Bishop Josiah says Australians must stop being polite about their faith if they want to match the more than 14 million people who regularly attend church in Nigeria each Sunday.

Bishop Josiah Idowu-Fearon is part of one of the fastest-growing sections of the Anglican Communion. With at least 14 million committed members, Nigeria is the Communion’s largest Province, meaning it has already reached well over 10 per cent of the country’s 130 million people.
Much of the church’s rapid growth has come through a strategy of church planting, especially in rural areas like in Bishop Fearon’s Diocese of Kaduna. The Bishop himself is very much a hands-on leader. He makes every effort to be personally and directly involved in these new ministries as they start.
So when it comes to talking about how Sydney Diocese can reach 10 per cent of its population, you could be forgiven for expecting him to suggest a host of careful plans and tactics. But instead, it quickly becomes clear that Bishop Fearon puts strategy clearly in second place, behind the testimony of lives changed by Christ.
“Christians really need to express their virtues corporately, as a community,” he says. “The church is not a building. The church is made up of men and women who have come to know Jesus Christ as their personal Lord and Saviour.
“It is by incorporating people, and by letting them see the difference that Christ makes in one’s life, that they will come to a personal, saving faith in Jesus Christ.”
Kaduna Diocese remains a ‘flashpoint’ for Christian-Muslim relations, being one of the few areas in Nigeria where the population is split almost evenly between the two groups. Across most of the country, Muslims represent around half of the total population, and are outspoken about their actions being determined by their faith.
In this environment, Bishop Fearon says he has learnt that Christians must adopt a similar willingness ‘not to shy away from letting people know that we are Christians’.
“Here [in Australia], we are polite and we don’t want people to know that we are Christians,” he says.
“If Sydney really wants to achieve this 10 per cent within 10 years, we must step out from the ‘stiff upper lip’ and being ‘polite’ about people’s salvation. Their salvation is a matter of life or death, so we need to speak out. If this is what we believe in, we need to live by the biblical principles. These are practical ways of helping people think and come to know Jesus Christ.”

Working largely in rural areas – where he says people are generally more willing to listen than in cities – the Diocese has seen many people become Christian as the gospel message is explained. These new converts provide the founding members for a church plant, and are discipled by more experienced Christians. The idea is that these people eventually learn to be the evangelists themselves, sharing their faith so the churches become like cells multiplying in surrounding villages.
In addition to this, Bishop Fearon has gone to great lengths to see that the clergy and evangelists of his Diocese are trained for their ministry. Many in Kaduna now use Moore College’s PTC Correspondence Course to prepare for church planting work among people in rural areas.
“Most people [in rural areas] cannot read or write, but if they have well-equipped evangelists who know the Bible, who know doctrine, then they will be able to teach people in their language,” he says. “That’s why the PTC program is very, very important in our discipling of new converts.”
Bishop Fearon is hoping that a plan to translate the PTC Course into the Hausa language will soon come to fruition. Hausa is spoken by many in Nigeria and across much of West Africa.

Visiting Sydney in October at the invitation of Archbishop Peter Jensen and Moore College, Bishop Fearon spent time meeting with students at Moore College, as well as addressing the diocesan Mission Taskforce and several congregations, including St Andrew’s Cathedral and St Matthias’, Centennial Park.
Since leading Bible studies at the 1999 session of Synod, his forthright yet warm and friendly style has endeared him to many in the Diocese. He has become a regular visitor to Sydney, and a close relationship has been formed between the Dioceses of Kaduna and Sydney.
Archbishop Jensen has been invited to visit Nigeria next year as a special guest at a planned meeting of all African bishops. In return, Archbishop Jensen has invited the Primate of Nigeria, Archbishop Peter Akinola, to visit Sydney.
“Trust me, I have gone through to my Primate and I’ve said to him, ‘you are coming to Sydney!’” Bishop Fearon smiles. “People say all sorts of things about Sydney – that they are unbending, straitjacketed, stiff, and what have you. But there is vibrant life here, and because of the scholarship there is so much that the evangelical church of the Anglican Communion in the [developing world] can learn from Sydney.”
As an outspoken evangelical, Bishop Fearon hopes Sydney Diocese, with its heritage of evangelicalism, will play a leading role in the Anglican Communion as it undergoes significant change. “This is the only diocese I know of in the West that is evangelical and conservative,” he said. “It is evangelical not just in words, but in scholarship and tradition.
“The Diocese is very well endowed. I believe your endowment is for a purpose – to give purposeful, evangelical leadership to the Anglican Communion in light of the revisionist agenda of many others. That is a big challenge.”