Who Makes You Different?

“For who maketh thee to differ? and what hast thou that thou didst not receive? but if thou didst receive it, why dost thou glory as if thou hadst not received it?” — 1 Corinthians 4:7 (ASV)

In 1842 Crowther sailed to England with a handwritten Yoruba grammar and vocabulary in his luggage. In 1843 the Bishop of London ordained him. The bishop said afterwards that his exam papers were “capital, and his Latin remarkably good.” (He was not, by the way, the first African ever ordained in the Church of England. Philip Quaque of Cape Coast was ordained in 1765. Crowther knew it; he had copied Quaque’s memorial with his own hand.)

He landed back in Freetown on 2 December 1843 and preached the next morning to a packed church. Lots of people had never seen an African clergyman. He wrote: “The novelty of seeing a native clergyman performing Divine Service excited a very great interest among all who were present. But the question, ‘Who maketh thee to differ?’ filled me with shame and confusion of face.”

Twenty-one years earlier he had been chained by the neck in a Lagos slave pen. Everything that now made him stand out, the education, the ordination, the pulpit, had been given to him. So what was there to boast about? That question, from the verse above, became the root of his humility for the rest of his life.

A few weeks later he did something that had probably never been done: he held a church service in Yoruba. He went house to house inviting people, even calling on the leader of the local Yoruba Muslims, who turned out to be proud that one of their countrymen was now a clergyman. A big crowd came. Crowther said that even though it was his mother tongue, he felt “as if I were a babe just learning to utter my mother tongue.”

Not every conversation went that well. In February 1844 he walked into a ceremony for Shango, the Yoruba god of thunder. When he rebuked the head drummer for something obscene, the man turned on him: the Christians of Freetown, he said, were the worst adulterers in town. He had been to church himself and found no good in it.

Crowther’s journal entry is startling: “To my great mortification, shame, and regret I was silenced — the charge was too true.” He didn’t argue or defend the church’s reputation. He admitted it. And when the worshippers drummed to drown him out, “the only weapons I used on this occasion were patience and an even temper.” Two of them ran after him into the street, amazed he hadn’t lost his temper.

Here is the uncomfortable lesson. Sometimes the people who criticise Christians are right. When they are, the best answer is not spin. It is honesty, and then lives that make the charge untrue. A church whose people don’t live like Christians won’t persuade anyone, however well it preaches.

One thing to do this week: think of one criticism people often make of Christians, one that is at least partly true. Instead of arguing with it, ask: is it true of me? Choose one concrete way this week to live in a way that answers it.