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- Anglicanism
Church of Nigeria
What is the Church of Nigeria?
Who is the leader of the Church of Nigeria?
What is the Church of Nigeria’s stance on women in ministry and same-sex relationships?
Church of Nigeria, independent Anglican church in Nigeria, the largest province (member church) in the Anglican Communion. In 2025 the church was estimated to have about 25 million members. (By comparison, the Church of England—the historic mother church of Anglicanism and the seat of the archbishop of Canterbury—reported about 21.75 million members in the United Kingdom and parts of continental Europe.) The church’s conservative views on social issues including same-sex partnerships and women in leadership have eroded its relationships with more liberal iterations of the Anglican Communion, particularly in Britain and North America. In 2025 Henry Ndukuba, the primate (leading archbishop) of the Church of Nigeria, announced that the church would sever ties with the Church of England in protest of the appointment of Sarah Mullally, the first female archbishop of Canterbury.
History and organization
The first formal Anglican missionary effort in Nigeria dates to 1842, when British reverend Henry Townsend and Yoruba missionary Samuel Crowther arrived in Badagry, Nigeria. The pair originated both the Yoruba Mission and Niger Mission, two bases of operation for Anglicans in Nigeria. In 1864 Crowther was ordained bishop of the Niger territory by the Church Missionary Society, making him the first Anglican bishop of African descent.
During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Anglicanism expanded steadily through evangelism, education, and medical missions across southern Nigeria and western Africa. The faith gradually spread inland along major trade routes and river systems, and the diocese of Lagos was established in 1919, followed by the diocese on the Niger the following year. In 1951 these dioceses and others in Sierra Leone, Ghana, and The Gambia were organized together as the Church of the Province of West Africa.
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By the 1970s, however, the Nigerian dioceses had grown rapidly and accounted for the majority of Anglicans in the region, prompting calls for a separate national province. In 1979 the Anglican dioceses in Nigeria formally joined together to form the Church of Nigeria, an independent member of the Anglican Communion. Between 1980 and 1999 an additional 50 dioceses were founded, making the Church of Nigeria the fastest-growing Anglican church in the world. In 2002 it organized its growing dioceses into ecclesiastical provinces, each of which is led by an archbishop. With the creation of 15 additional dioceses in 2025, the church now boasts 176 dioceses and 14 ecclesiastical provinces across the country. Its administrative headquarters are in Abuja.
Beliefs and tensions within the Anglican Communion
The Church of Nigeria has played a leading role in the conservative, traditionalist movement within global Anglicanism, often described as the Anglican realignment. Nigerian church leaders have been among the most vocal critics of the progressive theological positions held in some Anglican provinces and have supported the establishment of alternative Anglican structures that seek to preserve what they regard as traditional Anglican doctrine. Given that most of the world’s Anglicans live in Africa (the Church of the Province of Uganda and the Anglican Church of Kenya are the third and fourth largest Anglican bodies, with 16.3 and 5 million members, respectively), and the Church of Nigeria is the largest Anglican body, the growing influence of the faithful in the Global South has played an increasingly important role in debates and decision-making within the broader Anglican Communion in the 21st century.
Women in ministry and same-sex relationships
Since the late 20th century, the Church of Nigeria has voiced disapproval over the stances of more liberal members of the Anglican Communion, notably regarding what it considers appropriate roles for women in the church and the acceptance of LGBTQ+ Anglicans.
The first woman to become an Anglican priest was Florence Li Tim-Oi of Hong Kong, who was ordained in Zhaoqing, China, in 1944. Although Anglican churches in the United States, Canada, Hong Kong, and New Zealand began ordaining women as priests as early as the 1970s, the Church of Nigeria resisted such developments. At the 1978 Lambeth Conference, Nigerian leadership opposed the recommendation to allow the ordination of women as deacons and priests, though the proposal sparked debate within the church. In 1992 a Nigerian bishop ordained three women as deacons, but the primate soon nullified those ordinations. In 2010 then-primate Nicholas Okoh endorsed the ordination of women as deacons, though only in limited forms of ministry such as service in hospitals or schools. The Church of Nigeria has since rejected the appointment of women to the priesthood and episcopacy.
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The church has also consistently taken a conservative stance on the issue of homosexuality, specifically rejecting both same-sex unions and the ordination of members of the LGBTQ+ community, placing it at odds with some other members of the Anglican Communion. In 2003 primate of all Nigeria Peter Akinola drew international attention after V. Gene Robinson of New Hampshire became the first openly gay Anglican bishop. Akinola said that the Episcopal Church of the United States had “chosen the path of deviation from the historic faith” and erroneously called homosexuality “an aberration unknown even in animal relationships.” In 2023 Nigerian leaders similarly opposed the blessing of same-sex unions in the Church of England. Archbishop Henry Ndukuba criticized the move as undermining traditional Anglican teaching and warned that such decisions threatened the unity of the Anglican Communion.
In 2025 both of these issues came to a head with the appointment of the first female archbishop of Canterbury, Sarah Mullally. Although no individual is recognized as being the leader of all the churches that constitute the Anglican Communion, the archbishop of Canterbury is considered the senior bishop—the “first among equals”—and presides over the decennial Lambeth Conference of the communion’s bishops. The Church of Nigeria rejected Mullally’s appointment owing to both her gender and her support for the LGBTQ+ community. Calling the decision “a devastating one that ignores the current situation and challenges being faced by the Anglican Communion,” Archbishop Ndukuba declared that the Church of Nigeria would sever ties with the Church of England.
Formalizing the Anglican realignment
Under Akinola’s leadership in the early 2000s, the Church of Nigeria established the Convocation of Anglicans in North America (CANA) to provide a way for conservative congregations that were alienated by the actions of the Episcopal Church to retain fellowship with the Anglican Communion. CANA’s first missionary bishop, Martyn Minns of Virginia, was installed in May 2007 against the wishes of the archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams. In 2009 some conservative American churches broke from the Episcopal Church to form the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA), with CANA serving as a founding partner. In the following years many CANA congregations were incorporated into dioceses of ACNA, while others remained affiliated with the Church of Nigeria through the Church of Nigeria North American Mission.
Nigerian bishops also played a significant role in the creation of the influential Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON, now the Global Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans), helping to organize its first international gathering in Jerusalem in 2008. Attended by more than 300 conservative Anglican bishops from across the communion in response to disputes regarding biblical authority, church governance, and human sexuality, the meeting produced the Jerusalem Statement and Declaration, which affirmed traditional Anglican doctrine and the authority of scripture. This document would become the key doctrinal basis for the emerging fellowship of churches.
The Church of Nigeria was also a founding force of the Global South Fellowship of Anglican Churches (GSFA), a coalition of conservative Anglican provinces primarily in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Formed in 1994, the fellowship has increasingly served as a forum for traditionalist provinces to coordinate responses to doctrinal disputes. Nigerian archbishops have played prominent roles in the organization, which has often worked alongside the GAFCON movement in advocating for traditional interpretations of Anglican doctrine and biblical authority. (GSFA became a covenant body in 2019, and a number of its original provinces—including the Church of Nigeria—refrained from joining as formal covenanted members.)
In the 2020s members of GAFCON and GSFA moved toward what some have seen as a schism with the Church of England and the more liberal provinces of the Anglican Communion. These traditionalist groups have rejected the authority of the archbishop of Canterbury and that of the historical “instruments of communion” (e.g., the Lambeth Conference and the Anglican Consultative Council, a representative body of bishops, clergy, and laypeople from each province) in disputes over what they considered departures from the faith. This development reflects a broader shift in which many Anglicans locate the center of the faith outside its Western strongholds. In March 2026, weeks before the installation of Sarah Mullally, GAFCON issued “The Abuja Affirmation,” encouraging members to disengage from the historic Anglican Communion and its Canterbury-based structures to establish a new body, the Global Anglican Communion, as its orthodox replacement. Framed by its proponents as an act of reform rather than schism, the affirmation asserted that Anglican unity rests not on shared institutional history but on adherence to historic Anglican doctrine.