The Church in Nigeria | Acts 17:16-31

May 31, 2026 - The Global Church - 

Dr. Agam Iheanyi-Igwe traces the national history of the Nigerian Church and highlights how the gospel has come full circle in the Nigerian context. Indigenous leaders have recovered the confidence to know God's name and expect that he still shows up. 

Dr. Iheanyi-Igwe has taught Missions, Bible, and Theology courses at Bushnell University since 2016. Agam is passionate about equipping leaders for the global church and brings more than 15 years of pastoral ministry in Nigeria and the United States to the classroom. Dr. Iheanyi-Igwe has contributed to the Christian Education Journal, Encyclopedia of Christian Education and the Encyclopedia of Christianity in the global South. He is married to Oge, and they have four children.

/// Trinity Sunday ///

The Global Church: Part 2

Transcript

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So I was born in Nigeria to a family of seven. I was number five, so five of seven, I'm a middle child. One one might say my older sister who is number four is the actual middle number of seven, right? But here's the thing, my my parents had three boys in quick succession, then they had my sister, and my dad is said to have gone crazy, just gone berserk about having a daughter. So my sister remained a daddy's girl. And I I joke with my my siblings that I am not just a middle child, I'm kind of like the invisible child. But what I'm going to do today is tell us a story of my family. He said to introduce myself, talk about how I grew up and life in Nigeria, and then talk about the church in Nigeria. But what I'm going to do is do those two things together. Use my story as a paradigm to help us see what is going on there. So, like I said, my sister was born, my dad went crazy, and so two years later, when I showed up, okay, a fourth boy. Well, but when there's a fourth boy, what's another one? Still, my parents named me Agame To Chuku. Agam is a short form. Agame To Chuku means I will praise God in the Igbo language of southeastern Nigeria. I guess posterity will judge if I lived up to my name. My father was a bivocational pastor. He was a university administrator and also a church planter on the side, as well as a leader in our denomination. So everywhere we moved, he'll start a house fellowship in our living room. It would outgrow the house, become a church, the denomination would send a resident pastor, and then whenever we move to a different place, he'll do it again. So when I say I grew up in the church, I mean it literally. Because sometimes the church invaded our own house. So I want to introduce you to Nigeria through the stories of three people, three men. My grandfather Abraham, my father Timothy, and me. Because our family's story is intertwined with the story of the Nigerian church. Let's go to the next slide. I have some photos there. That's that's our family. Oh, that was before my youngest brother was born. And that's Abraham at the top, my grandfather. That's the only the only photo of him that I know exists. This is my my dad, Timothy. That's also him there. And the reason I put that photo there is because Timothy is standing with Marcel B. She she was a missionary, the last generation of missionaries from the UK who passed on the baton to my my dad's generation. So they were like grandparents, called Paran Marcelby. Long after they had retired, she was in her 90s when she heard I was in seminary, and she sent me money for textbooks for seminary because she was so excited that I was carrying on the mission. So let's go back, let's go back to that slide, the previous one. So I'll start with my grandfather, Abraham. About a hundred years ago, he was a son of a shaman in a village that worshipped a deity called Ogugu. Then in 1918, the great influenza pandemic, some people call it the Spanish flu, it swept the world. It's said to have killed about a half million, 500,000 Nigerians out of a population then of 18 million. So it was deadly. So these people in the village turned to the local deity for help, and when there was no help coming from there, they did something drastic. They cut down the shrine and burnt it. They rebelled against the local deity that they were worshiping. Then they sent three two emissaries to go and invite Christian missionaries to come plant a church there. My grandfather was one of the two missionaries that they sent. He was named Wanyamwagu, which means son of the sun god. And he was expected to inherit the juju practice of his father, but he turned away from it all and changed his name to Abraham. I want you to hold on to that picture. Because what I just described here, people burning down a shrine and sending for the gospel because of the things they had heard, it tells you something about how Christianity came to take root in Nigeria. Sometimes the classic picture is that of some passive recipients of the gospel. So we'll send missionaries over there and they'll go preach to those heathen people and then, you know, we'll have a harvest, bring in the harvest. It was a little bit different. And I'll back up a little bit and show you why. Because the substantive origin of the Christian movement in Nigeria today traces back to 1842 when British missionaries came to Nigeria. But it's also connected to the transatlantic slave trade and its abolition. See, around that time, because slavery had been abolished in the United Kingdom, the British Navy was patrolling the Atlantic Ocean and they freed thousands of, they called them recaptured slaves, because these were slaves in chains in these ships being transported to the New World. The British Navy, British Squadron intercepted them and they recaptured them to free them. But see, these people were picked up from various different ports. So there really was no way of getting all of them back. So basically, they freed them in Sierrellum. Free town was a settlement that had been formed for freed former slaves from England. Now, among these recaptured people were some Yoruba's from Nigeria, from Western Nigeria, who had been recaptured, set free in Free Town, and because the original people who had settled Freetown, freed slaves from the UK, eventually some from Nova Scotia, and some from Jamaica, I think, many of them came with a very vibrant faith. So what ended up happening was that Freetown became a discipling hub where all these people came, they had encounters with Jesus. Then some of these people made their way and found their way back to Nigeria, right? And after they had traced their way home to Nigeria, they wrote letters asking for missionaries to be sent. So this was initiative from people. And there's a man who holds this story together. Sorry for the history lesson, but I promise it'll make a little bit of sense later. Samuel Ajay Crowder. Samuel Crowder was captured as a boy. He was freed in Freetown and became the first student of Foura Bay College. Fura Bay College is the first university in sub-Saharan Africa. Started in Freetown. That was where he became a follower of Jesus, later became a priest of what was okay, the Anglican Church. The Church Missionary Society was the mission arm of the English Anglican church. So Samuel Crada trained, he became a priest, a Bible translator, translated the Bible into Yoruba and Igbo. And in 1857, he became the leader of an entirely African missionary force. As a matter of fact, in 1864, Samuel Crater was made the first African bishop of the Anglican church. However, historians call him the symbol of a race on trial because at the time there was this European doubt about whether Africans could lead. And everything was riding entirely on the shoulders of this one man. There was a lot of opposition to appointing him a bishop in the Anglican church. So eventually, when they did make him a bishop, it was a bishop with an ill-defined territory as a diocese. So they specified it as the countries of Western Africa beyond the limits of the Queen's dominions. All the established areas of the work in Western Nigeria, Yoruba land, where there were European missionaries serving, were excluded from his jurisdiction. So Crowder, the veteran church planter, a pastor, a Yoruba man himself, who also had the responsibility for translating the Bible into Yoruba and the orthography, was not appointed bishop in the Yoruba mission, but towards the Niger, a large territory with foreign languages and cultures. Now, Henry Venn was the secretary of the Church Mission Society, and he had a brilliant mission, a brilliant vision that he called the euthanasia of a mission. Euthanasia of a mission. He says that a church should become self-governing, self-supporting, and self-propagating. In his mind, the mission is like the scaffolding, and the African church was the actual building. And Crowder, in his leadership, was sort of the first kind of proof of that theory, as some people saw it. Anyway, after Henry Venn died, his successors pushed forward that opposition, and they sent young Englishmen to Nigeria who purged the African clergy in 1890. And Samuel Crowder, he died of a broken heart. All his work. But here's the thing: that betrayal as the people experienced it lit a fuse. Because the Africans began to say, well, if you don't want us, if you wouldn't let us play a role in your church, it's your church, we'll build our own. So historians talk about, or even in the field of religious studies, anybody who looks at Africa, there's something they call African independent churches. That is how it began. So you have these people who said, well, we've received the gospel, but you brought the gospel to us dressed in Western clothes. But we're not you, we're not Westerners. I mean, my my favorite caricature of that is people who came from Wales, the British Isles, and they came to Nigeria, which is very close to the Equator. It's hot and humid. And they taught people that the Christian way to dress was in a suit and tie. Which would be very good if you were from the cold and rainy British Isles. Anyway, there were some people who said, Well, we're going to do church differently, but the form still looked like the European church. Only thing that changed was the language. So we'll read the Bible in our language and we'll preach in the language, we'll translate the hymns. But then there was this other wave, a second wave that were called Aladura. Aladura means the praying people in the Yoruba language. These people Africanize their worship itself. There's a lot of emphasis on prayer, fasting, those prophecy, those healing, deliverance from evil powers, dreams and visions, the local language, native dress, and all of it building on Samuel Crowder's translation of the Bible. So that's the first time we're seeing really a contextualization of the gospel. Now, that's the world in which my grandfather stepped in. When they burnt the shrine and sent for the missionaries. In retrospect, I like to say he wasn't adopting a foreign religion. He was joining a faith that had learned to speak his language. Myssiologist Andrew Walls calls this the translatability of the gospel, the ability of the charismatic essentials of the Christian faith, the proclaimed gospel, to be discovered and communicated in a potentially infinite number of new cultural settings. And I'll make this point by drawing a contrast. When you think of, let me think of the other world religions. If I mention Hinduism, geographically, what comes to mind? India. So you you might have Hindus here, but India remains the geographical center and the core center of Hinduism. How about Islam? The Middle East, somewhere, Saudi Arabia. I mean, anywhere, even when Muslims pray, they pray focused towards in the direction of Saudi Arabia. It remains a center, even though there are many other Muslims elsewhere. I mean, in Indonesia, for example, Indonesia has more Muslims than the entire Middle East. But the center, the core of the faith and practice is still in the Middle East. Buddhism is the same thing. You think uh Tibet or China, Christianity is unique in that sense. You hear people saying, oh, Christianity is a white man's religion. It didn't start in the West, it started in the Middle East. But it came to the West and it took root and it became indigenous. So when Christianity made landfall in Nigeria, what I'm describing is Christianity taking root and becoming indigenous right there. Now on to my father. My father Timothy, he grew up in the Apostolic Church, which was Nigeria's first Pentecostal denomination. He was born in 1931 when these Aladura prayer groups were reaching out to foreign Pentecostals to come, and that's that's also the church in which I was raised. But the movement that really shaped my dad came through fire. Literally through war. In the late 1960s, Nigeria descended into the Biaphrin War. I I read something recently, uh a few years ago, about Steve Jobs of Apple, how he had seen a picture of a starving Biafran child on the cover of People magazine or life magazine, and went to talk with his Lutheran church youth pastor. I think it was about 14 then because he couldn't make sense of the suffering. The explanation that the pastor gave him was not satisfactory, and he never stepped in a church after that. He made headlines then. It was a catastrophe. More than a million people died, most of them Igbo people in my my own tribe, many from starvation. And sociologists will say will tell you that the crisis often comes before conversion. In the besieged town of Umwahia, there was a British Scripture Union missionary, his name was Bill Roberts. When all the Western missionaries were being evacuated because of the war, he refused to go anywhere and he just stayed there and continued holding Bible studies with high school kids. Bill Roberts was my dad's good friend. As a matter of fact, he was the best man at my parents' wedding during the war. My dad was at the center of that. Which was you have all these teenagers who were seeking for meaning, they had been displaced, a lot of them, the ravage of this 30-month-long war. But in the midst of it, God was doing something. Because many of those young people, there was something like a revival that was sparked from there. Many of those people went on to plant churches, start movements, start denominations. But another another the two strands of a revival that happened in Nigeria in the seventies. One was connected to the Biafra Civil War, which ended in nineteen seventy. The other one happened on the college campuses. So the the the youth the youth movement that happened here too, sixties and seventies in Nigeria it led to a revival among college students. So my dad was also at the center of that. He was already a church man himself, but he he talked to some of his leaders, those missionaries, and told them that he felt that God was calling him to go work in the university. So he he went back. That's how come he became bivocational. So he was working in the university, and there he was he was one of those who were discipling and mentoring, serving as catalysts for these young leaders who would go on to start and lead some of the work that God was doing in Nigeria. Now, through the 80s and 90s, military dictatorships, corruption, acute infl inflation gave rise to, I think some people have said Nigeria is a failed state. And it stings when I say it, but it is true. It was a state that had largely failed its people. And what happened? Into that vacuum stepped in a lot of newer churches. The historians and sociologists call them neo Pentecostal churches, who starting from the 90s, they were preaching hope. They were preaching about power and a holistic salvation that included, amongst many other things, deliverance from poverty. The opportunity was real, but the emphasis on the felt needs that the government couldn't, and then this energetic lay leadership in churches. Now, the problem is that some of that also led to an anti-intellectual bent that kind of dismissed theologically trained clergy. The ministerial formation process, one scholar dubbed it Elijah's mantle. So, you know, you feel called and you just go. But you can see that in each phase of this movement, it's like God was using what was there to meet the need of the moment. Which brings me to the third person in the story: me. I cut my teeth in ministry as a teenager in the Christian fellowship at my boarding school. Then I went to a big public university and I joined the campus ministry there. It's called NIFES, the Nigeria Fellowship of Evangelical Students. In the U.S., here it's Intervassity. That's also where I met my wife. I wish she was here so that she can grade my retelling. She says the first time that she noticed me was at an all-night prayer meeting. And she's sitting there and she sees this very young-looking kid playing bass with the worship team and also singing. And then later, the same kid was one of those upfront praying for people who were coming out, coming forward for healing and deliverance. And she's like, who is this boy? Who's who is he looks like he should be in high school, not even in university. That's her first impression. Well, we've been married 20 some 22 years now, so I was supposed to be studying engineering, but unfortunately, I had very little discipline for my academic studies. What I lacked in discipline, I made up for in zeal in discipling other students. But I managed to graduate from college by the skin of my teeth, but I did. Now, like every other young Nigerian graduate, I did a year of national service, not military, think peace corps. So you graduate from college, under 30, you do one year. And it was started as a mechanism for national integration. Nigeria has 250 plus ethnic groups. Ethnic groups, different language. I mean, like completely different. You you won't understand Jack. But one country. So it's a country of so many different nations. So you're posted for one year to go serve Peace Corps style, not your hometown, not where you went to college. So it was during that service year, national service year, uh, I uh God started making it clearer to me that He wanted me to go into a pastoral ministry. I wrestled with God over it. After all, I just earned this engineering degree and I wanted to put it to use. I lost that wrestling and I surrendered. So after that service year, I went into ministry. But notice I went into pastoral ministry with almost no formal theological training, but with perhaps a decade of hands-on practical training. And that's a very Nigerian path. That's why I was pointing that out. So only after I had turned 30, my early 30s, I came to the US to attend seminary, did doctoral work while pastoring a church in Los Angeles before transitioning after we moved to Eugene into helping train the next generation of pastors. And that, me standing here, is the second half of this my context that I'm describing because the Nigerian church today, God is doing something that I think is truly extraordinary. The Nigerian church is sending the gospel back. I want to use the Redeemed Christian Church of God as an example of what I mean. The Redeemed Christian Church of God is now in more than a hundred countries. A church started in Nigeria, very Nigerian. There are over 700 parishes in the U.S., more than 800 parishes in the UK. Now, most of them serve largely people who are part of the African diaspora, but currently they're deliberately planting churches in British towns where there are no Nigerians present because their aim is to reach secular Britons who have drifted from the faith of their own grandparents. So think about what that means. A faith that was once carried to Nigeria is now being carried back and exported. Nigeria is not a receiving country mythologically, it is a sending country. That's God at work. So let me widen the scale. Let me widen the lens from my family to the whole church and show you where Nigeria, what it looks like right now. First, the scale, the Pew Research Center reports that Nigeria's Christian population grew about a quarter in a single decade to roughly 93 million by 2020. That's the largest Christian population in Africa and the sixth largest in the world. Some people estimate it's about 109 million. And here's a striking detail. Nigeria is the only country that sits among the top 10 largest Christian population and also the top 10 largest Muslim population. Second, the vitality. Faith in Nigeria is public, it's loud in the best sense. Woven through the culture and the daily rhythm of life. According to the World Christian Encyclopedia, more Anglicans worship in Nigeria on a given Sunday than in all the episcopal and Anglican churches of Europe and North America combined. And people are open about it. I mean, you might be sitting in a bus and somebody stands up and gives an evangelistic gospel message and asks if anybody wants to follow Jesus. Thirdly, is the cost. Northern Nigeria and the Middle Belt are among the hardest places on earth to follow Jesus today. Open Door reports that all of all the Christians killed for their faith worldwide in 2024, the majority, about 3,100, I think the total was uh 4,000-ish, were in Nigeria. Attacks by Islamic militant groups like Boko Haram have driven hundreds of thousands from their homes. And yet the church keeps growing. Faith that costs something and grows anyway. For me, that's a clear sign of the living God at work. The reversal. When the Church of England moved to bless same-sex unions, the Nigerian Anglicans said they could no longer recognize the leadership of Canterbury. And in 2026, the conservative GAFCON, Global Anglican Fellowship, the network gathered in Abuja, Nigeria to help reorder the global communion. The church that in Bishop Crowder's day was told that Africans could not lead is helping to lead the worldwide church in the Anglican communion. That's what I mean by the reversal. But a mature church also names its own struggles. I've pointed out some of them. There's a heavy emphasis on prosperity, which can crowd out holiness. It doesn't always, but sometimes it does. The quick pathways into ministry can leave leaders undeformed, in my opinion. And there's an honest debate about where faithful contextualization ends and syncretism begins. Because you could have people who just because of the worldview that recognizes the supernatural, you could have people who would add Jesus to everything that they have because they have not been formed well. So the Nigerian church is still grappling with its issues. And hold that picture: a people who burnt the shrine, sent for the gospel, who were told that they couldn't lead, but built anyway, who suffer and keep going. So let's just quickly look at a moment in scripture that I want to use to connect to all of this. And we read it in Acts chapter 17. While Paul was waiting for his companions in Athens, it says he was greatly distressed to see that the city was full of idols. So he's come to Athens. Athens in the ancient world was very much like Eugene. It was a university town, the cultural capital, brilliant, curious, endlessly spiritual. And Luke tells us as he writes Acts that it was full of idols. There was a shrine in every corner, a God for every need. And there was even one altar. It's hard to get this out of my head. You have all these shrines and all these altars, and somebody's like, Yeah, just hedge my bets. Make sure we're not forgetting any woman. Okay, this woman is to the unknown God. A people who were so hungry for the transcendent that they left a blank space open, an altar to a God they could feel or sense in some way, but could not name. And see what Paul does. He does not open with condemnation as he stands in the Areopagus and says, Men of Athens, I see that in every way you are very religious. For as I walked through your city, I found an altar to an unknown God. What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. Do you see what Paul did there? He starts from where they are. He doesn't begin with their error, he begins with their longing. He even quotes their poets back to them. You know, the statement that has made it into many Christian songs. In him we live and move and have our being. He was quoting one of their poets. The original statement was a reference to Zeus. We are his offspring. He builds on what God has already been stirring internally in these people. And then, only then he turns. This God, he says, does not live in temples built by human hands. He's sending this on man's hill. The Acropolis was just across. They were sending this whole structure of temples built to the Greco-Roman pantheon. And he's saying to them, God does not live in temples built by hands. He is not served by human hands as though he needs anything. You did not make him. And he now caused everyone everywhere to turn to him because he has set a day of justice and he has proved it by raising a man from the dead. Now the response was split. Some sneered. Some said, Oh, we'll hear you again. Come back. But some believed. That's preaching in Athens. But friends, I think that's also preaching in Eugene. Or at least that's what it should be. Here's the part I want you to miss that ties in everything I've said this evening. God was already at work in Athens before Paul showed up. That hunger, that altar to the unknown, that was the Spirit of God making a people restless. Paul didn't import God to Athens. It wasn't something he packed in his luggage. Paul named the God they were already searching for. And that is also the whole story of the church in Nigeria. When the Spanish flu came and my grandfather's village burned the shrine to a gugu, they were kind of like Athenians. They had an altar to an unknown God and they were desperate for someone to name him. When Crowder put the scriptures, translated them into Yoruba, when the Aladura answered the real questions about sickness and fear and unseen powers. They were doing what Paul did at the Areopagus. They were saying to their own people, What you worship as unknown, let me proclaim to you. So here's a question that he leaves on the table for us today. Athens had its altar to the unknown God. Nigeria had its shrines. What about Eugene? And friends, if the Nigerian Christians I came from walked through this city, the way Paul walked through Athens, what might they see? What would they say to us? I want to imagine them here. Because actually, I I sent a message to a couple of them and said, Well, tell me, because I've been I haven't lived in Nigeria in 20 years. Tell me, and and what would you say to Christians here? First, if they're walking around, what would they see in Eugene? They would recognize Eugene immediately, I believe. Because Eugene is also Athens. Beautiful, thoughtful, spiritually curious. I think one of the most. Also one of the least church, too. They may not necessarily see godless people. They would see a city that's full of worship. Altars everywhere, altars to wellness and the body, altars to the mountains and to the rivers, altars to the trees, altars to justice, altars to authenticity, altars to the self. Eugene is very religious. It's covered in altars to an unknown God. And I think they might feel the longing beneath it all. The ache for transcendence that sends people to yoga studios and mountaintops and therapy and protests. The same ache, that's the same ache that built the altar in Athens. They won't despise it, I don't think. They would say, like Paul, that hunger is the Spirit of God making you restless. Let me help you name what you're reaching for. Secondly, what might they say we've missed? And I use we here because this is my tenth year living in Eugene. I think they they might they might identify four things. They might say we've made God safe. We believe in God the same way we believe in the founding fathers. They're real, they're respected, historically important, but not really expected to show up for dinner. Anyone has set a plate for Thomas Jefferson? We have a faith that admires God but does not expect God. They would say, maybe you're embarrassed by the Holy Spirit. We've quietly quarantined the supernatural, the healing, the deliverance, the power. At the very moment when the people around us are starving for exactly that. That whole spiritual but not religious neighbor already believes in unseen powers, and we are the ones who are shy about it. But we read the Bible, we read the gospels. They might say that we're playing defense. That we're talking about the decline of the church, about holding on, surviving, keeping the doors open. My friends, don't ask how do we survive? The questions they're asking is where is the harvest? They expect to grow. They are astonished that we don't. They might say we've outsourced the faith. That we've outsourced it to seminary-trained professionals, to the programs, the polished platforms. But they mobilize a grandmother, the teenager, the kid playing bass in the back. Everyone is a minister. When they pray, they pray like it changes things. Prayer is not a religious exercise for them. Prayer is not like a tasteful pause. It's the engine for everything, all night, if needed, with expectation. They expect God to act in the here and now during the pandemic. As a young man, I knew when I was in college, he he started this online prayer meeting. It's grown and taken on a life of its own. And there's a slogan they have. Every morning they have this prayer session. You have tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of people joining in in the prayer. And they say, what God cannot do does not exist. That's their slogan. Now, I I know it's a logical fallacy. You know, God cannot sin. God cannot do what he but see what I'm saying? They say that because they expect God to act. You can Google it. It's called NSPPD. New season prophetic prayer and declaration or something. Yeah. They will not try to argue someone into the kingdom. They will try to pray you into it. They may start the way my dad did with a fellowship in someone's living room, and they'd expect that living room to become a church. They will take the longings seriously. They'd look at the wellness, the activism, the reverence for these astonishing mountains. And instead of mocking that, they'll say, like Paul did, what you worship as unknown, let me introduce you to him. And then they would expect God to show up. And they won't be the least bit surprised when God did. So if you if you don't remember anything as I said tonight, remember this. There's an altar in Eugene to an unknown God. It's in this city. And if we're honest, sometimes it may even exist in some of our churches. That quiet, admiring, unexpectant faith. The gifts that the Nigeri holds out to us, it's not a worship style, it's not a program, it's a recovered confidence that we know his name and that he still shows up. We know God's name, and God shows up. Name the unknown God and expect him to answer. That's what my grandfather's village did when they burned that shrine and sent for the gospel. That's what Paul did in Athens. And it is, I think, what God is inviting Citizens' Church to do right here in our own Athens in Eugene. A hundred years ago, European missionaries crossed an ocean and named the unknown God for my grandfather. Tonight, his grandson crossed an ocean to stand in your church and ask you to do the same for your neighbors. The faith came all the way around the world and back, and it's still doing the only thing it has ever done naming the God that hungry people are already reaching for, and then expecting God to answer.