I spotted this interesting article and follow up letter in the Church Times when exploring its coverage of the 1968 Lambeth Conference. The article notes that the number of Anglicans in “the western part of Nigeria” was declining in favour of Pentecostals. Nigerian Anglicanism had gone through phases of shedding both sects and adherents towards Independency since at least the 1920s. But this was possibly the first report in the press of a new phenomenon which would have significant impacts on Anglicanism across the world.
There was a major Third Wave of new Pentecostal Churches emergent in Africa from the mid-1970s; in Nigeria, the continent’s most populous country, Jesse Zink locates this surge as beginning a little earlier, with an evangelical revival during the civil war of 1967-70. It would be incubated and then enormously multiplied in student groups meeting in the margins of the expanding Nigerian university system of the 1970s. Matthews Ojo understands these African movements as originating in the 1960s Pentecostalist revivals in North America and Britain; but Nigerian Independency long had links with the Anglo-Saxon north, and the influence wasn’t always unidirectional either.
Also of note here is some indirect evidence of Muslim-to-Christian conversion in Nigeria, which is far from unknown but somehow seems to escape everyone’s notice.
Anglicans facing competition from the burgeoning Pentecostal scene in Africa was one of a complex cluster of reasons why the issue of homosexuality became so toxic within world Anglicanism from the mid-1990s onwards.
From the Church Times, 9 August 1968
Fewer Anglicans in W. Nigeria
The number of Anglicans in the western part of Nigeria, West Africa, is declining, to the benefit of other denominations.
This is revealed in the report published giving the results of a research project into the “Role of Religion in Yoruba Society,” conducted by the Institute of African Studies of the University of Ife, Nigeria.
Last week I watched two films that depicted how people convinced they are fighting injustice can descend into barbarism precisely because of their moral certainty. Both looked back on events in the late 1960s and 1970s. The first was Sam Green and Bill Siegel’s insightful documentary on The Weather Underground, the second was Bernd Eichlinger’s emotionally overwhelming dramatization of the story of The Baader Meinhof Complex. On both sides of the Atlantic, young people outraged by the nightly television scenes from Vietnam, with America killing civilians in great numbers, themselves resorted to bombing and killing. None of this produced any of the justice and liberation they sought. In the end, both organisations found the world moved on rapidly and left those in them behind: on the run, or marooned on the edge of society, or imprisoned. The illusion that if only we ourselves ran the world, then everything would be wonderful, is a dangerous one.
