“I am ready not to be bound only, but also to die at Jerusalem for the name of the Lord Jesus.” Acts 21:13

There was no Ibadan waiting to receive them. There was a war-hardened city of over fifty thousand people, built by refugees from a fallen empire, ruled by warlords who had never seen a white face and had no reason to trust one.

In April 1853, David and Anna Hinderer walked into that city anyway.

The crowd that met them was not a welcome committee but chaotic men, women, and children screaming through the streets, “Oyinbo de! (The white man is come! The white mother is come!)”

Anna Hinderer, a woman from Norfolk, England, who had lost her own mother at age five, stood in the middle of it, having crossed an ocean to be spiritual mother to a nation that did not yet know her name.

They did not come with comfort because their first home was a mud-walled compound with a one room, thirty feet by six, shared with strangers, and a kitchen carved out of what was left.

David had gone ahead of Anna to prepare it, not because it was ready, but because he refused to let his bride’s first home in Africa be anything less than the best he could give her, even if the best was still mud and thatch.

They did not come with an easy harvest either because ten years is the number people love to quote about pioneer missions in Yorubaland. I mean, ten years before response, ten years of labour with almost nothing to show for it. The Hinderers gave that decade and more but war closed in around them when the Ijaye War tore through the region, cutting them off for years from money, from supplies, from their mission headquarters. David was, at times, in genuine danger of his life and both of them, in the end, were broken in body by the very ground they had chosen to stand on.

In 1867, the Ifole came which is a coordinated movement to drive every white missionary out of Yorubaland. Ibadan, alone among its neighbours, resisted the pressure and let the Hinderers stay. But by 1869, their bodies gave out what the war-clubs and the pressure never could. They left for England, broken and Anna died there, never seeing Nigeria again.

We’ll, David did not stay defeated because in 1874, as a widower, still recovering, with every earthly reason to remain in England and rest, he returned to Yorubaland, laid the foundation of the Church in Ondo and the towns east of Lagos. He did not retire until 1877, and even then, kept working on the Yoruba Bible translation until his strength was completely spent.

Here is what the Hinderers actually left behind: DANIEL OLUBI, a servant boy who was handed over to their household, grew up under their roof and became the pastor who carried Ibadan’s Church for the rest of his life then was buried, when his time came, at St. David’s, Kudeti, alongside “others who gave their lives to see the gospel rooted among the people.”

There is still a SCHOOL. A TRANSLATED SCRIPTURE. A CATHEDRAL that still stands, named after a German missionary who never once treated Ibadan as a stepping stone to somewhere better at all.

They did not do this for a testimony video and there was actually no algorithm to please, no offering envelope to fill by Sunday and no crowd to impress with a miracle. This was simply a woman named Anna Hinderer who buried her health, her homeland, and eventually her life, in a town that took over a decade to give her anything back, and she counted it worth it.

ASK YOURSELF:

What has the Gospel actually cost YOU?

I never said what have you given, I mean what has it COST you? Anna Hinderer did not tithe her comfort at all because she spent it all. She did not “sow a seed” into Ibadan. She was buried there, in every sense but the literal one, for seventeen years before her body finally gave out.

We have inherited a Christianity in Nigeria that promises a harvest without ever mentioning the sowing.

It’s quite impressive that we want the Church Daniel Olubi pastored without paying what the Hinderers paid to plant it. We want the cathedral without the mud-walled room, thirty feet by six.

The Gospel did not arrive in Yorubaland by prosperity. It arrived by people who were WILLING TO LOSE EVERYTHING and considered it fair exchange.

Ask yourself today: if the Gospel cost you nothing this year, did it actually reach you at all?