“Who Maketh Thee to Differ?”

“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

Islington

Crowther arrived in England in September 1842, bringing with him a manuscript grammar and vocabulary of the Yoruba language. The society sent him to its training college at Islington, in north London, to prepare for ordination. He was there for about nine months. James Scholefield, a Cambridge professor who examined him on Paley’s Evidences, praised his work. When his Yoruba vocabulary was published in 1843, it was, as Andrew Walls says, the first such work by a native speaker of the language.

On Trinity Sunday, 11 June 1843, Charles Blomfield, Bishop of London, ordained him deacon. As Page tells it, Henry Venn, the society’s secretary, had taken him to the bishop to be examined, and how the bishop had questioned him “pretty smartly.” When he had left the room, Blomfield said to Venn: “He’ll do, he’ll do, only polish him up a bit.” At breakfast after the ordination, the bishop told another of the new deacons that Crowther was “no mean scholar; his examination papers were capital, and his Latin remarkably good.” In October the same bishop ordained him priest.

Eugene Stock, the society’s historian, records a story that on the day of the ordination the English candidates “waited for the Negro to go first.” Stock tells it as a mark of respect. Stock called him “the first African clergyman of our day,” adding in a footnote that he had not forgotten Philip Quaque. He was not, as popular accounts sometimes claim, the first African Anglican priest. That honour belongs to Philip Quaque, whose memorial he had copied at Cape Coast.

Home Again

He sailed back to Sierra Leone and landed at Freetown on Saturday, 2 December 1843. The next morning he preached his first sermon in Africa as a clergyman, in English, to a crowded church. His text was from the parable of the great supper, where the servant reports to his master: “Lord, what thou didst command is done, and yet there is room” (Luke 14:22, ASV).

He wrote afterwards:

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.

The question is Paul’s, from the verse at the head of this chapter. Paul was writing to Christians in Corinth who had begun to boast about their teachers and their gifts. “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?” Crowther, standing in the pulpit as the first African clergyman many of his hearers had ever seen, felt the force of it. He had been a slave boy in a Lagos pen twenty-one years before. Everything that now set him apart, his education, his ordination, his place in the pulpit, he had received. There was nothing to boast of.

That sense of having received everything never left him. It was the root of his humility, and it made him patient with others. A man who knows that his own gifts were given is less likely to despise people who have not been given the same.

In His Own Tongue

A few weeks later he did something that had probably never been done before. Many of the people of Freetown were Yoruba recaptives like himself, and he announced that he would hold a service in the Yoruba language. He visited homes to invite people, especially those who never came to church. He called on the headman of the Yoruba Muslims who lived near Fourah Bay, and told him about it. He described the conversation: “I did not raise any objections to their faith nor attack it, but endeavoured to show them the great blessings Christianity bestowed on mankind wherever it was embraced.” To his surprise, the Muslims were proud that one of their own countrymen had become a clergyman of the Church of England.

On 9 January 1844, at half past four in the afternoon, he opened the first Yoruba service in the mission church in Freetown. A large crowd came, Yoruba, Igbo, and people from Calabar and elsewhere, drawn by the novelty of hearing the gospel preached in an African language in an English church. He wrote:

Although the language is my native tongue, with which I am well acquainted, yet on this occasion it appeared as if I were a babe just learning to utter my mother tongue. The work in which I was engaged, the place where I stood, and the congregation before me were altogether so new and strange that the whole proceeding seemed to myself like a dream. But the Lord supported me.

He read the prayers that had not yet been translated in English, and a portion of Luke’s Gospel in Yoruba, which he had translated himself on the voyage home. Three young Muslims, sent by their headman, were in the congregation. He preached on the angel’s words to Mary: “The Holy Spirit shall come upon thee, and the power of the Most High shall overshadow thee: wherefore also the holy thing which is begotten shall be called the Son of God” (Luke 1:35, ASV). It was the lesson he had just read, and with Muslims present it was a pointed one, since it concerns the very point on which Christians and Muslims most disagree. Afterwards the young Muslims followed him home, said they were glad of what they had heard, and wished God would help him in his work.

The Shango Drummer

Not every encounter went so well. In February 1844 he visited a house in Freetown where worshippers of Shango, the Yoruba god of thunder, were holding a ceremony. The head drummer said something obscene in his hearing, and when Crowther rebuked him he rose in anger and turned on him. The Christians of the colony, he said, were the worst adulterers in the place. He himself had once gone to church and found no good in it.

Crowther recorded what happened next with an honesty that few missionaries of his time would have allowed themselves:

To my great mortification, shame, and regret I was silenced — the charge was too true.

The Christians of Freetown were not all saints, and the drummer knew it. Crowther did not pretend otherwise. When he tried to speak to the owner of the house, the worshippers pulled the man away, and drummed and chanted to drown his voice. They asked him whether his own forefathers had not worshipped the orisha for thirty generations, whether he had not been born and kept alive by their gods, and told him that if his forefathers had gone to hell, he must go too.

“The only weapons I used on this occasion,” he wrote, “were patience and an even temper, which the Lord has pleased to grant me.” When he left, two of the worshippers ran after him into the street to say how surprised they were that he had kept his temper while he was insulted. “I told them it was the religion of Christ only which could make the temper of man sweet and amiable.”

Three things in this story would mark his whole ministry. The first is that he spoke to people in their own language and about their own religion, from inside their world. The second is that he did not answer anger with anger. And the third is that he admitted the truth of a charge against Christians when it was true. The drummer’s rebuke stayed with him. A church whose members did not live as Christians would not persuade anyone, however well it was preached.

“Pray Upon Her Lap”

He loved the Church of England, and he loved its Book of Common Prayer. Later he wrote: “I have considered the Church as my mother, which has taught me to pray, as it were, upon her lap by the Prayer Book.” It was the Prayer Book that had given him the phrase “perfect freedom.” It was the Prayer Book he would translate into Yoruba, and whose services he would carry up the Niger.

It may seem strange that a man with such a deep sense of his own African identity should love so English a book. But Crowther did not see a contradiction. The Prayer Book, for him, was not English. It was the prayer of the Church, drawn from Scripture and from centuries of Christian worship, and it could be prayed in any language. His life’s work would be to make it pray in his own.