Appendix A: Lessons from the Life of Samuel Ajayi Crowther

“Remember them that had the rule over you, men that spake unto you the word of God; and considering the issue of their life, imitate their faith.”

— Hebrews 13:7, ASV

The lessons below gather the themes of this book so that readers can return to them. Samuel Crowther would have been uncomfortable being held up as an example. He preferred to point, as he so often did, to “the Hand which has ever overruled.” Each lesson therefore rests on Scripture, not on his example alone. The letter to the Hebrews tells us to consider how those who went before us lived and died, and to imitate their faith, not every detail of their lives.

1. God Writes Straight With Crooked Lines

The day he was taken from Osogun in chains was, Crowther wrote, the “unhappy” day which he was later taught “to call blessed.” He never pretended that the slave trade was good. He saw that God had brought good out of it. “As for you, ye meant evil against me; but God meant it for good” (Genesis 50:20, ASV).

2. God Sees the Fatherless

A boy who lost his home, his family, and his name at about thirteen was not lost to God. Twenty-five years later he found his mother again. “Thou hast been the helper of the fatherless” (Psalm 10:14, ASV).

3. Freedom Is for Service

He was set free from one kind of slavery and gave himself to another, the service of Christ, which he called “perfect freedom.” “For freedom did Christ set us free: stand fast therefore, and be not entangled again in a yoke of bondage” (Galatians 5:1, ASV). The freedom was never for himself alone.

4. Gifts Are Received, Not Earned

When he was praised as proof of what an African could achieve, he turned Paul’s question on himself: “who maketh thee to differ? and what hast thou that thou didst not receive?” (1 Corinthians 4:7, ASV). Humility is simply the truth about where our gifts come from.

5. People Need the Word in Their Own Language

He spent his life giving the Yoruba, and then other peoples of the Niger, the Scriptures in their own tongue. At Pentecost every hearer asked, “how hear we, every man in our own language wherein we were born?” (Acts 2:8, ASV). The gospel is meant to be heard as a mother tongue, not a foreign one.

6. Preach With Sympathy, Not Scorn

He told his clergy not to dispute with Muslims or to mock the worshippers of the old gods, but to speak “with the feelings of sympathy with all classes of hearers.” “Let your speech be always with grace, seasoned with salt” (Colossians 4:6, ASV).

7. Africa by Her Own Children

He believed, from 1841 onwards, that Africa would be evangelised chiefly by Africans. Every church, in every land, is meant to grow its own leaders. “The little one shall become a thousand, and the small one a strong nation” (Isaiah 60:22, ASV).

8. Hard Providences Are Not the End

Wrecked at Jebba, robbed and held for ransom by Abokko, burned out at Onitsha and Gbebe, he kept writing: “though it is night with us now daylight shall come.” “We are pressed on every side, yet not straitened; perplexed, yet not unto despair” (2 Corinthians 4:8, ASV).

9. Home Is Also a Calling

When his wife was dying, he gave up his annual visitation of the Niger to stay with her, and let the mission wait. “Charity begins at home,” he said. “If any provideth not for his own, and specially his own household, he hath denied the faith” (1 Timothy 5:8, ASV).

10. Gentleness Must Not Become Neglect

His mercy to men who had fallen was real, but it allowed some unworthy men to stay, and a mission run on mercy without close oversight once employed men who did terrible wrong. Leaders are called to restore the fallen gently and to guard the flock faithfully. “Restore such a one in a spirit of gentleness; looking to thyself, lest thou also be tempted” (Galatians 6:1, ASV).

11. Zeal Without Patience Does Harm

The young men who judged his mission were sincere, devoted, and ready to die. They were also, as the society’s own historian later wrote, “too severe.” Zeal for purity that forgets humility becomes its own sin. “The wrath of man worketh not the righteousness of God” (James 1:20, ASV).

12. Suffer Wrong Without Bitterness

He was wronged at the end of his life by his own side. He protested and withdrew from the committee, but he did not turn bitter. His last letter, a draft he never sent, said only that he had always been willing “to be improved by the ideas of others.” “Who, when he was reviled, reviled not again; when he suffered, threatened not; but committed himself to him that judgeth righteously” (1 Peter 2:23, ASV).

13. Churches Can Repent

More than a century later, the Church that had wronged him said, in the cathedral where he was consecrated, “It was wrong.” Institutions, like people, can confess their sins. “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins” (1 John 1:9, ASV).

14. The Seed Is Not the Harvest

At his death his mission seemed to have collapsed. A century later, the churches of Nigeria were among the largest in the world. Faithfulness is measured by God, not by what the faithful live to see. “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).