Humble Bishop the Word
Bishops are those "able to teach." Yes, they are also hospitable, morally upright, self-controlled, and not in it for their own greedy gain (1 Tim 3), but historically their teaching role is critical to the health and wellbeing of the church. Apostolic succession for Irenaeus and Tertullian was not an automatic quasi-magical way of preserving valid sacraments, but the succession and continuity of the doctrine of the biblical Apostles (2 Tim 2:2).
“We should obey those presbyters in the church who have their succession from the apostles, and who, together with succession in the episcopate, have received the assured ‘charisma’ of truth.”
“For Reformation Anglicanism, apostolic succession is not the passing of the Holy Spirit from bishop to bishop in an unbroken chain back to the apostles and then Jesus himself. According to the English Reformers, people encounter the Holy Spirit when God speaks to them through the Bible. As his Word goes forth through preaching and the administration of the sacraments, so does his breath/Spirit. Hence, true apostolic succession is the faithful passing on of apostolic saving truth from one generation to another.”
The Anglican Church in North America is at a stage of beginning to replacing our first generation of bishops who are retiring and heading on to greener pastures. Candidates to replace them should be those in love with God's word written and who are compelled by the Holy Spirit to communicate “as of first importance” the central message of the Bible: the life, death, and resurrection of our Savior (1 Cor 15). Bishops should loosely hold their office in the face of God's sufficiency and not their own. The father of Anglicanism in Nigeria, Samuel Adjai Crowther, was such a bishop who was consecrated on this day, June 29, 1864. He went kicking and screaming.
Crowther was kidnapped and sold into slavery by Muslim Fulani cattle herders when he was thirteen, the same Fulani tribesmen who are attacking Christians today in NE Nigeria. After his release and conversion to Christ, Crowther became a great linguist, translator, scholar, and missionary teacher. He also produced the Yoruba Bible, and greatly influenced how government’s improved their view of Africa in the 1800's.
So strong were his convictions that he was consecrated the first African bishop, despite great protests. Crowther himself protested! He was reportedly a very humble man, a simple evangelist, who wanted nothing to do with episcopal ministry. But he was finally convinced that this was God's will for his life and for the church. The policy of The Church Missionary Society under Bishop Henry Venn was to support and bless indigenous, self-governing, self-supporting, self-propagating churches. But despite Crowther's passion for Jesus, and for all his achievements, Bishop Crowther’s mission was undermined and dismantled in the 1880s by racist white Europeans, including some of his fellow Anglican missionaries. When he died of a stroke in 1891 he was replaced by a white bishop.
The face of the Church of England is no longer white. It hasn't been for a long time. In fact, there are 20 million Anglicans in Nigeria alone, compared to fewer than 3 million in the United States. And the locus of God's activity in Anglicanism has changed from England and America to the two-thirds world. Anglicans in America find their place in the worldwide Anglican Communion in relationship with how God is working so wonderfully in Africa - In our common commitment to the Anglican formularies - To a theology, not a recently invented devotion to Canterbury. Some of the Anglican revival of the last 150 years, if not much of it, has to do with the witness and ministry Samuel Adjai Crowther, a reluctant and powerful servant of God's Word.