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SAMUEL CROWTHER: A Model Bishop for Our Times
By Chuck Collins
www.virtueonline.org
June 29, 2023
The office of bishop is a "noble task" (1 Tim 3:1), therefore those called to this office are to have a godly character and qualities that come from maturity in the faith. Upward-moving ambition is a worldly quality that will help someone become a CEO of a corporation, but it is unbecoming of bishops and priests. It's hard to read 1 Timothy, 1 Corinthians 12, and Philippines 2 and conclude otherwise.
Bishops are not little popes or princes; it's not a popularity contest or a quest for a larger salary. Bishops should loosely hold their office in the face of God's sufficiency and not their own, and should see themselves accountable to God and servants of the people of God. The father of Anglicanism in Nigeria, Samuel Adjai Crowther, was the first African to be made a Church of England bishop June 29, 1864. He was recruited kicking and screaming. Perhaps this should be the first quality looked for in electing new bishops (and priests) in God's one, holy, catholic and apostolic church.
Crowther was kidnapped and sold into slavery by Muslim Fulani cattle herders when he was thirteen. This is the same Fulani tribesmen who are killing Christians today in NE Nigeria by the thousands. After his release and conversion to Christ, Crowther became a great linguist, translator, scholar, and missionary teacher. He translated the Yoruba Bible, and greatly influenced how government's viewed Africa and Africans in the 1800's.
So strong was he as a leader, and with such commitment to Christ, that he was consecrated bishop despite great protests. Crowther protested himself! People who knew him described him as a very humble man, a simple evangelist, who only wanted the opportunity to tell others about God's love for sinners. But in the end he was finally convinced that becoming a bishop was God's will for his life and for the church. The policy of The Church Missionary Society under Bishop Henry Venn was to support and bless indigenous, self-governing, self-supporting, self-propagating churches. But despite Crowther's passion for Jesus, and for all his achievements, Bishop Crowther's mission was undermined and dismantled in the 1880s by racist white Europeans, including some of his fellow Anglican missionaries. When he died of a stroke in 1891 he was replaced by a white bishop.
The face of the Church of England, the Anglican Communion, is no longer white or English. It hasn't been for a long time. In fact, there are over 20 million Anglicans in Nigeria alone, compared to fewer than 3 million in the United States. And the locus of God's activity in Anglicanism has changed from England and America to the two-thirds world with GAFCON (Global Anglican Futures Conference; www.gafcon.org).
Anglicans in America find their place in the worldwide Anglican Communion in relationship with how God is working so wonderfully in Africa - in our common commitment to the Anglican formularies - to a theology, not a recently invented devotion to the Archbishop of Canterbury or by the vote of some bigwigs who call themselves "Instruments of Unity."
Some of the Anglican revival of the last 150 years has to do with the witness and ministry of Samuel Adjai Crowther, a reluctant and powerful servant leader. I once asked an African bishop friend how many congregations were in his diocese and he looked at me puzzled and then laughed. At that point congregations were springing up every week, sometimes every day, meeting under the eaves of houses and in the shade of trees, and wherever people were hungry for God's word. By God's grace the future of the Anglican Communion is in the hands of humble and thoughtful leaders who are single-mindedly in love with Christ who loved them first, and who have a big view of a big God for what is possible in the power of the Holy Spirit.
Dean Chuck Collins is a Reform theologian who blogs at https://www.anglicanism.info/blog
