On Sunday June 29, Canterbury Cathedral hosted a service of Celebration and Thanksgiving, marking the 150th anniversary of the consecration of Samuel Ajayi Crowther in the Cathedral as Bishop of the Niger.
Bishop Crowther had been a slave and was made the first Anglican black bishop, of the Niger. He was an evangelist and church planter and promoted ‘wholistic mission’ especially combatting the slave trade. His slogan was ‘The Bible and the Plough’. The tragedy was that the Anglican church worldwide had no further non-white bishops until Bishop Azariah in India in 1912. Crowther, who was a distinguished linguist with a DD from Oxford, was too much of a threat.
The area for which Bishop Crowther was commissioned to serve has recently been in the news. It is where over 200 Nigerian Christian schoolgirls were kidnapped. Their seizure focused the world’s attention, at last, on the outrages committed by Boko Haram (which means ‘no Western education’) in Nigeria. Scores of churches have been destroyed and many Christians killed by Boko Haram in Northern Nigeria, but the world kept quiet.
