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Most Westerners viewed the African church as a weak imitation of the European, struggling to grasp theological truths, struggling even to sing hymns properly. As yet, nobody noticed the signs of titanic growth.

Walls was too curious to stick to the European compound. He preached in village churches and participated in local preachers' meetings. He began to study local church history. "Real church history" involved Greek and Latin, he believed then, but as a hobby he figured he ought to learn about the locals.

His first stunning revelation came in the classroom, where he was teaching about the early church. "I still remember the force with which one day the realization struck me that I, while happily pontificating on that patchwork quilt of diverse fragments that constitutes second-century Christian literature, was actually living in a second-century church," he explains. "Why did I not stop pontificating and observe what was going on?"

It was a move from "talking about texts" to "talking about the community that formed the texts." The epiphany transformed his understanding of both the church in Sierra Leone and the second-century church he had studied in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. "As I looked at the surviving literature of the early second century, I could see all the examples of that literature around me," Walls says. "You read the first letter of Clement, and, yes, I'd hear sermons like that, and just as long. You read Ignatius, and though I had not actually seen anybody going to martyrdom, you saw the same sort of intensity."

What he met in Sierra Leone was not, Walls realized, a derivative or younger version of the European church, but "a symbiosis, very carefully fused." Something was occurring that paralleled the patristic period, when a Jewish gospel got translated into Greco-Roman culture. For Walls, this brought a "very definite movement from depression to hope" and began a lifetime love affair with Africa.

After five years in Sierra Leone, Walls and his family—his wife, Doreen, and two small children—moved to Nsukka, Nigeria, where Walls headed up the religion department in a new university. He was beginning to grasp the dynamism of the African church. On one enormous wall, he and a colleague created a map of East Nigeria and endeavored to record every last place of worship. They began to collect old church registers.

"We were first told there weren't any," he recalls. "'The documents are kept in heaven,' or they were all eaten by termites. 'Nobody keeps records.' [But] in fact, we found hundreds and hundreds of baptismal registers, marriage registers, discipline books, and committee minute books. Some of them went back to the 1880s. It was an African church with African executives, keeping its records with varying degrees of efficiency, according to the degree of education of the people involved But there it was: working, witnessing, worshiping, sinning, repenting. All this going on for a 70- or 80-year period."

Walls learned of vast revival movements, of foundational preachers and evangelists, of extensive church networks with their own ideas about order and their own ways of viewing Scripture. (For example, some saw Leviticus as among the most important books in the Bible.)

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February 2007, Vol. 51, No. 2