Essentially African, Essentially Missionary

“After these things I saw, and behold, a great multitude, which no man could number, out of every nation and of all tribes and peoples and tongues, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, arrayed in white robes, and palms in their hands;”

— Revelation 7:9, ASV

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For a few years after Crowther’s death, it looked as if his life’s work had failed. In 1890, Stock recorded, the Niger Mission had “a Bishop, nine Native clergy, and nine English missionaries.” By 1893, after the suspensions, the resignations, the deaths, and the withdrawal of the Delta churches, its staff was listed as three Englishmen, one of whom soon went home, and three African clergymen. “So disastrous a change,” Stock wrote, “was unparalleled in the Society’s history since the fatal early days of Sierra Leone.” The young men’s mission to the Sudan had collapsed with them. The first African bishop of modern times in the Anglican Church had been succeeded by an Englishman, and the Englishman had died soon after reaching Africa.

Stock, who belonged to the side that had judged Crowther, still wrote in hope that the Master Himself would perhaps have said, “The Mission is not dead, but sleepeth.”

What Remained

It was not dead. Much of what Crowther had built could not be undone by a committee.

There was the Yoruba Bible, completed in 1884 by the team he had led and inspired, and the written Yoruba language that he, more than anyone, had given its shape. There was the beginning of written Igbo, and of Nupe, and word lists and grammars of a dozen other languages. There were the churches of the Delta, self-supporting and self-governing, which had survived persecution and would survive the quarrel with the society. There were congregations along the Niger, small and often struggling, from Onitsha to Lokoja. There were African clergy he had trained and ordained. And there was the example of his life, which nobody could take away.

Stock recorded a small incident from 1894. A missionary of the society was preaching in a street in Calcutta, in India, when an African man appeared in the crowd and began begging the people to accept Christ, of whom he had learned, he said, from “the sweet words of a black bishop called Crowther.” It is the kind of story that missionary histories like to tell, and we cannot know more about the man. But it is a reminder that the seed Crowther sowed travelled further than anyone could trace.

The Historians

In the century after his death, as the missionary era ended and Africa’s nations became independent, historians began to look at Crowther again. The Nigerian historian J. F. Ade Ajayi, in a study of the Nigerian missions published in 1965, showed how the crisis of 1890 had grown out of a change in European attitudes to Africans, and how Crowther’s generation of African Christians had become the educated elite of a new Nigeria. E. A. Ayandele, another Nigerian historian, admired Crowther but did not flatter him, judging him weak as an administrator and a disciplinarian. The Scottish historian Andrew Walls called him probably the most widely known African Christian of the nineteenth century. Lamin Sanneh, the Gambian-born scholar of mission, made him the great example of his argument that Bible translation, by treating African languages as worthy of the word of God, dignified African cultures and prepared the way for African churches to stand on their own.

These historians did not agree on everything. But they agreed that Crowther’s personal integrity was never in question, that the mission had real weaknesses, and that the way the crisis of 1890 was handled was unjust and had lasting consequences. Walls summed up Crowther’s legacy in a phrase: a Christian faith that was “essentially African and essentially missionary.” Crowther was African through and through, and never pretended otherwise. And he was a missionary through and through, who believed that the faith that had set him free must be carried to others.

“It Was Wrong”

In 2014, a hundred and fifty years after Crowther’s consecration, a service of thanksgiving and repentance was held in Canterbury Cathedral, where he had been made a bishop. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, preached. He called Crowther “the apostle of Nigeria,” and said: “We in the Church of England need to say sorry that someone was properly and rightly consecrated Bishop and then betrayed and let down and undermined. It was wrong.”

It had taken more than a century, and it came from the same church and the same cathedral. Crowther would probably have been embarrassed by it. He never asked for an apology, and never spoke publicly against those who had wronged him. But the apology was not really for his sake. It was for the sake of the truth, and of the African churches who had carried the memory of his treatment for generations.

The Harvest

The greatest change came after all the historians and archbishops. When Crowther was born, there were hardly any Christians in the lands that are now Nigeria. When he died, there were a few thousand, in scattered congregations, many of them nominal. Today Nigeria has one of the largest Christian populations in the world, and its Anglican church is among the largest provinces of the Anglican Communion, with many more worshippers on a Sunday than the Church of England. Most of the world’s Christians now live in the global South, and Africa has more Christians than any other continent. The churches of Africa send missionaries of their own across the world, including to Britain.

Crowther did not cause all this, and it would be foolish to claim that he did. Many other people, African and European, and many other movements, from independent African churches to the great revivals of the twentieth century, played their part. But in a real sense he stood at its beginning. He was the first African bishop of the Anglican Church in modern times, and the man through whom many Africans first heard the gospel in their own language. The pattern he believed in, of African churches led by Africans, supported by Africans, and carrying the gospel to their neighbours, is the pattern that prevailed.

Jesus said: “Except a grain of wheat fall into the earth and die, it abideth by itself alone; but if it die, it beareth much fruit” (John 12:24, ASV). Crowther’s work seemed to fall into the earth and die in 1891. The fruit came later.

He is remembered today in many ways. The Episcopal Church in the United States and the Church of Nigeria commemorate him on 31 December, the traditional date of his death. There is a university in Oyo that bears his name. His grandson, Herbert Macaulay, is honoured as a father of Nigerian nationalism. And every Sunday, in Yoruba and Igbo and a hundred other languages, African Christians read the Scriptures in their own tongue, as he spent his life to make possible.

Every Nation and Tongue

Crowther used a verse from the Psalms which many African Christians of his century took as a promise for their continent: “Princes shall come out of Egypt; Ethiopia shall haste to stretch out her hands unto God” (Psalm 68:31, ASV). In the Bible, Ethiopia stood for the lands of Africa beyond Egypt, and he believed he was living to see the promise fulfilled.

The vision at the head of this chapter goes further. It is John’s vision of heaven, of “a great multitude, which no man could number, out of every nation and of all tribes and peoples and tongues, standing before the throne and before the Lamb.” Every tongue: Yoruba and Igbo, Nupe and Hausa, Ijaw and English. Every people: the Egba and the Oyo, the chiefs of Bonny and the slaves of Brass, the Emir of Nupe’s people and the congregations of Islington. In that multitude, the distinctions that divided the Niger Mission in 1890 will count for nothing.

Samuel Ajayi Crowther was taken from his home in chains, sold six times, and put on a slave ship bound for the Americas. He was set free by strangers, taught by strangers, and made a Christian by people who did not know his language. He spent the rest of his life making sure that his own people would hear the gospel in theirs. He was wronged at the end, and did not complain. He died saying “Good night.” He was essentially African and essentially missionary. And he is, we may believe, somewhere in that multitude, with a palm in his hand.