“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.

Walter Gowans was a Scottish-Canadian in his mid-twenties. Thomas Kent was an American from Buffalo. Rowland Bingham was an Englishman raised in Canada. Their target was the massive sixty million people living across the interior of Sudanic West Africa, in territory Christian missions had already labeled impossible.

They had been warned before they ever sailed because established missionaries in Lagos already told them plainly that they would not live to see the interior, that perhaps their children, or their grandchildren, might see it reached, but they themselves would not. The three men went anyway.

However, the push inland was brutal from the start. Bingham fell too ill to continue and stayed on the coast to manage supplies. Gowans and Kent pressed on towards the interior alone, deeper into territory no mission had successfully planted in. Malaria caught up with both of them within the year. Thomas Kent died on the 8th of December, 1894, in Bida, which is now Niger State, having just delivered supplies back to Gowans before the fever took him. Walter Gowans died ten days earlier, alone but for a faithful local helper at his side, in a town called Girku, near present-day Zaria, buried, by his own servant’s hands, in a cornfield, because there was no one else left to bury him properly.

Rowland Bingham survived, barely, and sailed home to Canada broken in body and, by his own account, uncertain the whole venture hadn’t been a mistake. He carried what remained of Walter Gowans’ few belongings to the one person he dreaded facing most: Walter’s mother, the woman whose vision had started the entire venture in the first place.

It had been Mrs. Gowans who first saw the need in the Sudan and pressed her own son towards it. Bingham expected grief, and perhaps blame but what he received instead was resolve. She told him that she would rather her son had died in the Sudan obeying his LORD than lived safely at home in disobedience to Him and she asked Bingham directly whether he was prepared to go back and finish what her son had started.

He was.

Bingham tried again in 1900 and failed a second time, forced home once more by the same fever that had already taken his two friends. He did not quit. In 1901 and 1902 he sent and eventually led a third attempt, and this time a station finally took root at Patigi, on the Niger.

What Gowans, Kent, and Bingham began in near-total obscurity, three unfunded young men, thirty pounds, and a vision nobody senior in missions believed was survivable, grew into the Sudan Interior Mission, and today lives on through ECWA, one of the largest Church bodies in Nigeria, and also spread across different African nations and other continents now, with congregations numbering in millions.

Two men are buried in Northern Nigerian soil who never once saw the fruit of what they died planting. They did not even live to see a single Church built. They did not see one soul saved that we have record of. What they left behind was a mother’s resolve, a young man’s broken health, and a debt the modern Nigerian church has largely forgotten it owes.

Gowans and Kent died before they ever reached the people they set out to reach. No convert. No congregation. No visible fruit of any kind at the moment either man breathed his last. By every metric, the modern Church uses to measure “success,” their mission failed completely.

And yet.

We have built a Nigerian Christianity that is extremely addicted to visible results such as the testimony, the crowd, the “breakthrough” that must be seen to be believed. Gowans and Kent remind us that obedience and fruitfulness are not the same thing, and that God has never for once needed a visible harvest to call a life well spent.

Beloved, could you keep obeying if you knew, for certain, that you would never personally see the result?

Think about it!