The West African Church
By CANON R. W. STOPFORD DURING the last war it fell to the lot of many thousands of service-men to spend some days in Freetown Harbour, as I did, enduring the torture of a blacked-out troopship in tropical waters and gazing with longing eyes on a shore on which they were not allowed to land. Many of• them must have noticed a curious four-storeyed red-brick building on'the water's edge, which, to those who know its history, is a symbol of West African development: It is the original home of Fourah Bay • College, founded by the Church Missionary Society over 120 years ago. In the Bay itself the slave-ships captured by the Royal Navy in its humanitarian mission of suppressing the hideous slave-trade were broken up, and some of the timbers were used as beams for the College and can still be seen there.
And the men in the troopships would also see a church, rather like an English parish church, somewhat out of place in its tropical setting. This is Freetown Cathedral, the mother church of West Africa. which last Tuesday was the scene of an historic ceremony, when the Archbishop of Canterbury inaugurated the Church of the Province of West Africa. One more self-governing province is thus added to the Anglican Communion, and the crown set upon a century of missionary work. From slave-ships to ecclesiastical self-government is a long way to travel, but it is only 110 years since Samuel Crowther, himself a liberated slave, sailed from Freetown to begin the evangelisation of his native Nigeria, and in due course to become the first African bishop. It is only a hundred years since the first diocese in West Africa was created in Sier:a Leone, but today there are five dioceses with a vigorous church life and a -total membership of nearly half a million—Sierra Leone, the Niger and Lagos, founded as a result of the work of the C.M.S., and Accra and the Gambia, brought into being by the S.P.G.
It is the genius of the Anglican Church that its expansion throughout the world has led to the creation of one autonomous province after another, developing their own distinguishing characteristics but in full communion with the See of Canterbury. So it was natural that as far back as 1906 there should have been a movement towards a Province of West Africa. Little was done until 1944 when the bishops in West Africa met, at the instigation of Archbishop William Temple, and made the first draft of a constitution. During the following six years the present Archbishop of Canterbury personally investigated the problems, and, after many consultations with the bishops, a constitution was prepared and accepted by the dioceses ; this constitution was adopted formally on Tuesday. The Province will comprise the five dioceses already men- tioned, and it is hoped that the American diocese of Liberia may be added in the near future. The connection with the Anglican communion is secured by the provisions in the con- stitution that the Church of the Province will hold and maintain the " Faith, Doctrine, Sacraments and Discipline of the Church of Christ as the Lord hath commanded in His Holy Word and as the same are received and explained by the Church of England." and that it will hold "as its standard of.-worship the Book of Common Prayer of the Church of England," It is also provided that if there is doubt concerning a matter of faith and order, and if two members of the Episcopal Synod so require, it shall be referred to the Archbishop of Canterbury; " who shall decide the matter in accordance with the formtv- Jules and doctrinal teaching of the Church of England."
Never before has an Archbishop of Canterbury visited any' of the West African dioceses which have been under his metropolitical control, and the importance of • the occasion to the Church would in itself have justified the presence of the Metropolitan. But the creation of the Province has a signifi- cance which is far wider. It comes into existence in a year which will be marked as one of outstanding importance in the political evolution of British West Africa. In the Gold Coast the Legislative Assembly has met, and responsible African' Ministers have already assumed office in Nigeria and Sierra Leone new constitutions will come into force before the end of the year which will transfer a very substantial measure of respon- sibility to elected assemblies. British West Africa has moved more quickly towards the goal of self-government within the British Cojnmonwealth than the most optimistic prophet could' have foretold ten years ago. That it has been able to do so is to a very large extent the result of the work of the Christian Church. The vision of Church leaders has provided a training'. in democratic self-government in diocesan councils, especially' in Sierra Leone and Nigeria, and in the Gold Coast Methodist Church and the Ewe Presbyterian Church, which may prove, to have been as significant in the political evolution of West' Africa as was the influence of the Free Churches in the growth of democratic government in Britain. But the influence of the Christian Church in West Africa goes deeper than that, for self-government would have been impossible without education, and, in the words of the Elliott Commission on Higher Education in West Africa in 1944. "'it • is a simple historical fact that save for the Churcheg; now largely Africanised, no one so far has seriously tackled on the grand scale the sheer hard work of West African Education.", Until Achimota College in the Gold Coast was founded in 1924.._ Fourah Bay College was the only centre of higher education in: West Africa, and most of the African elder statesmen of Nigeria and the Gold Coast are proud to have been its students, Throughout the whole field of education the great majority of the schools and training colleges are conducted by the Christian Churches. Without the Church there would have been very few Africans educated to undertake the work of self-government.
And there is a further significance in the fact that the Pro- vince comes into being in this great year of constitutional change. I have recently visited West Africa after an absence of five years. Wherever I went in the Gold Coast or Nigeria I was impressed with the extent of the material development which had taken place since the war, and by the optimism of the African leaders about the future of their countries. As I talked to my African friends and heard their plans, I was more and more convinced that the next five years will see even greater development. But there are two dangers—one that the proper emphasis on the material development without which the stan- dard of living cannot be raised may not be accomplished by a parallel development of the spiritual resources without which . material progress may lead only to disaster ; the other that Britain may fail to supply to these emergent nations a sufficient number of men and women of character and experience to form the body of expert advisers which they need, and which they look to us to provide. The new Church of West Africa, in fellowship with the other Christian Churches, can do much to remove the first danger. But it will be itself exposed to the second. Though it will be autonomous, it will need not less but more help from the Church of England. Theologians, educationists, evangelists will be needed to work, not as leaders, but as partners in the Christian enterprise. The new order in West Africa is a challenge to the Province and through it to the whole Anglican communion.
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