The History of the Church in Nigeria: A Complete Historical Record

From Portuguese Contact to Global Mission Force

The history of Christianity in Nigeria does not begin where most people assume it does. It does not begin with the Church Missionary Society steamers arriving at Badagry in 1842. It does not begin with the Niger Expedition of 1841. It begins, if one follows the thread back far enough, with a Portuguese captain making landfall on the coast of Benin in 1472, and it encompasses five and a half centuries of contact, collapse, exile, homecoming, revival, and explosion that together constitute one of the most dramatic religious histories of any nation on earth.

What makes Nigeria’s Christian history distinctive is not merely the scale of what it eventually became, though the scale is extraordinary by any measure. What makes it distinctive is the character of the people who drove it. The permanent planting of Christianity in Nigeria was accomplished not primarily by European missionaries imposing a foreign religion on a conquered people, but by African men and women who had suffered the worst that history could do to a human being, who had been carried across the Atlantic in the holds of slave ships, and who returned home carrying a faith they had embraced entirely on their own terms. The Church in Nigeria was, from its permanent beginnings, a homecoming story.

This document traces that story from its earliest origins to the present day, through the specific events, places, institutions, and individuals whose lives shaped the faith of what is now the largest Christian population in Africa.

I. The Land Before the Cross: Nigeria at the Dawn of European Contact

The territory that constitutes modern Nigeria, defined by its current boundaries only in 1914 when the British amalgamated the Northern and Southern Protectorates, was in the pre-colonial period one of the most politically and culturally complex regions in Africa. It was not one people or one state. It was a mosaic of great kingdoms, city-states, and confederacies, each with its own governance structures, religious traditions, legal codes, and economic systems.

The Major Polities

The Benin Empire, centred at Benin City in the forest zone of the present-day south, was among the most sophisticated states in sub-Saharan Africa. Its monarchy, the Oba, exercised both religious and political authority and presided over a court of extraordinary artistic production. The famous Benin Bronzes, now scattered across museums in Europe and elsewhere following the British punitive expedition of 1897, are testimony to a civilisation of considerable refinement. Benin had been trading with the Portuguese since the 1470s, long before any missionary arrived.

To the north of the forest zone, the Oyo Empire dominated the savanna. Founded in the 14th or 15th century by the legendary Oranmiyan, a descendant of the Yoruba culture hero Oduduwa at Ile-Ife, Oyo grew through the 17th and 18th centuries into the most powerful military state in the West African region, renowned for its cavalry and its sophisticated constitutional structure, which included a council of chiefs, the Oyo Mesi, with the power to depose an autocratic Alaafin. At its height in the late 18th century, Oyo exercised tributary authority over the kingdoms of Dahomey (modern Benin Republic) and controlled the trade routes from the Atlantic coast to the Sahara.

In the northeast, the Kanem-Bornu Empire, one of Africa’s most ancient states with roots in the 9th century, maintained authority over the Lake Chad basin and the surrounding region. It had been Muslim since the 11th century, its rulers having converted to Islam through contact with trans-Saharan merchants, and it maintained diplomatic relations with the Ottoman Empire and the states of North Africa. The Kanem-Bornu court was one of the most sophisticated in Africa, maintaining a class of Islamic scholars and correspondence in classical Arabic.

The Hausa states, seven in number according to tradition, occupied the northern savanna and had similarly been drawn into the orbit of Islam through trade from the 14th century onward. They were wealthy trading cities, controlling the movement of gold, leather goods, kola nuts, and enslaved persons across the Sahara. The 19th century Fulani jihad led by Usman dan Fodio between 1804 and 1808 swept through these states and replaced their ruling houses with the Fulani emirs of the Sokoto Caliphate, which consolidated Islamic authority across the entire region.

In the southeast, the Igbo-speaking peoples of the Niger Delta and the hinterland were organised not into centralised kingdoms but into autonomous village republics governed by councils of elders, age grades, and the authority of the oracle at Arochukwu, known as Chukwu, whose pronouncements reached through a network of agents across the entire Igbo-speaking world. The Igbo world was enormously complex, commercially vibrant through its position in the Atlantic trade, and governed by sophisticated systems of customary law.

In the south, the city-states of the Niger Delta, including Bonny, Brass, Kalabari, and Calabar, had grown wealthy and powerful as the primary commercial intermediaries between the interior producers and the Atlantic trade. Their political structures, the canoe houses of Bonny and the Ekpe society of Calabar, were adapted specifically to the demands of long-distance maritime commerce.

The Religious Landscape

The religious life of pre-colonial Nigeria was dominated by African Traditional Religion in the south and centre, and by Islam in the north. The two traditions were not entirely sealed from each other. Islam had penetrated some Yoruba areas, particularly among merchants and scholars, and Yoruba towns like Ilorin on the north-south frontier maintained mixed Muslim and traditional religious populations. But broadly speaking, the country that would become Nigeria in 1914 was divided between a predominantly Muslim north and a predominantly traditional south, with the Christian mission entering into this context at the southernmost coastal points and working inward.

II. The Portuguese Encounter: 1472 to the 18th Century

The first documented European contact with the coast of what is now Nigeria occurred in 1472, when the Portuguese explorer Ruy de Sequeira reached the Bight of Benin. Within a decade, Portuguese traders were in regular contact with the Kingdom of Benin, and the Oba had sent an ambassador to Lisbon. The Portuguese were primarily interested in the trade in pepper and ivory that Benin could supply, but they also carried missionaries.

The Benin Mission

The first Catholic missionaries to enter the Benin kingdom arrived in 1515, and by 1516 a small church had been built in Benin City. The Oba Esigie, who reigned from approximately 1504 to 1550, is recorded as having shown considerable interest in Portuguese Christianity, permitting missionaries to preach, to baptise some members of the court, and to operate a school for the sons of Benin notables. His son Orhogbua was baptised and sent to Portugal for education, returning to Benin with the Catholic faith and with Portuguese military support that helped Orhogbua consolidate his succession.

For several decades, Christianity appeared to have found a foothold. But the faith remained almost entirely confined to the royal court and its immediate circle. It had no vernacular presence: the missionaries preached through interpreters whose translations were unreliable, used Latin liturgical forms that were entirely opaque to Benin worshippers, and understood almost nothing of Benin religious life, cosmology, or social structure. When the Portuguese trading interest shifted toward the far more lucrative slave trade in the 17th century, the missionary presence in Benin shrank proportionally. By the end of the 17th century, organised Christianity in Benin had effectively ceased to exist.

The Warri Kingdom

The most sustained example of early Portuguese Catholic influence in the Nigeria region was in the Kingdom of Warri in the Niger Delta, governed by the Olu dynasty. The history here is more extended than in Benin and more theologically interesting.

The connection began in the late 16th century when a prince of the Warri royal house, known in Portuguese records as Dom Sebastiao, was sent to Portugal for education and returned as a committed Catholic. His son Dom Domingos Berre went further: he petitioned the Pope directly for priests and maintained an active Catholic practice at the Warri court throughout the early 17th century. Warri sent multiple embassies to Portugal and maintained a Catholic chapel in the palace over several generations.

The story of Warri Christianity is poignant precisely because of how far it went before it collapsed. A succession of Warri rulers maintained nominal Catholic identity across most of the 17th century, corresponding with Rome and Portuguese Lisbon, maintaining priests when they could obtain them, and continuing certain Catholic practices even in the absence of clergy. But the faith was always thin in the community, always dependent on the personal commitment of individual rulers, and always entangled with the political relationship with Portugal. When the 18th century brought a disruption of that relationship and a reassertion of traditional religious authority in Warri, the century and a half of Catholic influence dissolved remarkably quickly. By 1750, there was little visible trace of it.

The Portuguese missionary failure in what is now Nigeria followed a pattern consistent with their failures across the Gulf of Guinea coast. They confused the conversion of rulers with the conversion of peoples. They presented a Christianity inseparable from European culture and Portuguese political interest. They trained no local clergy who could sustain the work after the Europeans left. And they allowed the slave trade, in which the same Portuguese who sent missionaries were also the most active purchasers of enslaved Africans, to comprehensively undermine whatever moral authority the missionaries might otherwise have claimed. The people watching Portuguese Catholic priests preach about human dignity and brotherhood were the same people watching Portuguese slave merchants negotiating the purchase of their neighbours.

III. The Long Silence and the Slave Coast: 1700 to 1840

Between the effective collapse of the Portuguese Catholic missions in the late 17th century and the arrival of the permanent 19th-century missions, there was an extended period in which organised Christianity was almost entirely absent from the territory that is now Nigeria. This was not a period of stasis. It was a period of profound and violent change.

The Atlantic slave trade was at its height from approximately 1700 to 1808. The region that would become Nigeria was among the most heavily affected on the entire continent. The Bight of Benin and the Bight of Biafra, which together constitute the coastline of modern Nigeria, were among the primary embarkation points for the transatlantic slave trade. Conservative estimates suggest that between 1.5 and 2 million enslaved Africans were shipped from this coastline alone over the course of the trade.

The consequences within the interior were devastating. The demand for enslaved persons generated endemic warfare between neighbouring peoples, the kidnapping of individuals and families from their homes, the depopulation of entire districts, and the total moral corruption of political authority as chiefs and kings competed to supply the coastal markets. The Oyo Empire, which had reached its peak of power in the 18th century, collapsed in the early 19th century partly under the pressure of the multiple conflicts that the slave trade had generated and intensified.

It was into this devastated world that the events of the 19th century would eventually bring the missionaries. But the missionaries would not come first. The formerly enslaved would come first.

IV. The Return of the Captives: Sierra Leone and the Making of the Saro

The British Parliament abolished the transatlantic slave trade in 1807, and the Royal Navy’s West Africa Squadron was commissioned to enforce the prohibition by intercepting illegal slave ships on the Atlantic Ocean. Over the following decades, the Squadron intercepted hundreds of slaving vessels and landed the freed captives, men, women, and children from across West and Central Africa, at Freetown in Sierra Leone, a colony established in 1787 on the West African coast specifically as a home for freed Africans.

The Church Missionary Society, founded in 1799 by a group of evangelical Anglicans largely connected to the Clapham Sect, took on primary responsibility for the education and pastoral care of these liberated Africans in Freetown. The missionaries found in the freed captives a community of extraordinary resilience and receptiveness. Having been torn from their homes by violence and stripped of almost every aspect of their former lives, many of the recaptives threw themselves into education with an intensity that surprised even their teachers. Within a generation, the mission schools of Sierra Leone were producing clergymen, teachers, doctors, lawyers, and merchants of considerable accomplishment.

Many of these recaptives were of Yoruba origin, captured during the wars that accompanied the collapse of the Oyo Empire in the 1820s and 1830s. They knew where they had come from and they longed to return. As the political situation in Yorubaland gradually stabilised in the 1830s and 1840s, many of them did return, settling first in the coastal towns and then pushing inland toward their places of origin. They came to be known as Saro, a derivation of Sierra Leone, and they brought with them the English literacy, the Christian faith, and the particular cultural formation of the Freetown mission schools.

A parallel community of returnees arrived from a different direction. Beginning in the early decades of the 19th century, enslaved Africans who had been transported to Brazil and who had subsequently gained their freedom, either through manumission or through self-purchase, began returning to the West African coast in significant numbers. Many of these Amaro, or Aguda as they were also known, were Catholic, reflecting the religious tradition of Brazil, and many of Yoruba origin. They settled particularly in Lagos, Badagry, and Porto-Novo, building distinctive houses in the Brazilian colonial style that are still visible in Lagos today, establishing Catholic communities, and maintaining commercial connections with Brazil.

Together, the Saro and the Amaro communities constituted the human infrastructure on which the permanent planting of Christianity in Nigeria would be built. They were Africans who had survived the worst experience history had to offer and who returned home with a faith they had made their own, a community of practice, and an urgent desire for organised religious life in the land of their birth. They wrote letters to missionary societies in Britain begging for clergymen to come. They built meeting houses. They waited.

V. The Permanent Planting: Badagry, 1842

The date September 24, 1842 is the starting point of the permanent, unbroken history of the Christian Church in Nigeria. On that day, the Reverend Thomas Birch Freeman, a Wesleyan Methodist minister of mixed English and African heritage who had been working in the Gold Coast (modern Ghana) since 1838, arrived in Badagry on the southwestern coast of what is now Lagos State. He was welcomed by a Saro community that had been gathering informally for worship and had petitioned the Wesleyan Missionary Society for a minister.

Within weeks of Freeman’s arrival, the CMS sent its own pioneer. Henry Townsend, an Englishman, arrived in Badagry in late 1842 and began the work that would eventually lead to the establishment of the CMS mission in Abeokuta, the Egba city about 60 miles inland. Townsend’s decision to push toward Abeokuta was guided by the Saro community’s knowledge of the interior and by the political situation: Abeokuta had become a refuge city for Egba people displaced by the Oyo collapse and was home to a large Saro population, including many of the recaptives who had been born near Abeokuta and had returned home via Sierra Leone.

The first Christmas Day service in the recorded history of Nigerian Christianity was held in Badagry in December 1842, under a tree, conducted by Freeman for the Saro community. The image is a precise one: a congregation of formerly enslaved men and women, gathered under a West African sky, celebrating the birth of the Christ who had become the centre of their life in exile and whom they now worshipped in the land they had spent decades trying to reach.

Abeokuta: The First Inland Mission

The establishment of the CMS mission in Abeokuta in 1846 was a significant expansion of the Christian presence from the coastal towns into the interior. Henry Townsend was joined there by the Reverend Charles Gollmer and, crucially, by Samuel Ajayi Crowther, who had returned to West Africa as part of the Niger Expedition of 1841 and who would become the defining figure of Nigerian Christianity in the 19th century.

Abeokuta proved an initially receptive environment. The Alake and other Egba chiefs permitted missionary activity, and the Saro community provided a ready-made congregation and a network of social connections that allowed the mission to spread into the surrounding community more quickly than purely European missionaries could have achieved on their own. By the early 1850s, the Abeokuta mission had established a school, begun translation work, and was conducting regular services in Yoruba.

The Wesleyan Methodists were not far behind. Thomas Birch Freeman and his successors moved northward from Badagry and Lagos and established Methodist presence in Abeokuta and then in Ibadan. The American Baptist Mission Society, operating from its base in the United States, sent the Reverend Thomas Jefferson Bowen to Yorubaland in 1850. Bowen was a remarkable linguist and ethnographer, publishing a Yoruba grammar and dictionary in 1858, and his mission established a presence at Ijaye and subsequently at other Yoruba towns. The American Baptists also brought the particular tradition of indigenous church governance that American Baptist polity emphasised, which would prove significant in the development of Nigerian Baptist life.

Lagos: The Commercial and Ecclesiastical Capital

The British annexation of Lagos in 1851, driven initially by the desire to use it as a base for anti-slave-trade operations, and formalized as a Crown Colony in 1861, transformed the city into the primary point of entry for commerce, colonial administration, and mission activity. The Saro community in Lagos was substantial, economically active, and deeply invested in both education and religious life. The Catholic presence, anchored in the Amaro community, was also significant.

The CMS Grammar School, established in Lagos in 1859 as the first secondary school in Nigeria, produced the generation of educated Lagosians who would dominate Nigerian public life in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The CMS mission also established the printing press in Abeokuta in 1859 and produced the first edition of Iwe Irohin, the first newspaper published in Nigeria, in Yoruba and English, as documented in the previous article in this series.

The Catholic mission in Lagos was formally established in 1868 by Father Francesco Borghero of the Society of African Missions, though Catholic practice had been maintained informally by the Amaro community for decades before that. The arrival of organised Catholic missionary activity gave the Amaro community the sacramental life and institutional structure they had been seeking.

VI. Samuel Ajayi Crowther: The Architect of Indigenous Christianity

No figure in the history of Nigerian Christianity stands taller than Samuel Ajayi Crowther, and no life in the 19th-century African Church encapsulates more completely the themes of captivity, education, vocation, and the struggle for African ecclesiastical self-determination.

He was born around 1809 in Oshogun, a Yoruba town in the Oyo confederacy, in the region of present-day Oyo State. His given name was Ajayi. In 1821, when he was approximately twelve years of age, Oshogun was raided by Fulani warriors and their Oyo allies in one of the conflicts generated by the disintegration of the Oyo Empire. Ajayi was captured, separated from his mother and siblings in the chaos of the raid, sold multiple times through the interior slave markets, and eventually placed aboard a Portuguese slave ship at Lagos.

The ship was intercepted in the Atlantic by a vessel of the Royal Navy’s West Africa Squadron. Ajayi was landed at Freetown, Sierra Leone, in 1822. He was taken in by the CMS, began his education at the mission school, demonstrated exceptional linguistic aptitude, and was baptised in December 1825, taking the name Samuel Crowther after a prominent member of the CMS committee in London. He subsequently married Asano, a fellow Yoruba recaptive who had been given the name Susan, and who would remain his companion for over fifty years.

The Scholar and the Linguist

Crowther’s intellectual gifts were recognised early and consistently. He was sent to the CMS Training Institution at Islington in London for further study, becoming in 1827 the first student to be enrolled at what is now Fourah Bay College in Sierra Leone, and returning to England in 1851 for theological training at Islington. He was ordained a deacon in 1842 and a priest the same year, becoming the first West African to be ordained as a priest in the Anglican Church.

Before his ordination, he had already been selected by the CMS as one of the African participants in the Niger Expedition of 1841, the British government’s ambitious attempt to open the Niger River to commerce and missionary activity. The expedition itself was a partial failure, killed by malaria, with a majority of the European participants dead or incapacitated within weeks. But Crowther emerged from it as the CMS’s most important African asset, having demonstrated the capacity to work in conditions that destroyed European missionaries, having gathered invaluable linguistic and geographical information about the Niger region, and having made the personal contacts that would serve his subsequent ministry.

His linguistic scholarship was a life’s work. He published the first Yoruba grammar and vocabulary in 1843. He collaborated in the translation of the New Testament into Yoruba, completed in 1862, and the complete Bible, which appeared in 1884, the year before his death. He produced grammars and vocabularies of Igbo and Nupe, and contributed to the study of other Nigerian languages. The Yoruba Bible translation was not merely a religious text: it established the written standard of the Yoruba language, preserved its orthography, and created a literary monument around which Yoruba cultural identity could consolidate.

Bishop of the Niger: 1864

On June 29, 1864, in Canterbury Cathedral, Samuel Ajayi Crowther was consecrated as the first African bishop of the Anglican Church. The specific terms of his appointment placed him as Bishop for the Countries of Western Africa beyond the Queen’s Dominions: his jurisdiction was the Niger territory, the lands beyond the reach of British colonial authority. The CMS had concluded, correctly, that the interior of the Niger Delta and the middle Niger were best served by an African bishop who understood the cultures, spoke the languages, and would not be destroyed by the climate.

The Niger Mission that Crowther led from 1864 represented a conscious experiment in indigenous church leadership. Crowther staffed it almost entirely with African clergy and catechists, many of them recaptives from Sierra Leone like himself. He worked in Onitsha, at the confluence of the Niger and Anambra rivers, and along the Niger and its tributaries, dealing with the chiefs of Igbo and Igala and Yoruba communities, negotiating access for his workers, and building a network of mission stations that constituted the first organised Christian presence in the interior of what is now Nigeria’s Middle Belt.

The last years of his life were deeply painful. In the 1880s, a younger generation of European CMS missionaries, reflecting the hardening racial attitudes of the late Victorian era, began to undermine his authority in the Niger Mission, questioning the conduct of his African staff, bypassing his authority, and treating the entire experiment of African ecclesiastical leadership with barely concealed contempt. A CMS committee inquiry in 1890 found against the mission in ways that were widely seen by educated Africans in Lagos as a racially motivated reversal of the principle of indigenous leadership. Crowther, who was 81 years old and had served the CMS for over sixty years, was effectively stripped of operational authority over his own mission.

He died in Lagos on December 31, 1891, broken by the humiliation. The educated Yoruba community of Lagos mourned him with a depth of feeling that testified to his stature: he was not merely the Anglican Church’s pioneer bishop, he was the symbol of Africa’s claim to full dignity within the Christian communion. His funeral drew the largest crowd that Lagos had seen. His death directly precipitated the formation of the first African-led breakaway denominations, as the men who had watched the CMS dismantle his authority concluded that African Christianity could not trust its future to European institutional control.

VII. The Expansion Across Nigeria: East, West, and North

Eastern Nigeria: Onitsha, Igboland, and the Presbyterian Mission at Calabar

The CMS mission at Onitsha, established in 1857 as part of the second Niger Expedition that Crowther helped lead, became the gateway through which Christianity entered Igboland. Onitsha was strategically chosen: it sat at the confluence of the Niger River with its major tributary, the Anambra, and was a major market town at the intersection of several important trade routes. A mission established there could potentially reach communities across an enormous geographical area.

The early Onitsha mission was remarkable in that it specifically welcomed the categories of persons that Igbo traditional society had excluded. Osu persons dedicated to local deities, and therefore considered untouchable by freeborn Igbo, found in the mission a community that accepted them. Mothers of twins who had been expelled from their communities were taken in and cared for. Former slaves and other marginalised individuals found in the Christian community a new social standing that the traditional society would not grant them. The mission was not merely a spiritual institution; it was a counter-community, a living argument that the human dignity the Gospel proclaimed could be made visible in specific social arrangements.

The Scottish Presbyterian mission at Calabar, led initially by the Reverend Hope Masterton Waddell who arrived in 1846, developed along a different axis. The Old Calabar region, dominated by the city-states of the Cross River estuary, was already deeply enmeshed in the Atlantic commercial world through the palm oil trade that had replaced the slave trade. Its merchant princes, the heads of the great canoe houses of Bonny and Calabar, were sophisticated men who understood the relationship between literacy and commercial advantage. They welcomed the mission schools for practical reasons as much as spiritual ones.

The Hope Waddell Training Institution, established in 1895 in Calabar, became one of the most significant educational institutions in all of colonial Nigeria, producing graduates who spread across the region as teachers, clergymen, government clerks, and eventually lawyers, doctors, and politicians. Its curriculum, which combined academic education with practical training in trades and agriculture, was consciously designed to produce individuals who could function effectively in the emerging commercial and administrative economy of colonial Nigeria.

The Qua Iboe Mission

In the swampy creeks of the Qua Iboe River region of what is now Akwa Ibom State, a remarkable mission was established in 1887 by a young Irishman named Samuel Alexander Bill, who arrived without institutional backing, with very little money, and with no prior missionary experience. The Qua Iboe Mission, which grew from Bill’s solitary enterprise, became one of the most effective evangelising movements in Nigerian church history.

The mission’s effectiveness rested on its early commitment to indigenous leadership. Bill trained local catechists and evangelists who could reach communities that a European could never have accessed. Within two decades, the Qua Iboe Mission had established a network of village churches across the Ibibio-speaking region that substantially outnumbered anything the older and better-funded denominational missions had achieved in comparable time. The Ibibio received the Gospel with a depth of response that consistently surprised outside observers, a response rooted partly in the spiritual openness of Ibibio traditional religion and partly in the quality of the indigenous leadership that the Qua Iboe Mission had trained.

The Catholic Mission: SMA and SPS

The Roman Catholic mission in Nigeria was formally established through two principal religious orders. The Society of African Missions (SMA), a French congregation founded in 1856, took primary responsibility for Lagos and the western regions. The Society of the Holy Spirit (SPS or Spiritans), with stronger German and Irish representation, worked primarily in the east, establishing their most important base at Onitsha in the 1880s and expanding rapidly through Igboland.

The Catholic missions brought with them a different institutional philosophy from the Protestant missions. Where the Protestant missions placed a high premium on vernacular literacy and individual Bible reading, the Catholic tradition emphasised communal sacramental practice, the authority of the ordained priesthood, and a more gradual integration of indigenous elements into the liturgy. The Catholic schools, like the Protestant ones, became critically important educational institutions, but the Catholic approach to catechesis was more formal and extended, with a longer period of preparation before baptism.

By the early 20th century, the Catholic presence in eastern Nigeria had become the most significant rival to the CMS and Presbyterian missions, establishing schools, hospitals, and seminary training institutions across the entire Igbo-speaking region.

The North: Sudan Interior Mission and the Long Frontier

The Sokoto Caliphate and the Muslim emirs of the north presented a fundamentally different challenge from the kingdoms and city-states of the south. The British colonial authorities, having conquered the Caliphate in 1903, pursued a policy of indirect rule that explicitly discouraged Christian missionary activity in the north, calculating that disturbing the Islamic social order would make the administration of the enormously populous and geographically vast north far more difficult. Lord Lugard, the architect of the amalgamated Nigeria of 1914, specifically restricted missionary access to the Muslim north.

The Sudan Interior Mission, an interdenominational faith mission founded in 1893 and working initially in the region that would become northern Nigeria, focused its energies on the middle belt communities that were neither Muslim nor under the direct authority of the Muslim emirs. Among the Nupe, the Tiv, the Hausa Christians, and the numerous smaller communities of the central plateau, the SIM built churches and schools over the following decades.

The Danish and American missions working among the Tiv people of the Benue Valley achieved particularly notable results. The Tiv, a community of small-scale farmers who had successfully resisted both Fulani political dominance and large-scale involvement in the slave trade, proved extraordinarily receptive to Christianity in the early 20th century. The breadth of the Tiv Church by mid-century, growing with remarkable speed from a missionary beginning in the 1900s, became one of the most-cited examples of rapid mass conversion in African Christian history.

VIII. The Colonial Church and Its Discontents: 1900 to 1940

The first four decades of the 20th century in Nigeria were a period of rapid institutional growth and equally rapid indigenous disillusionment. The mission churches expanded their educational and medical infrastructure enormously, producing the literate professional class that staffed the colonial administration and built the beginnings of modern Nigerian civil society. They simultaneously hardened their institutional structures in ways that relegated African leadership to subordinate positions and reproduced, within the church, the racial hierarchy of the colonial state.

The educated Nigerian response to this situation took several forms. In the political sphere, it produced the journalism and advocacy of Herbert Macaulay, grandson of Samuel Ajayi Crowther and founder of the Nigerian National Democratic Party in 1923. In the cultural sphere, it produced an intense re-examination of African identity by the Yoruba intelligentsia centred in Lagos, who were simultaneously proud of their Christian faith and increasingly conscious that the European cultural forms in which that faith was packaged were neither necessary to the Gospel nor hospitable to their humanity.

In the ecclesiastical sphere, it produced the African Independent Church movement. Following directly from the humiliation of Bishop Crowther and the reversal of indigenous leadership principles in the Niger Mission, a series of educated Lagos Anglicans left the CMS church and formed the United Native African Church in 1891. The formal resolution of their break stated explicitly that they believed Africa to be a continent for Africans, that no European church could ultimately serve African interests, and that an African church must be founded to operate on African principles.

Other separations followed. The African Church Organisation, the Bethel African Church, and several smaller bodies formed in the opening decades of the 20th century, each carrying the conviction that Christianity was meant for Africans and could only thrive in Africa when Africans were in charge of it. These were middle-class, educated churches, worshipping in much the same manner as the missions from which they had separated, but insisting on African governance, African leadership, and a gradual opening toward African musical and cultural forms in worship.

They were the precursors of something far larger.

IX. The Aladura Revolution: 1918 to 1950

The Aladura movement was not a planned institutional development. It was a spiritual explosion, detonated by a catastrophe, that transformed Nigerian Christianity more thoroughly than any event since the first arrival of the missionaries.

The 1918 Influenza Pandemic as Catalyst

In the second half of 1918, the global influenza pandemic reached West Africa. In the context of the First World War, which had already caused enormous disruption to Nigerian society through conscription, forced labour, and the diversion of resources, the pandemic was devastating. It struck communities across Nigeria with terrifying speed and killed tens of thousands. The mission hospitals were overwhelmed. The colonial medical services were inadequate. And the traditional healing systems, whatever their other merits, had nothing to offer against a disease that killed within days.

In the Anglican church at Ijebu-Ode in what is now Ogun State, a small group of young members began a period of intense prayer, fasting, and reading of the Bible, seeking divine intervention in the face of the epidemic. The group, which included Daniel Orekoya, J.B. Sadare, and others who would become the founding generation of the Aladura movement, began to operate from a conviction that the New Testament promises of healing through prayer were literally true and immediately available to any Christian who believed them with sufficient sincerity and urgency.

They associated themselves initially with the Faith Tabernacle Church, an American Holiness group based in Philadelphia, with whom they had made contact through pamphlets and tracts circulating in Lagos. But the relationship with the American body was always thin, mediated entirely through correspondence, and the movement that developed in Yorubaland was entirely indigenous in its character, its methods, and its leadership.

The Cherubim and Seraphim: 1925

The most celebrated of the founding events of the Aladura movement occurred on June 9, 1925, in Lagos. A young Yoruba woman named Abiodun Akinsowon fell into what witnesses described as a trance or spiritual crisis at a Corpus Christi procession organised by the Catholic church in Lagos. She was taken to the home of Moses Orimolade Tunolashe, an elderly itinerant preacher of extraordinary personal holiness who had been walking the roads of Yorubaland for years, known to all as Baba Aladura, the Praying Father.

Orimolade prayed over Abiodun for several days. She recovered, and the two subsequently worked together to establish a prayer fellowship that would become the Cherubim and Seraphim Society. The movement spread rapidly across Lagos and into the Yoruba interior, drawing in people who had found the mainline mission churches cold, formal, and spiritually inert, and who were hungry for the immediate, experiential encounter with God that the Aladura tradition offered. Prayer, fasting, dreams, visions, healing, and the singing of Yoruba hymns to Yoruba musical rhythms were the hallmarks of Cherubim and Seraphim worship from the beginning.

Joseph Babalola and the 1930 Revival

If the Cherubim and Seraphim Society represented the founding generation of Aladura Christianity, the revival led by Joseph Ayo Babalola in 1930 and 1931 represented its volcanic expansion into a mass movement.

Babalola was a road construction worker employed by the colonial public works department. In 1928, while working at Ikeji-Arakeji in the Osun region, he reported hearing a voice from heaven calling him to preach the Gospel, leave his employment, and go out with a bell and a calabash of water as the instruments of a healing ministry. His response to this call, and the extraordinary events that attended his first preaching tour of Yorubaland in 1930, constitute one of the most remarkable chapters in the entire history of Nigerian religion.

The revival that Babalola led spread from Ilesha in Osun State across the entire Yoruba region and beyond with the speed and force of a fire in dry grass. Reports multiplied of mass healings, of people abandoning traditional medicine and the practitioners of indigenous religion, of entire communities turning out to receive baptism. Estimates of the numbers who gathered to hear Babalola at his largest meetings range from tens of thousands to figures that some historians regard with scepticism but that all agree were without precedent in Nigerian religious experience.

The colonial administration, alarmed by the scale of the movement and particularly by its tendency to undermine the authority of both traditional chiefs and colonial officials, arrested Babalola in 1930 and held him for several months. The arrest did not stop the revival. If anything, it intensified the devotion of his followers, for whom his imprisonment confirmed his prophetic status.

The immediate institutional result of the Babalola revival was the crystallisation of the Christ Apostolic Church, which incorporated the Faith Tabernacle congregations that had been growing across Yorubaland since the 1920s. The CAC became and has remained one of the largest Pentecostal denominations in Nigeria, with a membership that runs into millions.

The Church of the Lord (Aladura) and Josiah Ositelu

A third major stream of the Aladura movement was established by Josiah Ositelu, a former CMS teacher and catechist who began receiving visions and prophetic experiences in the late 1920s. Ositelu was excommunicated from the CMS for his unusual spiritual practices, which included the use of specific prayer formulas, holy names, and ritual acts that his CMS superiors considered incompatible with Anglican order.

Ositelu established the Church of the Lord (Aladura) in 1930, the same year as the Babalola revival, and developed it into an institution with a distinctive theology that was more self-consciously African in its approach to traditional religious symbols and practices than either the CAC or the Cherubim and Seraphim. The Church of the Lord spread beyond Nigeria in subsequent decades, establishing presence in Sierra Leone, Ghana, and the United Kingdom, where it became one of the earliest African-originated churches to plant a congregation in the British diaspora.

The Aladura churches did something that neither the colonial missions nor the African independent churches of the 1890s had managed. They gave ordinary Nigerians, people without education, without social standing, without English, a direct and unmediated access to the power of God. They democratised the sacred.

The Redeemed Christian Church of God: From Humble Origin to Global Reach

The Redeemed Christian Church of God was founded in Lagos in 1952 by Josiah Akindayomi, a man with little formal education who had been through both the traditional religious world and the Cherubim and Seraphim movement before establishing his own congregation. The early RCCG was a small, Yoruba-speaking, holiness-oriented church with no particular ambition for institutional expansion.

Akindayomi died in 1980, and the succession he had designated before his death passed to a university professor of mathematics named Enoch Adejare Adeboye. The choice was, by any conventional measure, improbable. Adeboye had not been raised in the RCCG tradition, was deeply intellectual in temperament, and had no background in Pentecostal ministry. What he brought, however, was an unusual combination of spiritual authority, administrative intelligence, and a vision for the church’s potential that had not been part of the RCCG’s self-understanding.

Under Adeboye’s leadership from 1981, the RCCG transformed itself from a small Lagos denomination into one of the largest Christian institutions in the world. The Holy Ghost Festival, begun in 1985 as an annual gathering and eventually expanded to the monthly Holy Ghost Night and then the annual Holy Ghost Congress, regularly draws over a million worshippers to the Redemption Camp along the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway, events that are by most measures the largest regular Christian gatherings on earth. By the early 21st century, the RCCG had presence in over 190 countries.

X. Independence, the Campus Fellowship, and the Charismatic Explosion: 1960 to 1990

Nigeria’s independence in 1960 found the Christian community in a state of considerable institutional development but uncertain spiritual direction. The mainline denominations, the Anglicans, the Catholics, the Methodists, and the Presbyterians, had inherited the schools, hospitals, and administrative traditions of the missions. The Aladura churches had demonstrated that African Christianity could thrive on its own spiritual terms. But the connection between the Christian faith and the daily life of ordinary Nigerians, particularly educated urban Nigerians, was fraying.

The transformation that followed, and that eventually produced what the world now recognises as Nigerian Pentecostalism, began not in churches but on university campuses.

The Scripture Union and the Generation of the 1970s

The Scripture Union movement, a British-originated interdenominational organisation focused on daily Bible reading, had established a Nigerian chapter that was active in secondary schools and then increasingly on university campuses from the 1950s onward. The Christian Union fellowships that met on the campuses of the University of Ibadan, the University of Nigeria at Nsukka, the University of Lagos, and Ahmadu Bello University in Zaria in the late 1960s and through the 1970s were the nurseries of the generation that would build the mega-churches.

The campus fellowships were characterised by an intensity of biblical study, a commitment to prayer as a practical discipline rather than a formal exercise, and a theological seriousness that the mainline churches, with their inherited liturgical traditions, were not providing. Many of the young people who passed through these fellowships had been raised in Anglican, Catholic, or Methodist homes and found in the campus Christian Union a different quality of religious experience. They were also, almost without exception, highly educated by Nigerian standards, and they brought that intellectual seriousness to their engagement with the biblical text.

From these campus fellowships emerged the leaders of the next generation of Nigerian Christianity.

The Deeper Life Bible Church: 1973

William Folorunso Kumuyi was a mathematics lecturer at the University of Lagos when he began leading a Bible study group in 1973 that grew with remarkable speed into an independent church. The Deeper Life Bible Church that developed from this group was built on a theology of radical holiness and biblical literalism: members were expected to maintain strict standards of personal conduct, to attend multiple weekly services and Bible studies, and to evangelise actively. The church’s growth through the late 1970s and 1980s was extraordinary. By the mid-1980s, Deeper Life was drawing congregations of tens of thousands to its Lagos meetings, conducting open-air crusades that filled public spaces across Nigeria, and establishing a network of local assemblies across the country.

The Living Faith Church: 1983

David Oyedepo, an architecture graduate, received what he describes as a mandate from God in 1981 to liberate Africa from the bondage of poverty, sickness, and spiritual darkness. The Living Faith Church International, also known as Winners Chapel, which he founded in Kaduna in 1983 before relocating to Lagos and then to the purpose-built Faith City at Ota in Ogun State, grew into one of the largest single congregations in the world. The church’s Canaanland headquarters, encompassing a university, a secondary school, an airport, and the 50,000-seat Faith Tabernacle auditorium, is a physical monument to the scale of what the Nigerian Pentecostal movement achieved in its second generation.

XI. The Mountain of Fire and Other Streams: The Diversity of Nigerian Pentecostalism

The Nigerian Pentecostal movement of the late 20th century was never monolithic. It encompassed an extraordinary range of theological emphases, worship styles, and institutional models, reflecting both the diversity of the spiritual influences that shaped it and the entrepreneurial creativity of its founders.

The Mountain of Fire and Miracles Ministries, founded in Lagos in 1994 by Dr. Daniel Kolawole Olukoya, a molecular biologist who holds a PhD from the University of Reading, developed a theology with a particularly strong emphasis on deliverance from demonic bondage and on aggressive, militaristic prayer. Its prayer programmes, including the Seven Day Prayer and Fasting and the annual Fire Conference, drew millions of participants across Nigeria and the diaspora. The MFM model of intensive prayer combined with careful biblical study attracted people who found the mainstream Pentecostal churches insufficiently attentive to the reality of spiritual warfare in the African context.

The Christ Embassy, founded by Pastor Chris Oyakhilome in 1987 as a campus ministry at the University of Benin, developed a media-intensive approach to ministry that anticipated the digital revolution in Christian communication. Oyakhilome’s Rhapsody of Realities daily devotional, published from the early 2000s, became one of the most widely distributed Christian publications in the world, translated into multiple languages and distributed in print and digital form across six continents.

The Daystar Christian Centre, founded by Pastor Sam Adeyemi in Lagos, developed a model of socially engaged Christianity that placed economic empowerment, leadership development, and the transformation of Nigerian public culture at the centre of its mission, alongside conventional Pentecostal evangelism.

These institutions, together with hundreds of smaller churches across Nigeria’s 36 states, constitute a Christian ecosystem of extraordinary diversity and energy. They disagree with each other on theology, on worship practice, on the proper relationship between prosperity and godliness, and on the relationship between the church and the Nigerian state. But they share a conviction, rooted in the same soil as the Aladura movement and the campus fellowships of the 1970s, that God is immediately present, that prayer produces specific results, and that the Christian faith is not a colonial inheritance to be maintained respectfully but a living power to be deployed urgently.

XII. Nigeria as a Global Missionary Force

In the 21st century, Nigeria has become one of the world’s primary missionary-sending nations. The direction of Christian mission, which ran from Europe to Africa for three centuries, has partially reversed itself, and Nigerian churches are now planting congregations in London, Houston, Toronto, Glasgow, Amsterdam, Seoul, and across the Caribbean and South America.

The Nigerian diaspora, estimated at several million people spread across North America, Europe, and other regions, carries with it an intense religious culture. Nigerian-founded churches in the United Kingdom are among the fastest-growing Christian institutions in a country where the mainline churches have been in sustained numerical decline for decades. The Kingsway International Christian Centre in London, founded by Pastor Matthew Ashimolowo, for many years hosted the largest single congregation in the United Kingdom. RCCG parishes are found in every major British city. Winners Chapel, the CAC, the Cherubim and Seraphim, and dozens of other Nigerian denominations maintain active congregations across the diaspora.

The scale of this reversal carries an historical irony that is not lost on those who know the full story. The British missionaries who came to Nigeria in the 19th century were sustained by British home churches, financed by British Christian societies, and embedded in a broader project of British imperial expansion. The Nigerian Christians who are now planting churches in British cities are sustained by Nigerian home churches, financed by Nigerian members who give with an intensity that their British counterparts rarely match, and embedded in a Nigerian cultural tradition that the British colonial church once treated with condescension.

The wheel has completed a remarkable revolution. The Christianity that the missionaries brought to Badagry in 1842 is being carried back to their successors’ grandchildren, not as a re-export of a foreign product but as an expression of something that Nigeria made entirely its own.

Key Timeline: Christianity in Nigeria

Date	Event
1472	Portuguese explorer Ruy de Sequeira makes first documented European contact with the Bight of Benin coast.
1515	First Catholic missionaries enter the Kingdom of Benin. A small church is built in Benin City.
Late 1600s	Portuguese Catholic missions in Benin and Warri collapse through a combination of neglect, cultural failure, and the slave trade.
1807	British Parliament abolishes the transatlantic slave trade. The Royal Navy’s West Africa Squadron begins interdiction operations.
1822	Samuel Ajayi Crowther, rescued from a Portuguese slave ship, lands in Sierra Leone.
1841	First Niger Expedition. Crowther participates as one of the CMS’s African representatives.
Sept 1842	Reverend Thomas Birch Freeman arrives in Badagry. First permanent Christian mission in Nigeria established.
Dec 1842	First recorded Christmas Day service in Nigeria, conducted under a tree in Badagry.
1843	Crowther publishes the first grammar and vocabulary of the Yoruba language.
1846	CMS mission established at Abeokuta. Henry Townsend and Crowther among the pioneers.
1851	British annex Lagos, transforming it into the primary entry point for missions and commerce.
1859	CMS Grammar School established in Lagos: first secondary school in Nigeria. Iwe Irohin, first Nigerian newspaper, published in Abeokuta.
1864	Crowther consecrated first African bishop of the Anglican Church in Canterbury Cathedral.
1868	Catholic mission formally established in Lagos by Father Francesco Borghero, SMA.
1876	Mary Slessor arrives in Calabar. Begins her decades-long ministry in the Cross River region.
1887	Samuel Alexander Bill arrives on the Qua Iboe River. Qua Iboe Mission established.
1891	Crowther dies in Lagos, December 31. United Native African Church formed by Lagos Anglicans as protest against European mission control.
1892	Mary Slessor appointed British magistrate; first woman to hold such a position in the Empire.
1895	Hope Waddell Training Institution established in Calabar.
1914	Amalgamation of Northern and Southern Protectorates creates Nigeria.
1918	Influenza pandemic reaches Nigeria. Prayer groups at Ijebu-Ode begin the movement that will become Aladura Christianity.
1925	Cherubim and Seraphim Society founded by Moses Orimolade and Abiodun Akinsowon in Lagos.
1930	Joseph Babalola revival sweeps Yorubaland. Christ Apostolic Church formally constituted.
1930	Church of the Lord (Aladura) founded by Josiah Ositelu.
1952	Redeemed Christian Church of God founded in Lagos by Josiah Akindayomi.
1960	Nigeria’s independence. Christian institutions inherit extensive mission educational and medical infrastructure.
1973	William Kumuyi begins the Bible study group at University of Lagos that becomes Deeper Life Bible Church.
1981	Enoch Adeboye becomes General Overseer of RCCG. The church’s global expansion begins.
1983	David Oyedepo founds Living Faith Church International (Winners Chapel) in Kaduna.
1994	Mountain of Fire and Miracles Ministries founded by Dr. Daniel Olukoya in Lagos.
2000s	Nigerian diaspora churches established as major institutions across the United Kingdom, United States, and Canada.
2020s	RCCG active in over 190 countries. Nigeria confirmed as one of the world’s largest missionary-sending nations.

References & Further Reading

Primary and Institutional Sources

1. Crowther, Samuel Ajayi. A Vocabulary of the Yoruba Language. London: Seeleys, 1843.
2. Crowther, Samuel Ajayi and Taylor, J.C. The Gospel on the Banks of the Niger. London: CMS House, 1859.
3. Redeemed Christian Bible College. Church History II: The Advent and Expansion of Christianity in West Africa. Lagos: RCBC Course Material.
4. Oshitelu, G.A. Expansion of Christianity. Abeokuta: Visual Resources Publishers, 2002.

Academic Books and Monographs

• Ajayi, J.F. Ade. Christian Missions in Nigeria 1841-1891: The Making of a New Elite. London: Longmans, 1965.
• Ayandele, Emmanuel A. The Missionary Impact on Modern Nigeria 1842-1914: A Political and Social Analysis. London: Longmans, 1966.
• Hastings, Adrian. The Church in Africa: 1450-1950. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994.
• Isichei, Elizabeth. A History of the Igbo People. London: Macmillan, 1976.
• Isichei, Elizabeth. A History of Christianity in Africa: From Antiquity to the Present. London: SPCK, 1995.
• Peel, J.D.Y. Religious Encounter and the Making of the Yoruba. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000.
• Peel, J.D.Y. Christianity, Islam, and Orisa Religion: Three Traditions in Comparison and Interaction. Oakland: University of California Press, 2016.
• Anderson, Allan H. To the Ends of the Earth: Pentecostalism and the Transformation of World Christianity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
• Walls, Andrew F. The Missionary Movement in Christian History: Studies in the Transmission of Faith. Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1996.

Journal Articles

1. Mepaiyeda, S. M. and Popoola, T. (2019). ‘The roles of indigenous missionaries and Christians in the expansion of Christianity in Nigeria, 1860-1969.’ Verbum et Ecclesia, 40(1), Art. #1785.
2. Nwaoha, C. C. (2020). ‘Christian Missionaries as the Pathfinder to Nigeria Colonial Domination.’ International Journal of Innovative Social Sciences and Humanities Research, 8(1), pp. 1-12.
3. Bastian, M. L. (2000). ‘Young Converts: Christian Missions, Gender and Youth in Onitsha, Nigeria 1880-1929.’ Anthropological Quarterly, 73(3), pp. 145-158.

Biographical Sources

1. Page, Jesse. Samuel Crowther: The Slave Boy Who Became Bishop of the Niger. London: S.W. Partridge, 1889.
2. Bowie, Fiona. Mary Slessor: A Life on the Altar for God. Fearn: Christian Focus, 2008.
3. Alokan, O.A. The Christ Apostolic Church 1928-1988. Ibadan: Ibukunoluwa Printing Press, 1990.