THE MAN WHO WON ALMOST NO ONE
“I am ready to be offered, and the time of my departure is at hand.” 2 Timothy 4:6 He was ten years old when he started work in a Scottish cotton mill, fourteen hours a day, six days a week, sharing a single tenement room with his parents and siblings and twenty-three other families in […]
THE PROPHET THE CHURCH ITSELF LOCKED AWAY
“A prophet is not without honour, save in his own country, and in his own house.” Matthew 13:57 He was born around 1882 in Obonoma, in the heart of the Niger Delta, and grew up in Bakana, inside the very Niger Delta Pastorate that Bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther had built decades earlier, which we already […]
THE BISHOP THEY NEVER LET HIM BE
“How long wilt thou refuse to humble thyself before me? let my people go, that they may serve me.” Exodus 10:3 James Johnson’s parents were carried into slavery during the wars that tore through Yorubaland in the early 19th century which were the same wars that produced Samuel Ajayi Crowther’s story. A British anti-slavery patrol […]
THE RIVER THAT BURIED FORTY-TWO MEN IN A SEASON
“Some trust in chariots, and some in horses: but we will remember the name of the LORD our God.” — Psalm 20:7 On the 1st of June, 1840, a room full of British reformers gathered at Exeter Hall in London, chaired by Prince Albert himself. They had a grand dream of three iron steamships sailing […]
THE MAN WHO BURIED TWO WIVES TO OPEN THREE DOORS
“Yea, and if I be offered upon the sacrifice and service of your faith, I joy, and rejoice with you all.” Philippians 2:17 He was the son of a freed African father and an English mother, born in 1809 in a small village in Hampshire, England, belonging fully to neither world by the standards of […]
THE MEN WHO DIED PLANTING A LIVING SEED
“He that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.” – Matthew 10:37 Three young men landed at Badagry, Lagos, on the 4th of December, 1893, with about thirty British pounds between them and no mission board behind them. No salary. No supply chain. No senior missionary waiting to receive them. […]
THE WOMAN THEY CALLED QUEEN
“But she said, Yea, Lord: yet the dogs under the table eat of the children’s crumbs.” – Mark 7:28 She was eleven years old when she started working ten-hour days in the jute mills of Dundee, Scotland, because her father drank away what little the family had. By fourteen, two brothers and her father were […]
THE BISHOP THEY UNMADE
Samuel Ajayi Crowther | Osogun, Sierra Leone, the Niger | 1809–1891 “I have FOUGHT A GOOD FIGHT, I have FINISHED MY COURSE, I have KEPT THE FAITH.” 2 Timothy 4:7 He was around twelve years old when the raiders came for his village, Osogun, during the Yoruba wars. He was sold, chained, and put on […]
THE DAY THEY BROKE THE HOUSES
“They have cast fire into thy sanctuary, they have defiled by casting down the dwelling place of thy name to the ground.” Psalm 74:7 Twenty-four years. That is how long Henry Townsend had given to Abeokuta by 1867. He arrived in 1843 to a warm reception from Sodeke, the Egba war commander, who told him […]
There Are More Lands To Conquer
In Joshua 13:1, after many years of labour, bringing God’s people to their rest, at an old age, the Lord told Joshua: “…Thou art old and stricken in years, and there remaineth yet very much land to be possessed.” This is one statement that is capable of disrupting the comfort of anyone who has laboured […]