The Church in Ghana and its significance for rightly understanding the history of Anglicanism 

Among the many activities of this week was a visit by Bishop Felix Annancy and his wife Barbara yesterday,  when they were able to give a presentation on their work in the Diocese of Koforidua in Ghana which is part of the Anglican Province of the West Africa.  

More widely, they spoke powerfully of the impact that Christianity has had in shaping their country and in helping it to achieve a degree of stability and democracy that makes it stand apart from many others in the region. 

Their videos also brought out quite vividly the highly ceremonial character of the liturgical tradition they have maintained,  since the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG) first brought Anglicanism to the region. 

In this regard, it was fascinating to learn that the Anglican Church in Ghana was one of the first to be established outside the United Kingdom.  It was in the mid-eighteenth century that the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel first sponsored work at Cape Coast when an S.P.G. presence was established by the missionary Thomas Thompson. It was then later maintained for several decades by Philip Quaque (1741-1816), the first African to be ordained in the Anglican church.^[i]

Philip Quaque was born in what is now Ghana to a family from the area’s Fante/Fetu elite which had close connections to the English in Cape Coast Castle.   In 1754, Thomas Thompson, the first missionary posted to Africa by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG), sent Quaque and two other local boys to London for education. Neither of his compatriots survived, sadly,  to return to west Africa, but Quaque was educated for several years there^[ii] before being ordained and marrying an English woman, Catherine Blunt. 

In 1766 Quaque returned to Cape Coast as a missionary for the SPG the,  “Venerable Society the Fruit of whose Benevolence I have enjoyed ever since their Compassion snatched me from the Bondage of Sin & Satan, and that miserable Condition I was then involved in.” as he later put it –in rather dramatic terms.   He then remained stationed at Cape Coast for the next fifty years, dying in 1816.^[iii] Even though that initial legacy rather lapsed in the nineteenth century, an Anglican chaplaincy continued.  The S.P.G. then began mission work in Ghana again in 1905, a new start that was followed by twenty years of considerable difficulty and challenge.^[iv] Nonetheless, in many ways, it was this period which laid the foundations for modern Ghanaian Anglicanism.  During those initial years,  the Gold Coast was made an independent diocese under Canterbury (1909), and the ceremonial tradition Ghanaian Anglicanism and piety took root. 

More remarkable still however,  was the growth attested by the fact that a church which in 1900 was confined to two or three coastal towns had spread by 1925 to one close to its present geographical extent. Meanwhile the numbers of practising adherents had grown at least tenfold in the process, a pattern sustained down to the present day, when Ghana has thirteen full dioceses.^[v]

Born in 1942, he was the scion of an ancient African royal family in the Gambia, (where he was at one point offered the Presidency) a small country in the westernmost part of Africa. His scholarship led to an impressive academic career culminating in his appointment as the D. Willis James Professor of Missions and World Christianity at Yale Divinity School in 1989. One of his most important projects was that ofReligious Freedom and Society in Africa. And the Sanneh Institute at the University of Ghana in Accra was founded in 2018 and named in his honor just before his unexpected death in 2019.

In a 1987 essay entitled ‘Christian Mission and the Pluralist Milieu: The African Experience’, Sanneh wrote that while missionaries, ‘went out with all sorts of motives, some of them unwholesome’, nonetheless, ‘what stands out is the emphasis missionaries gave to translating scripture into vernacular languages’. 

Their enthusiastic adoption of local languages was a bold move which made clear that they were affirming local cultures as vessels to carry the gospel of Christ. This was how and why they therefore came to write grammars, translate the Bible, start schools, teach people to read and write. It was becaaus of this wide project that they also collected and preserved local wisdom in local stories, proverbs, and axioms. It was their attentive engagemenet with local languages and culture that enabled them to adopt pre-existing names for God and to reinterpreted traditional cosmology in light of the Christian faith.  All of this enabled a profoundly embedded grounding for an authentically enculturated proclamation of the gospel.

Far from destroying indigenous cultures, missionary work catalyzed the preservation and stimulation of these cultures. Missionaries helped to preserve languages that were threatened by the rise of more widely spoken ones. Their grammars, dictionaries, primers, readers, and systematic compilations of proverbs, stories, and customs also furnished the resources needed for the documentation and modern study of cultures. 

Ultimately professor Sanneh was able to through his careful and critical examination of Christian history to demonstrate that the pattern observed in missionary work of recent centuries was actually in profound continuity with the process of transmission of Christianity across time,  going back to the days of the early church itself. 

Hence, in ‘Disciples of All Nations: Pillars of World Christianity’.  he explored the intrinsically invitational and thus missionary nature of the Christian faith. Within this narrative,  he saw as of profound significance the freedom exhibited by early Christians to embrace other languages such as Greek, Latin, and Coptic.  It was this openness that enabled the transmission of the gospel and its release from the confines of its original Jewish context  to go into all the world with the good news of salvation in Christ. 

In an important contrast with some other faiths (such as Islam), Christianity does not have particular intrinsic bond to one language or indeed any particular local culture. Christianity has therefore no inherent geographical boundary. As Sanneh understood – Christianity has thus a radical,  liberating and challenging message to every person and culture. 

Together with such other scholars as Andrew Walls and Brian Stanley Sanneh helped to develop a path through and beyond the “post-colonial moment”, which emphasised the need to discern how current issues need to be related to the expression of believing and belonging within a much larger reality than that which is immediately discernible in the current context and experience. In other words,  we must frame things instead in continuity with the memory of the expansive community of faith through the ages that is the witness of the Church. 

By means of such an approach,  as one scholar has put it (the Kenyan Professor Wanjiru M. Gitau),  contemporary theologians “should guide Christian communities to discern the signs of the times, like the sons of Issachar (1 Chron. 12:32) [during the rise of King David] who understood their times and knew what Israel needed to do before advancing God’s redemptive purposes.”

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^[i] He was part of the small circle of eighteenth-century African men and women whose writings in English are known to contemporary scholars. This group included Olaudah Equiano, Phillis Wheatley, Ignatius Sancho, James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, Ottobah Cugoano, and others. The study of their writings has brought out the importance for Anglicanism in West Africa of two developing movements of the time, namely  evangelical Christianity and antislavery activism. 

^[ii] In London, Quaque lived with and was educated by the Anglican clergyman John Moore (1714-68) who evidently connected him to evangelical and even Methodist and Huguenot circles. Moore himself had been educated at Merchant Taylors’ School and St. John’s College, Oxford and then received an MA from Corpus Christi College, Cambridge in 1756. His wife, Susanna Surel, was the daughter of a French Protestant refugee, connecting Moore to London’s Huguenot community and figures like Samuel Beuzeville, a friend who served as minister to the Huguenot church of St. Jean’s in Spitalfields. He served as a curate and lecturer at London’s St. Sepulchre’s Church and was a resident of nearby Charterhouse Square where undertook his educational labours for such as Quaque. He then rose from this relative obscurity to the prominent position of rector of St. Bartholomew the Great where he served until his death in 1768.

^[iii] His posthumous importance is enhanced for historians by the manuscript correspondence with his SPG employers in London and preserved private letters. Together, these original sources provide information on nearly fifty years, an unmatched span of material for a member of the period’s African British Atlantic community.  

^[iv] Under successively,  N. T. Hamlyn (Assistant Bishop of Western Equatorial Africa, 1905-9, and Bishop of Accra from 1909, and M. S. O’Rorke (Bishop of Accra 1913-24)

^[v] One of the points which Bishop Felix stressed was that in the entire history of Christianity, and more specifically of Anglicanism, in Ghana, it has been sustained and spread by the indigenous population. It is not therefore something to be understood as sustained by outsiders or simply as some kind of imperial legacy.  Of particular importance in this narrative has been the commitment to education which was such a marked concern of Anglican congregations. In the words of one historian of Anglicanism there: 

 “Almost invariably, as far as the records allow generalisation, in the towns the existence of Anglican congregations was coupled with the existence of, or pressure for, some form of Anglican School. Sometimes the church members provided the school out of their own resources. More usually, perhaps, they would have looked to the Diocese for financial help with buildings, furniture, books and salaries.” See Paul Jenkins, “The Anglican Church in Ghana, 1905-24 (I)” Transactions of the Historical Society of Ghana, June 1974, Vol. 15, No. 1 pp. 23-39 and part II of the article, in Transactions of the Historical Society of Ghana, December 1974, Vol. 15, No. 2 pp. 177-200,

^[vi] See the following works by Professor Sanneh that amply illustrate the scale of his achievement and the originality of his approach: ‘Christian Mission and the Pluralist Milieu: The African Experience’, Missiology: An International Review, Vol.XII, No.4 (October 1984). 

Translating the Message: The Missionary Impact on Culture, Maryknoll, 1989.

Whose Religion is Christianity: The Gospel Beyond the West, Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 2003. 

Disciples of All Nations: Pillars of World Christianity, Oxford University Press, 2007.