historian wrote that perhaps the Master would say, “The Mission is not dead, but sleepeth.”

It wasn’t dead. There was the Yoruba Bible. There was the beginning of written Igbo and Nupe. There were the self-supporting churches of the Delta. His grandson, Herbert Macaulay, became one of the fathers of Nigerian nationalism. And today Nigeria has one of the largest Christian populations in the world, its Anglican church among the largest anywhere, led, as Crowther always believed it should be, by Africans. In 2014, a hundred and fifty years after his consecration, the Archbishop of Canterbury stood in the same cathedral and said that Crowther had been “betrayed and let down and undermined. It was wrong.” Crowther never asked for that apology. It was for the sake of the truth.

Jesus said a grain of wheat has to fall into the ground and die before it bears much fruit. Crowther’s work seemed to fall into the ground in 1891. The harvest came after him, and he never saw most of it. That is how it often goes. You may never see what your faithfulness grows into.

A boy torn from his home in chains spent his life making sure his people would hear the gospel in their own words. He was wronged at the end and didn’t complain. His last word was a word of trust: “Good night.”

One thing to do this week: think about how you want to be remembered by the people closest to you. Write one sentence. Then pick one small, faithful thing that fits that sentence and do it every day this week, whether or not anyone notices.