Sympathy with All Classes

“but sanctify in your hearts Christ as Lord: being ready always to give answer to every man that asketh you a reason concerning the hope that is in you, yet with meekness and fear”

— 1 Peter 3:15, ASV

A Bishop’s Charge

In the Church of England a bishop gives his clergy, from time to time, a formal address called a charge, setting out his teaching on the work of the ministry. Crowther’s first charge was printed in London in 1866. Its title page calls it “A Charge delivered on the banks of the River Niger in West Africa, by Samuel Adjai Crowther, D.D. Oxon. (Native Missionary Bishop).” It begins “My dear beloved Brethren,” and calls the occasion “the first gathering together of the Bishop and Clergy in this Mission.” There were only a handful of them, and every one was an African.

It is a remarkable document. In a few dozen pages, Crowther set out what he had learned in twenty-five years of mission work about how the gospel should be preached to the peoples of West Africa. Later charges, in 1869, 1874, and 1885, filled out the picture. Together they are the nearest thing we have to his theology of mission, and much of what they say still repays reading.

The Gospel First

He began with the history of the mission and its modest results: after nine years on the Niger, a hundred and forty-six baptisms, eighty-nine communicants, and a hundred and forty-nine children in school. He quoted Thomas Fowell Buxton’s watchword, “the Gospel and the Plough,” and called it “worthy to be written in letters of gold.” He believed in teaching crafts, farming, and trade alongside the gospel. But he was firm about the order: “the Gospel primarily; Industry, as the hand-maid to the Gospel.”

He had been told by some Europeans that he should stop teaching Africans to read and write and teach them carpentry and cooking instead, and that once their material lives were improved they would be ready for Christianity. One adviser had told him that unless he did so, he would never give a farthing to the mission. Crowther answered with a sharp irony. Look at England, he said, the first nation in the world in wealth, science, and invention. Had all these advantages made the men who gave such advice more willing to receive the gospel? “I fear there are no such effects. Neither themselves, nor many who maintain such an opinion, are found near the doors of the places where the Gospel is preached: it is to them foolishness.” Material progress did not make people Christians. Only “the faithful preaching of the Gospel, which is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth,” could change hearts, “both at home and abroad.”

Preaching Like Christ

How should the gospel be preached? His model was Christ himself: the Sermon on the Mount, the parables, the discourses. “Sublime and lofty as the sentiments therein expressed are; yet they are so simple, that every heathen can understand them; and so appropriate, that every one can see himself represented in them.” He told his clergy: “Imitate Christ, then, to reach the understanding, and not to move the feelings only; speak to the people as they are able to bear it.”

Then came the heart of his method:

Again, in preaching, divest yourself of a disposition to dispute with Mahometans, or to censure heathens; rather be possessed with the feelings of sympathy with all classes of hearers.

And of the worshippers of the old gods, among whom most of his clergy worked: “them you must not censure as ignorant, stupid, and foolish idolators; your dealing with them must be that of sympathy and love, as you would deal with the blind who errs out of the way.”

He went further. The missionary should “take advantage of any principles which they themselves admit.” The sacrifices that the people offered to their gods, which many missionaries simply condemned, were for Crowther “a foundation for our preaching.” People who already understood that sin required a sacrifice could be shown the sacrifice of Christ. Paul had done the same at Athens, when he began from an altar “To an Unknown God.”

The verse at the head of this chapter is Peter’s advice to Christians living among people who did not share their faith: “being ready always to give answer to every man that asketh you a reason concerning the hope that is in you, yet with meekness and fear.” Paul put it another way: “Let your speech be always with grace, seasoned with salt, that ye may know how ye ought to answer each one” (Colossians 4:6, ASV). That was Crowther’s method exactly. He was ready to give an answer, and he gave it with meekness.

The Muslims

He applied the same principle to Islam, which was spreading southward from the Fulani states of the north into the lands of the Niger. He did not believe that Islam was true. He believed that Muhammad was not a prophet and that the Qur’an was wrong about Christ. But he believed that argument and abuse would never win a Muslim. The missionary should preach Christ fully and plainly to Muslims and leave the result to God. “We must leave the results to the Disposer of all hearts.”

He was scathing about Christians who tried to compete with Muslim scholars on their own ground. Many Africans wore charms made by Muslim teachers, scraps of paper with verses of the Qur’an written on them, sewn into leather pouches. People asked him for scraps of the Bible to wear in the same way, and some Europeans told him it would do no harm to give them. He refused. At a great missionary meeting in Exeter Hall, London, in 1873, Crowther said: “I would rather let the Mohammedans take possession of the field … than that we should use cunningly devised frauds to deceive souls.” When an old chief at Bida asked him for paper charms to protect his horse, Crowther told him he had ridden the same horse for twelve years without a single charm, only washing, grooming, and feeding it well.

Polygamy

On one subject Crowther was unbending. Most of the men of the Niger who were wealthy enough had several wives. Some Europeans, among them the explorer Richard Burton, defended the custom as suited to Africa, and some churchmen had argued that a man with several wives should be baptised, so long as he took no more. Crowther rejected this. He argued at length, from Genesis and from the teaching of Christ and Paul, that marriage was the union of one man and one woman.

His main argument, though, was not only from Scripture. It was about women. The system, he said, “has enslaved the female population of the countries where it prevails.” Of the women of the harems he wrote: “They are reasonable beings, in whom God has planted certain rights and feelings.” He would not baptise a man with several wives, but he would baptise the wives of such a man, since they had not chosen the arrangement.

This is one of the hardest questions in the history of African Christianity, and Christians have answered it differently. Some African churches later came to accept polygamous converts. It is fair to note that Crowther’s position meant, in practice, that some men who wanted to be baptised were refused. He held his position out of conviction, not convenience, and he held it for African women’s sake as much as for any other reason.

No Compulsion

He was insistent that no one should be forced. “They are never compelled to do anything,” he said of the people among whom his clergy worked; “we leave the matter to their own deliberate consideration; they are never urged to cast away their idolatrous objects of worship.” Converts must come of their own will, or not at all.

And he was humble about the hardest question a missionary is asked: what becomes of those who die without ever hearing the gospel? He refused to pronounce. “With all submission, I will remark that it is not the will of God to reveal unto us what shall become of such persons.” He pointed his clergy instead to Abraham’s question: “shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?” (Genesis 18:25, ASV). Their task was not to judge the dead but to go to the living.

Africa and Its Customs

In later charges he spoke about African culture. “Christianity does not undertake to destroy national assimilation,” he said in one; “where there are any degrading superstitious defects, it corrects them.” The gospel did not require Africans to become Europeans. It required them to become Christians, and a great deal of their own way of life could remain.

He also warned against the opposite mistake. By 1869 the cry “Africa for the Africans” was being raised in Sierra Leone and Lagos, and some were saying that the missions should be handed over entirely to Africans, with no more European help. Crowther called the slogan “Africa for the Africans alone” “great ignorance, not to say unpardonable selfishness.” He believed that Africa still needed European men and money, and that the young African churches were not yet strong enough to stand alone. “We are but a Church in embryo,” he told his clergy at Onitsha in 1874; “we must derive nourishment from the mother.” It is a striking position, given what would happen later. He did not want Europeans out. He wanted them as partners.

A Man of His Time

It would be wrong to present Crowther’s charges as modern documents. He shared many of the assumptions of his time. He could quote the missionary hymn that speaks of “the heathen in their blindness” who “bow down to wood and stone.” He spoke of “the foolish heathen.” He told his clergy to speak to the people “as to children.” He wrote harshly about the greed of some chiefs and the dishonesty of some traders. In his journals he could write about Islam with a sharpness and contempt that his public counsel of gentleness did not show.

But when all that has been said, the charges remain the work of a man who knew his people from the inside, who respected them, and who had thought more carefully than almost any missionary of his day about how the gospel should come to them. His central word was sympathy. It was a word he had earned. He had been a heathen boy, a slave, and a stranger, and someone had shown him sympathy. He asked his clergy to show the same.