Thursday in the Christmas Season
Samuel Ajayi Crowther Bishop in the Niger Territories
1891
Today the Church commemorates Samuel Ajayi Crowther, missionary, translator, and bishop in the Niger Territories.
Ajayi was born in Yoruba country in West Africa about 1807. In 1822, during a time of war, slave raiders seized him and separated him from his mother and sisters. After he had been sold several times, Portuguese traders placed him aboard a slave ship. A British naval patrol intercepted the ship and brought the captives to Freetown in Sierra Leone.
In Freetown, Ajayi entered a school of the Church Missionary Society. He learned to read within a Christian community formed largely among people rescued from slavery. He was baptized in 1825 and took the name Samuel Crowther. He was among the first students at Fourah Bay, a college established to prepare African Christians for ministry, and later became an assistant teacher there.
In 1841, Crowther joined a British expedition up the Niger River. Its leaders hoped to weaken the slave trade by opening new commercial ties. The Church Missionary Society sent him as one of its representatives. Crowther served as an interpreter, negotiated with local leaders, and ministered among the sick while many Europeans in the party lay gravely ill.
The following year, Crowther went to England for further study and was ordained a priest in 1843. After preaching his first sermon on his return to Freetown, he wrote that the words of Scripture, “Who maketh thee to differ?” filled him with “shame and confusion of face.” He thanked God that the people received him as a messenger of Christ.
Crowther soon returned to Yoruba country. In August 1846, at Abeokuta, his mother came to meet him. They grasped one another and wept. For a time, they could say little. He soon learned that his brother and the two sisters captured with him had also survived. Crowther wrote, “God has brought us together again, and turned our sorrow into joy.” In 1848, he baptized his mother, who took the name Hannah, using the baptismal service he had translated into Yoruba.
Over the following years, Crowther preached, baptized, taught, and trained others for ministry. He prepared grammars and dictionaries and translated the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer into Yoruba. He also assisted work in other West African languages. On later journeys into the interior, he met Muslim communities. He listened carefully and spoke with Muslims about Christ without turning conversation into a contest.
In the schools and training colleges Crowther founded, students read Scripture, pursued other studies, and cultivated food and cotton to help support their communities. African catechists, teachers, and clergy carried the work into places that no single missionary could have reached. Crowther’s ministry sought churches able to pray, teach, and sustain their common life under African leadership.
On June 29, 1864, Crowther was consecrated in Canterbury Cathedral as the first African Anglican bishop. His charge extended through the Niger Territories and other lands of West Africa beyond British rule. Several white Anglican missionaries had refused to serve under an African churchman, so the Church of England gave Crowther authority only where no white missionaries were then serving. Even within that limit, he was entrusted to ordain and pastor African clergy.
During the 1880s, Crowther patiently endured attacks on his authority while remaining active in ministry. His opponents within the Church Missionary Society accused the African clergy and teachers under his care of misconduct. One document, issued in 1880 and called the Wood Report, made false charges against several workers. Crowther used his influence within the Society to suppress it. Other accusations concerned genuine failures, but he believed that workers who had failed could be restored.
In 1890, the Society sent younger English missionaries to the Niger to take control of the work. They dismissed most of the African workers Crowther had recruited. Crowther resigned his office in protest rather than accept the removal of those workers. Yet a committee of the Society found no fault in Crowther himself.
Samuel Crowther died in Lagos on December 31, 1891. The Scriptures he translated, the clergy he formed, and the churches he helped plant continued to bear fruit after his death.
Let us pray
O God, who leads those whom you love from captivity into the grace of the Gospel, we thank you for Samuel Crowther, whom you called to become a bishop in your Church: Grant that your Holy Word may be heard, loved, and lived in all corners of the world, that we and all your people may proclaim, by word and example, the Good News of God in Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.