By Lanre Ogundipe
Before the Nigerian church became a landscape of cathedrals, universities, hospitals, schools, publishing houses and vast administrative structures, there was a simpler question:Who paid for the mission?
It is a useful place to begin because preaching required more than conviction. It required land, buildings, teachers, books, housing, transport, medical facilities and an administrative system capable of sustaining the work.
Faith required an economy.
Somewhere between the first mission station and the modern religious institution lies a long history of money, land, labour, ownership, trusteeship and institutional expansion.
That is the trail worth following.
The Financial Architecture
The surviving records of the Church Missionary Society, CMS, reveal that the missionary enterprise was never without a financial architecture.
The archives contain accounts of money received, mission expenditure, building funds, receipts and disbursements, landed property returns and records relating to the Native Pastorate Fund. They also contain papers concerning mission property and its administration. This tells us something important.
The mission was not sustained by prayer alone. Neither was it sustained simply by money from Europe.
The easy version of missionary history assumes that Europeans supplied the capital, built the institutions and Nigerians merely received them.The documentary trail is more complicated.
Nigerians gave land, contributed money, supplied labour and became teachers, catechists, pastors and administrators. CMS Grammar School, Lagos, established in 1859, developed within this growing African participation in Christian education. The distinction is crucial:
The person who provides a resource is not necessarily the person who owns the resulting asset. A community could provide land without holding the legal title to the school subsequently built on it.
An individual could contribute to a building fund without acquiring ownership of the building. A government could provide a grant without becoming proprietor. A missionary society could administer property without that property becoming the personal possession of the missionary occupying it.
Contribution, ownership, control and stewardship are not the same thing.That distinction will matter throughout this investigation. The School Was More Than a Classroom
The school was one of the earliest expressions of the institutional economy.
It required land, buildings, teachers, books and maintenance. By the 1930s, Protestant and Catholic missions together operated a vast network of elementary and secondary institutions, alongside government and Native Administration schools.
But scale does not answer the question of ownership.
Who provided the land?
Who paid for construction?
Who paid the teachers?
Who administered the money?
Who held the title?
And what happened when control changed?
The questions become particularly important because government gradually entered the system through regulation and grants in aid. The mission, community and State were therefore no longer operating in completely separate worlds.
The financial architecture had become layered. Follow the Books
The mission’s economic activity was not confined to schools.
The CMS Bookshops archive, covering 1876 to 1982, contains committee minutes, annual reports, correspondence and financial papers, including audited accounts from 1906 to 1976. That is an important documentary trail.
It demonstrates that the missionary enterprise developed organised commercial and distribution activities around books and educational materials.
But this is where investigative discipline becomes essential.
The existence of audited accounts does not automatically tell us that an enterprise was operated for private profit, nor does it tell us how every surplus was applied.Those questions belong to the accounts themselves.Revenue must be distinguished from expenditure. Surplus from profit.
Institutional income from personal income.
Until the underlying financial records have been examined, conclusions must remain conclusions to be tested.
Then There Was Land Money can be spent.
Land remains.
The CMS records contain landed property returns and property records dealing with matters such as tenure, estimated value, authority to sell and the treatment of proceeds.
That changes the character of the investigation.
The question is no longer merely what the mission preached or what it collected. It becomes: What did the institution hold, how did it acquire it, under what legal arrangement was it held, and what eventually happened to it?
The answer cannot be inferred from occupation.
The missionary living in a mission house did not necessarily own it.A bishop administering property did not necessarily own it personally.A church using community land did not necessarily possess unrestricted title.
The deed matters.
The conveyance matters.
The trustees matter.
The court record matters.
The property register matters.
Then the State Took the Vineyard
The decisive rupture came after independence and particularly after the Civil War. In 1970, the East Central State Government announced a complete takeover and management of primary and secondary schools from voluntary agencies, local councils and private proprietors as part of its postwar educational policy.
The Education Edict transferred to the State property used for voluntary agency and private schools, together with associated rights and liabilities. The significance goes beyond education. An institutional asset base built over generations had changed hands. The question therefore changed.
It was no longer simply:
Who paid?
It became:
Who owned?
And the answer was not always obvious.
The Courts Had to Decide
The legal record reveals just how complicated the question could become. In Registered Trustees of the Apostolic Church v Attorney General, Mid Western State, the dispute involved claims to two schools, their buildings and the land on which they stood.
The Supreme Court emphasised the importance of establishing the legal corporate status of the claimant and the proprietary rights being asserted.
The lesson is straightforward.Historical association with an institution does not automatically establish legal ownership.
Administration is not necessarily title.Usage is not necessarily ownership. Religious identity is not a substitute for legal personality or documentary evidence.The takeover of mission schools also produced disputes over compensation.
In Attorney General of the Mid Western State v Chief Sam Warri Essi, the State’s acquisition of Essi College, Warri, under the Education Edict became the subject of litigation involving proprietary rights and a claim for compensation for compulsory acquisition.
This makes it impossible to tell the story honestly as either a simple tale of government theft or an uncomplicated transfer of public property.The legal questions were more precise:
What interest existed? What was acquired? Under what law?
And who was entitled to compensation?
Then Came the Return. The story did not end with State control. From the late 1990s onward, some States began returning former mission schools to private or religious managers.
Lagos provides a documented example. In 2001, 48 secondary schools were returned to former private managers. A University of Lagos study found that the arrangement involved a deed of indemnity and subsequently raised questions about administration, infrastructure and staff welfare.
But even the word return requires caution.
Return what?
Ownership?
Management?
Use?
Buildings?
Land?
Or some combination?
The old institution did not simply reappear in precisely the form in which it had existed before State intervention.
The history was therefore not a straight line of accumulation.
It was a history of formation, intervention, transfer, interruption and reconstruction.
The Question Changes Again. The religious economy of Nigeria did not begin with the modern megachurch.
It has a genealogy. It was built through faith, missionary funding, community participation, land, labour, donations, public support and institutional enterprise.
It passed through different hands.
Some institutions were taken over.
Some were contested.
Some were returned.
New ones were subsequently built.
That history makes one conclusion unavoidable, even if it does not yet answer all the questions:
The source of a resource, the ownership of the resulting asset and the control of that asset are three different questions.
A donor is not automatically an owner. An administrator is not necessarily a beneficiary. A government grant does not by itself establish government ownership.An institutional surplus does not by itself establish private profit.
Every proposition must therefore be tested against the record.
The Spiritual Question
The old institutions were built by people who often believed they were building for generations they would never live long enough to see.
Then another generation inherited them.
Others administered them.
The State took control of some.
The courts became involved.
Later generations sought their return.
The buildings remained while custodians changed.
That brings us quietly to stewardship. The Biblical steward does not confuse possession with ownership. What is placed in his hands carries an obligation.
The issue, therefore, is not whether the church may have money, own land, build schools or hospitals, or operate enterprises.
The deeper question is: What happens when the machinery created to serve the mission gradually becomes something that the mission itself must serve?
That is not an accusation.
It is a question.
And history gives us sufficient reason to ask it.
The Vineyard Outlives the Vinedresser
The first enduring lesson of this excavation may be that the religious economy is not merely a story about money.
It is a story about what generations build, what later generations inherit, and what happens when the hands holding the trust change.
The person who receives the vineyard is not necessarily its owner.He is its custodian. Every generation that inherits an institution inherits more than its assets. It inherits a responsibility to the purpose for which those assets exist.
The vineyard outlives the vinedresser. And when it does, the question is no longer who planted it. It is whether those who inherited it remembered why it was planted.
Ogundipe is a Public Affairs Analyst, former President of the Nigeria Union of Journalists and African Union of Journalists, and itinerant Bible teacher, writes from Abuja.