Henry Venn
Anglican clergyman and honorary secretary of the Church Missionary Society. He held that a mission should end in a self-supporting native church under native pastors, and he proposed Samuel Crowther as bishop.
Venn was born at Clapham on 10 February 1796, the son of its rector (Memoir of Henry Venn p. 1). As honorary secretary of the Church Missionary Society he issued in 1851 a minute on the ordination of native teachers (Memoir of Henry Venn Appendix C, first paper (1851), par. 10, pp. 413–414). Its tenth paragraph says that the ultimate object of a mission is “the settlement of a native Church, under native pastors, upon a self-supporting system”, and that the “euthanasia of a mission” comes when the missionary can hand all pastoral work to them and move on to “the regions beyond” (Memoir of Henry Venn Appendix C, first paper (1851), par. 10, pp. 413–414).
The Society’s historian records that when it seemed that Europeans could not live on the Niger, Venn’s plan was a purely African mission under an African bishop, and that he persevered against the doubts of the English missionaries in West Africa (Stock, History of the CMS vol. 2, p. 454). See Samuel Ajayi Crowther, the First African Anglican Bishop. He died on 13 January 1873 (Memoir of Henry Venn p. 373).
In the timeline
- 29 June 1864, firm dateSamuel Ajayi Crowther, the First African Anglican Bishop
Samuel Ajayi Crowther, enslaved as a boy and freed at Sierra Leone, is consecrated at Canterbury as bishop for the Niger, to lead a mission planned as purely African. By the mission society’s own account, English missionaries sent in 1890 override him; he dies the next year.