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Five summers ago, the lion of African Anglicanism roared. This week, it has bared its claws.

The summer of 1998 saw the every-ten-years Lambeth Conference of the worldwide Anglican communion absorbed with issues of human sexuality. At its meetings, African Anglicans led a campaign against the liberalizing of the church's teachings on homosexuality.

Joining in the African "roar" was Bishop John Rucyahana of Shyira, Rwanda, who issued this warning to the liberalizing contingent in Western Anglicanism: "We don't like your First World way of speaking ambiguous words and not being straight on the issues." Rucyahana and his colleagues were heard, and heeded: the conference passed a resolution (526 to 70, with 45 abstentions) that homosexual practice is "incompatible with Scripture."

In the wake of Lambeth, liberals in American Anglicanism (the Episcopalian Church) resented this new voice of "African fundamentalism," while a conservative like bishop Jack Iker of Ft. Worth, Texas could observe with some satisfaction: "No longer does the United States or England speak for the Anglican Communion but the church in Africa and Asia does."

This week, one branch of African Anglicanism seems to be moving from rhetoric to action in the conservative cause. In a letter to Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of the Nigerian Church (Anglican Communion)—a church representing 17 million of Anglicanism's 70 million members—has threatened to break communion with the worldwide body over the same issue that dominated discussion at Lambeth: Williams has supported the appointment of the openly gay Dr. Jeffrey John as Bishop of Reading, in England.

Said Nigerian Archbishop Peter Jasper Akinola: "We cannot continue to be in communion with people who have taken a step outside the biblical boundaries."

How did this lion of African Christianity come on the scene? The August, 2003 issue of Christian History will tell the story of sub-Saharan Africa's "Christian explosion" in the twentieth century—a century that brought Africa from the periphery to the center of the Christian world, largely through the efforts of native African evangelists. This untold story involves, at every step, tensions between Western and indigenous African Christians—none so vivid as those that beset Samuel Ajayi Crowther, Anglicanism's first African bishop.

Crowther was born in Western Africa in 1807. His original African name was Ajayi, and he grew up under constant threat of raids by slave traders. At the age of 13, he was dragged from his flaming village by Muslim raiders. He was sold several times, then rescued by the British and put ashore in Sierra Leone.

There, as he later wrote, he became "convinced of another worse state of slavery, namely, that of sin and Satan. It pleased the Lord to open my heart. … I was admitted into the visible Church of Christ here on earth as a soldier to fight manfully under his banner against our spiritual enemies."

Trained at a college of the Anglican-based Church Missionary Society (CMS), Crowther showed skill as a linguist, and he was soon made schoolmaster. In Sierra Leone, schoolmasters functioned also as evangelists, and Crowther excelled in this role. He distinguished himself early in his courage as he confronted Muslims and ethnoreligionists—that is, the worshippers of the old Gods of Africa.

Then came the Niger Expedition of 1841, an investigative trip under Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton that was to prepare a religious, economic, and civilizing mission along the Niger. Crowther served as a CMS representative, preacher, and linguist. Soon he was in England, studying, being groomed for ordination. Returning to Africa, Crowther joined a mission party to Abeokuta, the state of the Egba people—a Yoruba group. There, in Yorubaland, Crowther was reunited with his family, whom he had not seen since his enslavement over two decades earlier. They became some of the first Christians in Abeokuta.

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