“And he said unto them, Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature.” — Mark 16:15
Before someone like Peter Jerry ever set foot in Datta, Divo, Guitry, Zégo, Dagrom, or even Bada, there was a barefoot Liberian prophet named William Wadé Harris, that walked that same soil more than a century ago, carrying nothing but a Bible, a cross-shaped staff, and a certainty that God commissioned him personally to reach it.
Harris was a Grebo man from Cape Palmas, Liberia, a teacher-catechist in the Episcopal mission. Around 1910, he was imprisoned for a political offense, and in that prison cell, he said, the angel Gabriel visited him and gave him his commission to GO and PREACH to every nation that had not yet heard.
He believed it completely and on the 27th of July, 1913, he left Cape Palmas on foot and crossed the Cavally River into the Ivory Coast, the same Côte d’Ivoire where I am currently, with two women as his singing companions. He wore a plain white robe, a turban, carried a Bible and a staff shaped like a cross, and walked from village to village along the coast preaching against the traditional gods, burning fetishes with the consent of the very people who had worshipped them, and baptizing everyone who responded.
What happened next is unbelievable. In roughly eighteen months, Harris had already baptized between 100,000 and 120,000 people across Côte d’Ivoire and into the Gold Coast. Catholic missionaries who had laboured in the same region for two decades had only been able to baptize fewer than 400 in all that time. But one prophet, walking barefoot, without a mission board, without a salary, without a single Church building to his name, did in a year and a half what organized missions could not do in a generation.
The beautiful thing about this story is that, he did not build an empire out of it because when people asked him to start his own Church and make him their leader, he refused. He simply told them to wait for “Christians with Bibles”, that means the established Churches to come and disciple what he had started. He didn’t want any monument, he just wanted the harvest to belong to whoever would actually shepherd it.
However, the cost came fast when the French colonial government, alarmed at a movement they could not control and did not create, arrested him multiple times. By 1915, they judged his following too large and too unpredictable to tolerate, so they deported him back to Liberia, and destroyed many of the Churches his converts had built. He was never permitted to return to the field he had planted. He went on a few smaller journeys through Liberia and Sierra Leone in the years after, but the fire that had already swept the Ivory Coast never gathered around him again in the same way. He died in 1929, largely forgotten by the wider Christian world, in the same country he had left as an unknown catechist.
He never got to see when Methodist missionaries finally arrived in Côte d’Ivoire in 1924, nearly a decade after he was expelled and they found thousands of his converts still waiting for them, still practicing the faith he had planted, still faithful to a man who was no longer even alive to receive credit for it. To this day, the Methodist Church in Côte d’Ivoire dates its founding not to 1924, when its own missionaries arrived, but to 1914 which was the year the barefoot prophet walked through.
Harris built the biggest harvest recorded in West African mission history and was deported before he ever got to pastor a single one of them. He refused to found his own Church so the glory would not attach to his name. He died without an organization, without a title, without recognition, in the same obscurity he started in.
Currently, Lightbearers Christian Network is labouring in the exact geography Harris once walked barefoot through, Divo, the villages around it, the same coastal region and I’m here asking myself what I would say to a Gospel that has since been used, in the very region I am currently evangelizing, to promise wealth and comfort instead of the fire that was once attached to its name.
Beloved, ask yourself this question: are you building something that needs your name attached to survive, or something so rooted in the people themselves that it would outlast you being forgotten completely?
