Few institutions in human history have shaped the world quite like the Catholic Church. With over one billion members today and a history stretching back two thousand years, it has been a force for education, charity, and spiritual comfort on one hand, and a participant in war, conquest, and suppression on the other. To understand … Read more
There is a story told among the Akan people of Ghana that has quietly fascinated scholars, theologians, and ordinary people for generations. In the beginning, God lived close to the earth. So close that people could reach up and touch him. He was not distant or abstract or unreachable. He was simply there, overhead, present, … Read more
Let me tell you about a story told by the Yoruba people of Nigeria that most Nigerian Christians have never heard. Long ago, before the world was as it is now, there was a great flood. The waters rose and covered the earth. Almost everything was destroyed. Only a small number of people survived, saved … Read more
It started with a teenage girl having a vision. Not a pastor. Not a bishop. Not a trained theologian with years of seminary education and a wall full of certificates. A teenage girl named Abiodun Akinsowon, sometime in 1925, who fell into a trance during a Corpus Christi procession in Lagos and did not wake … Read more
There is a woman in the Bible who did something that very few people in all of scripture ever did. She gave God a name. Not a title. Not a description. A personal name, drawn from her own direct encounter with him, in a desert, alone, with no priest present, no temple nearby, no prophet … Read more
I need you to sit with this fact for a moment. In the year 400 AD, North Africa was the most intellectually powerful Christian region on earth. Not Europe. Not the Middle East. Africa. The greatest Christian thinkers of that era were African. The most influential theological debates of that century were happening on African … Read more
Every December, across Nigeria and around the world, nativity scenes are set up in churches, schools, and living rooms. Three figures always appear. Robed in rich colours, carrying gifts, kneeling before a manger. We call them the three wise men, or the three kings. We give them names — Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar. We dress … Read more
I want to start this with something that might surprise you. When the first Christian missionaries arrived in Yorubaland in the nineteenth century, they expected to meet people who had no concept of God. People who worshipped idols blindly, who had no spiritual framework, no theology, no understanding of a supreme being. What they found … Read more
I want to ask you something honestly. Did anyone ever teach you about Samuel Ajayi Crowther in church? In school? Anywhere? Because they never taught me either. And that is a problem — because this man’s story is one of the most extraordinary things that has ever happened in African Christian history, and most Nigerian … Read more
Here is a question I want you to sit with for a moment. Where did Nigeria’s first lawyers come from? Its first doctors? Its first judges, engineers, journalists, and politicians — the men and women who eventually sat across the table from the British and negotiated independence for this country? Almost every single one of … Read more