FRANK WESTON had been Bishop of Zanzibar since 1908 when he died unexpectedly on 2 November 1924, aged 53. He was a remarkable figure. He had excommunicated the Bishop of Hereford and had charged the Bishops of Mombasa and Uganda with heresy and schism. Vilified as the “Zanzibarbarian” by his critics, he had been mentioned in dispatches and appointed OBE for his military service in the First World War. In 1964, he was declared a saint by the diocese of Zanzibar. His grave at the Holy Cross, Magila, in Tanzania, remains a place of pilgrimage.
Although Weston had an Evangelical upbringing, he was increasingly attracted to Anglo-Catholicism. Studying theology at Trinity College, Oxford, in the early 1890s, he was drawn to Christian Socialism, but found the Christian Social Union too moderate, and joined Stewart Headlam’s more radical Guild of St Matthew. During Weston’s studies, Bishop Smythies of Zanzibar visited Oxford and, in a sermon at St Barnabas’s, Jericho, appealed for volunteers to bring Christ to Africa. Weston signed up, but subsequently failed the medical.
In 1893, Weston took a first in theology. Despite encouragement from William Sanday to pursue an academic career, his heart was set on the Church. After leaving Oxford, he lived at the Trinity College Mission, Stratford, in east London. In 1894, he was ordained deacon, and, in 1895, priest by the Bishop of St Albans. Weston’s Anglo-Catholicism and socialism seem to have alarmed the leaders of the mission, and he resigned in 1896. There followed a curacy at St. Matthew’s, Westminster (1896-98), where a monument now stands in memory of his time at St Matthew’s and his subsequent African ministry.
IN 1898, Weston passed his medical and joined the Zanzibar Mission of the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa, serving as Warden of St Mark’s Theological College, Mazizini, and Principal of St Andrew’s Training School, Kiungani. Alongside these duties, he was in 1903 made a Canon of Christ Church Cathedral, Zanzibar, and became its first Chancellor. Despite his many duties, he gained an Oxford BD in 1906 and his book The One Christ: An enquiry into the manner of the incarnation was published in 1907 (2nd revised edition, 1914), a work of Anglican Christology highly praised by Sanday, Charles Gore, and Henry Scott Holland.
In 1908, Weston succeeded Dr J. E. Hine as Bishop. He devoted much of his episcopate to promoting and supporting the establishment of a genuinely African ministry that eschewed the Europeanisation of Africans in favour of an African form of Anglicanism that would genuinely meet the spiritual, moral, and pastoral needs of the indigenous population in his vast diocese.
To achieve this, he introduced an Africanised training programme for ordinands, insisted on his white missionaries adopting African traditions in their ministries, and introduced a Swahili Liturgy and Prayer Book based on a modification of the 1549 Book of Common Prayer combined with the priest’s prayers from the Roman rite. By the time of his death in 1924, African clergy had come to outnumber the white missionaries. Weston was, as it were, a decolonising colonial bishop.
An impediment to his goal of Africanising the Anglican Church in his diocese was the casual racial superiority of his fellow missionaries. What would today be called anti-racism would be a central theme of Weston’s ministry. To counter what he saw as the pernicious effects of colonialism and Westernisation on African family life, Weston established in 1910-11 an Anglican order of nuns, the Community of the Sacred Passion, to provide education and healthcare to African women and their families. During the war and its aftermath, he wrote open letters condemning the German and British governments for their harsh treatment of Africans, publishing in 1917 “The Black Slaves of Prussia” and in 1920 “The Serfs of Great Britain”.
IT WAS the 1913 Kikuyu controversy that brought Weston to the attention of the general public and made him a figure of some notoriety. In June 1913, there took place at Kikuyu, in what is now Kenya, an interdenominational conference of the various Protestant missions active in Central East Africa.
At the conference, a Scheme of Federation was agreed to coordinate missionary activity among the various churches. At the conclusion of the conference, the Bishop of Mombasa, W. G. Peel, assisted by the Bishop of Uganda, J. J. Willis, presided at a joint communion service in a Presbyterian church, during which non-Anglican participants communicated.
For Weston, this “Pan-Protestantism’ threatened the foundations of the Church of England, the question being “whether life in fellowship with the Episcopate be, or be not, the evident condition of retaining a full membership in the Catholic Church, and, therefore, of approach to the altar of that Church”. For Weston, episcopacy had to be an essential feature of the Church of England if it was to be regarded as remaining part of the Catholic Church.
Weston responded to Kikuyu by publishing an Open Letter, “Ecclesia Anglicana: For What Does She Stand” (1913), addressed to the Bishop of St Albans, E. J. Jacob. He also wrote to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Randall Davidson, calling for the official censure of the two bishops’ actions at Kikuyu as “contrary to the faith of the Catholic Church and her practices”.
Weston accompanied his letter to Davidson with an indictment charging the Bishops of Mombasa and Uganda “with the grievous faults of propagating heresy and committing schism” and condemning them for having presided at a communion service at which “the sacrament [had been] given to many members of Protestant Bodies whose very existence is hostile to Christ’s Holy Church.”
His action caused uproar back in England and generated a pamphlet war and a flurry of articles in the press. Some considered Kikuyu a welcome step towards Christian unity and considered Weston’s action a return to the days of the Inquisition. Others praised Weston for his resolute defence of the faith. With the aim of resolving the crisis, Davidson summoned the bishops to England for personal interviews.
The outbreak of the First World War, however, prompted Peel, Willis, and Weston to hurry back to their respective dioceses before Davidson had been able reach his own conclusions. Back in Zanzibar, Weston had to deal with the crisis caused by the Germans’ internment of much of his staff in German East Africa. The British authorities’ conscription of Zanzibarians to serve as porters to the British forces on the African front prompted Weston to protest at their poor treatment. On being challenged to find porters himself, Weston raised and led a Carrier Corps to ensure the conscripts were treated humanely, an initiative for which he was later appointed OBE.
British IllustrationsFrank Weston in procession to St Martin-in-Fields, London, at the 1923 Anglo-Catholic Congress
The war delayed Davidson’s official response to Kikuyu until Easter 1915. The Archbishop tried to steer a middle ground between the warring factions by acknowledging that the principle of co-operation which had motivated the conference was in line with resolutions of earlier Lambeth Conferences, which had promoted “brotherly conference” between Anglicans and other denominations.
Davidson also emphasised, however, that such fraternal relations should not compromise the principles of Anglicanism. He accepted the joint communion service as a spontaneous communal act of devotion by Christian missionaries faced by common problems in a “heathen” country, but also maintained that the service was “admittedly abnormal, admittedly irregular”. Progress towards reunion might not be made, Davidson insisted, at the expense of compromising the Church of England’s commitment to episcopacy. In short, the Kikuyu service had been an understandable anomaly that set no precedent.
No party in the Kikuyu affair was happy. In his biography of Davidson, George Bell wrote: “The statement pleased neither side, and was blamed both by the friends of Zanzibar and by the friends of Uganda, for what it said or did not say. But the Archbishop was not perturbed, and held that this mixture of abuse was far more satisfactory than if he had been praised by one party, and been by the other denounced.”
IN HIS open letter to the Bishop of St Albans, Weston identified two other threats to Anglicanism that further demonstrated unfitness to engage in mission to Africa. These threats were “modernism” and “denial of Catholic practices”.
The threat of modernism was for Weston epitomised by the publication of Foundations: A statement of Christian belief in terms of modern thought (1912), edited by Jacob’s former chaplain B. H. Streeter (1874-1937), and one of the reasons that Weston addressed his Open Letter to the Bishop of St. Albans. Foundations was for Weston the climax of a series of pernicious modernist publications. What particularly angered him was that most of the contributors, including Streeter, were in Anglican Orders.
The reason for the intensity of Weston’s hostility towards modernism was that, in his eyes, it undermined missionary work in Africa. Modernist biblical criticism had led to scepticism, even among Anglican clergy, with regard to the objective truth of Jesus’s miracles, virgin birth, and resurrection. For Weston, such modernist views made it more difficult for Christian missionaries in Africa to counter Muslim claims that the Christian Scriptures were corrupt and unreliable and lent weight to the Muslim denial of the divinity of Christ. Such was Weston’s opposition to modernism that he even went so far as to “excommunicate” the Bishop of Hereford, John Percival, when Percival appointed Streeter as examining chaplain and to a canonry in 1915.
On 10 February 1915, Weston posted on the door of his cathedral in Zanzibar a formal declaration condemning Percival’s appointment of Streeter as amounting to “treason, sinful beyond all earthly treason, against the King who is above all earthly Kings”. Therefore, Weston declared, “there can be, and from this day forward there is no Communion in Sacred Things between Ourselves and the Right Reverend JOHN, Lord Bishop of Hereford, nor between Ourselves and any priest within his jurisdiction who shall make known his approval of the false doctrines now officially authorized with the Diocese of Hereford.”
Percival responded in a letter to The Times, in which he reprimanded Weston for his lack of Christian sympathy and misguided conception of duty, and expressed his surprise that Weston had not left his act of communication to the proper authority. When Percival stepped down in 1917, the appointment of his successor was equally contentious in Weston’s eyes. The new Bishop of Hereford was Herbert Hensley Henson, whom Weston considered to be an “Arch-Heretic”. Henson’s appointment prompted Weston to write yet another open letter, “Christ and His Critics” (1919), this time addressed to the European missionaries of his diocese, in which he attempted “to deal with very serious questions that concern all who hold communion with the See of Canterbury”.
THE third area of controversy in which Weston engaged in his open letter to the Bishop of St Albans concerned the Catholic character of the Anglican Church. Weston compares the favourable treatment meted out by the Bishop to Streeter to the punitive action that he had taken against “a priest who had invoked our Lady and two other Saints”. Weston’s conviction of the Catholic character of Anglicanism led to a further controversy in 1923, when, as the President of the 1923 Anglo-Catholic Congress, he called for those present to “fight for their tabernacles”.
Most controversially of all, he spontaneously decided to send a telegram of “respectful greetings” to Pope Pius XI, prompting Archbishop Davidson to describe Weston as “a source and centre of real danger to the Church at present owing to the unguarded way in which he writes and speaks”.
There was no danger to the Church in his closing speech to the conference, however. On the contrary, it was a stark reminder to all present and to us today of what our vocation to follow Christ means: “Now go out into the highways and hedges where not even the Bishops will try to hinder you. Go out and look for Jesus in the ragged, in the naked, in the oppressed and sweated, in those who have lost hope, in those who are struggling to make good. Look for Jesus. And when you see him, gird yourselves with his towel and try to wash their feet.”
ON RETURNING to Zanzibar after the Congress, Weston complained of extreme weariness, but, despite advice from his doctor “to go slow”, he continued to overwork. By October 1924, he had developed the carbuncle that would eventually be the cause of his death. Weston died at 4.30 a.m. on Sunday, 2 November 1924, and was buried that very same day at Church of the Holy Cross at Magila.
A century after his death what is Weston’s legacy?
Since his death in 1924 the doctrinal differences between the denominations have become increasingly insignificant. While this is to be welcomed in so far as it has led to closer relations between different churches, it raises questions about Anglican identity and about which doctrines and practices unite the Anglican Communion. It is perhaps here that the significance of the Kikuyu controversy lies. The bone of contention may now be sexuality rather than episcopacy, but the issue of how the Anglican Communion can achieve unity in diversity remains as relevant as it was in Weston’s day.
We may certainly have qualms about Weston’s choice of episcopacy as the battleground on which to fight for Anglican identity. Many of us may also feel that Weston’s construction of Anglican identity is imbalanced; for, as critics such as Henson pointed out, Weston ignores the contribution of the Protestant Reformation to the character of Anglicanism. Furthermore, in an age in which the main threats to Christianity are secularism, ignorance, and indifference, Anglicans should see non-episcopal churches not as sub-Christian foes, but as allies in our common duty to witness to Christ.
Nevertheless, we should at the same time recognise the importance of the questions that Weston raises, even if we do not agree with his answers. Weston reminds us that doctrine matters and confronts us with the question whether there are certain doctrines in Anglicanism which are non-negotiable. The question that Weston posed in response to the Kikuyu conference remains just as relevant today as it was in 1913: “Ecclesia Anglicana: For What Does She Stand?”
The Revd Dr David R. Law is Professor of Christian Thought and Philosophical Theology in the University of Manchester.