God's Irregular: Arthur Shearly Cripps

God's Irregular: Arthur Shearly Cripps is Douglas Steere's 1973 biography of an Anglican priest and poet who spent the greater part of his adult life as a missionary in Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. Cripps arrived there in 1901, served the Mashona people in the Victoria district, and lived among them in deliberate poverty until his death in 1952. Steere, a Quaker philosopher and one of the twentieth century's most respected writers on prayer and devotion, took up Cripps as a subject because here was a life in which the spiritual and the political could not be pulled apart. The book was written for a readership that knew little of Cripps, who was well regarded by his African neighbours and by a small circle of literary friends but almost unknown in the wider Christian world.

Steere's portrait is of a man who was irregular in the fullest sense: an Oxford-educated priest who dressed shabbily, walked or cycled from village to village, and refused the comforts that colonial society offered a white clergyman. Cripps wrote verse, fiction and essays throughout his years in Africa, and Steere draws on them to show how his devotional life and his convictions fed one another. The central thread is Cripps's public protest against the seizure of African land and the system of forced labour that settler rule imposed, a stand that cost him standing with the authorities and with many of his fellow whites. Steere does not present him as a flawless figure or reduce him to a cause. He lets the reader see a contemplative temperament, shaped by the English tradition of devotional poetry, working out what faithfulness meant when the church's institutions and the surrounding order were in tension with the gospel he preached.

The book remains worth reading because it offers a case study in costly witness that does not depend on heroics. Cripps did not found a movement or write a manifesto; he stayed, listened, shared his neighbours' hardships, and spoke plainly when he saw injustice. For anyone interested in the history of mission, in how Christians have responded to colonialism, or in the relationship between prayer and public action, Steere supplies a patient and sympathetic account from a writer who knew the inner life well.

Who should read this: readers drawn to spiritual biography, to the history of Christianity in Africa, or to questions of how contemplation and justice belong together. It will suit those who want a thoughtful portrait of one obscure life rather than a survey of mission history. It is not for readers looking for a critical or postcolonial analysis of the missionary enterprise, nor for those who want a fast-paced narrative; Steere writes as an admirer and a devotional thinker.