S.G. "Pa" Elton and the Nigerian Pentecostal Generation
A British missionary from Bradford, Sydney Granville Elton arrived in Nigeria in 1937 and stayed fifty years — mentoring Benson Idahosa, William Kumuyi and a generation of African Pentecostal leaders.
Sydney Granville Elton — universally called "Pa Elton" — was born in Bradford, Yorkshire, in 1906. He was sent to Nigeria by the Apostolic Church in 1937 and was based for most of his life in Ilesa, in what is now Osun State. He broke from the mission's mainstream after disputes over the use of medicine and worked instead as an independent Pentecostal teacher.
His home in Ilesa became an open school for any preacher who would come. Benson Idahosa of Church of God Mission, William Kumuyi of Deeper Life, and dozens of founders of the African independent and neo-Pentecostal churches sat under his teaching, were prayed for in his living room, or received books from his library when nothing comparable was available in Nigeria.
He refused offers to return to England and died at his post in Ilesa in 1987. Nigerian Pentecostal historians routinely describe him as the spiritual grandfather of the country's Pentecostal explosion of the late twentieth century.