The East African Revival

History and Legacies

Kevin Ward, Emma Wild-Wood, Emma Wild-Wood

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317034834
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Religión étnica y tribal

From the 1930s the East African Revival influenced Christian expression in East Central Africa and around the globe. This book analyses influences upon the movement and changes wrought by it in Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Kenya, Tanzania and Congo, highlighting its impact on spirituality, political discourse and culture. A variety of scholarly approaches to a complex and changing phenomenon are juxtaposed with the narration of personal stories of testimony, vital to spirituality and expression of the revival, which give a sense of the dynamism of the movement. Those yet unacquainted with the revival will find a helpful introduction to its history. Those more familiar with the movement will discover new perspectives on its influence.

PART 1
Historical Overview

Introduction

Kevin Ward

The East African Revival emerged as an important movement within African Protestantism in the late 1920s and 1930s. It continues profoundly to influence the Churches of East Africa to this day. The Revival has a two-fold origin. The first relates to dissatisfaction with the spiritual state of the Native Anglican Church of Uganda. The Church had been founded some 50 years earlier and had attained a privileged status in colonial Ugandan society. But to keen Christians, the Church had sacrificed its evangelistic zeal and the quality of its Christian discipleship by its compromises with both traditional culture and the material opportunities opened up by modern society. This dissatisfaction was articulated by Simeoni Nsibambi, a member of the chiefly class of Buganda (the central area of the British Protectorate of Uganda, proud of its distinctive cultural institutions and its monarch, the Kabaka). The other factor in promoting the East African Revival was the Ruanda Mission, which operated as an autonomous mission of the Church Missionary Society in South West Uganda and whose main energies were directed to pioneer evangelism in the Belgian territory of Ruanda-Urundi, a League of Nations mandate. The Ruanda Mission stood firmly and decisively for a conservative evangelical theological position with regard to the Bible, promoting an urgent quest for renewal and personal holiness as understood by the Keswick movement. Revival brethren often date the origin of the East African Revival to the meeting in 1929 between Nsibambi and Dr Joe Church, the pioneer Ruanda missionary, at Gahini in eastern Ruanda. Nsibambi’s circle in Kampala began to supply the mission at Gahini with zealous, committed Ugandan (mainly Baganda) hospital workers and educationalists. It was from within this group of workers that revival first emerged in Gahini in the early 1930s. Revival spread to other Ruanda1 Mission stations in Ruanda and Burundi and back into the Kigezi district of Uganda. From there its influence widened into other parts of Uganda and, by the late 1930s, it had become a significant movement within the Church in Buganda. Dr Joe Church did not regard himself as the initiator of this revival – it was a movement of the Holy Spirit and the indigenous workers were the instruments. But Dr Church also understood that his considerable skills as an organizer could be utilized to further Revival. The dissemination of publicity, the planning of revival meetings and regular correspondence with fellow revivalists were all accomplished with great energy and creativity. In particular Joe Church was able to use his contacts with a wide range of other missionaries and his standing with government officials to enable his fellow revivalists to spread the message of the revival far and wide and to enable his fellow African revivalists to travel. The multi-racial composition of the mission ‘teams’ was stressed. Dr Church saw himself as a co-worker with African brethren. The collaboration was particularly close with William Nagenda, a Muganda working as a teacher in Gahini, who emerged as the most prominent dynamic preacher of revival. By the early 1940s the revival was having an impact in Kenya, Tanganyika and the Sudan. Although Anglican in origin, it affected other denominations too, notably the Presbyterians and Methodists of Kenya, and the Lutherans and Mennonites of Tanganyika. The Revival did not spread significantly to African Independent Churches nor, to the surprise of many observers, did it cause significant breakaways from the mission churches.

Often called, in its initial stages, ‘the Ruanda movement’ because the first manifestations were in Gahini, it became popularly and universally known as the ‘Balokole’ – the Saved People, a Luganda word. This name was at first a rather suspicious and derisory epithet, but gradually it came simply to describe what was, after all, the basic premise of revivalist teaching: the gift of salvation through faith in the Cross of Jesus Christ. Revivalists thus came to accept the term ‘Balokole’. But they more often refer to themselves as ‘Ab’oluganda’ (brothers and sisters in Luganda), or ‘The Brethren’ or ‘The Fellowship’ in English. The singing of the Luganda hymn Tukutendereza Yesu (We praise you Jesus) became the defining marker of membership of the Fellowship, sung regularly and often at meetings, whether in church or in homes or in the market place. ‘Tukutendereza’ came to be used as a greeting between brethren. The Luganda terminology spread far beyond the areas where Luganda was used and has remained part of the basic vocabulary of all Balokole.

Revivalists evidence the classic traits of Evangelical revivalism – a focus on sin and repentance, the Cross, the baptism of the Spirit, sanctification and the quest for holiness. The East African Revival bears the hallmarks of American evangelical revivalism (Finney’s Revivals of Religion often accompanied Church and his team of evangelists on their journeys) and Keswick holiness. But, from the beginning, it had a very distinctive African feel about it, not least because it was the African leaders who provided the energy, the intellectual and emotional dynamic. The Keswick movement, with its English origins strongly influenced by the American holiness tradition, had emphasized that converted Christians should search for a ‘second blessing’ beyond initial conversion. This was never the message of the Balokole, which always focused on the initial conversion. Conversion was an overwhelming experience of brokenness at the Cross, which provoked a public confession of sin. Previous Christian experience apart from this event was not recognized as ‘kulokoka’ – the state of being saved. Joe Church had in his student days been influenced by Frank Buchman’s Oxford Group movement. Some of the innovations which were a feature of that movement – public confession in informal meetings and the willingness openly to express sexual temptations, for example – became part of Balokole meetings. But in the end, the Revival rejected the increasing moral rather than theological emphases of the Oxford Group movement (Moral Re-armament as it became known after the Second World War). That is not to say that the Revival did not insist on absolute standards, but it always insisted that the Christian life could only be lived as the outcome of the salvation achieved by Christ and neither moralism nor indeed the search for a victorious life could ever become the chief end of the Christian life – which begins and ends at the Cross.

It may be surprising that such a radically Evangelical emphasis could at first engender such alarm among evangelical church leaders, bishops, pastors and missionaries. The call, often made with considerable stridency, for African clergy and European missionaries to confess their sins and to come in brokenness to the Cross, was often resented by leaders in a hierarchical church and by missionaries for whom the boundaries of propriety in their relationship with Africans had been unquestioned in a colonial milieu. The preaching of a radical equality between clergy and laity, between Europeans and Africans, was threatening. Yet, one of the reasons that the Revival did eventually become accepted within the churches in the 1950s was that the Balokole resisted the call (to them the siren call) of African nationalism. They eschewed a militant anti-colonialism; nor did they have faith in a new world of African politicians and national politics. Balokole refused to take the oaths demanded of militant nationalists in the Kenyan Mau Mau movement of the1950s. They refused to kill or expropriate the goods of Tutsi in the Hutu revolution in Rwanda. They refused to fall in with the Buganda nationalism of the Kabaka Yekka movement. For them Yesu Yekka – Jesus Only – was the cry. But nor were they enthusiastic about a wider Ugandan nationalism. Nevertheless they did see themselves as modelling a non-racial, non-tribal, non-ethnic solidarity with those who were saved.

The Balokole emphasized their counter-cultural identity. They refused to make compromises with the traditional spirituality and the idolatrous practices of the old religion. They would not participate in the rituals which bound together people of different groups and status. They insisted on monogamy. Balokole were marked by their upward mobility and the individualism of modernity, putting store on the nuclear family, on clean and tidy houses, on schooling for their children. You could be saved as a simple farmer, certainly, but through the Balokole you could also develop connections and aspirations that would better enable you enter the wage economy. But Balokole were not isolated individuals. They wanted to model a purified form of traditional community, emphasizing their membership of a new clan, recreating old communitarian values in a new form, not least in their practice of arranging marriages within the fellowship. But their entry into the new world opened by colonialism and nationalism must also be on their own terms. Their insistence on a stubborn honesty and a simple life-style, their refusal to follow fashion or to seek the trappings of consumerism all set them at odds with the aspirations of other East Africans as they came to terms with modernity.

Inevitably such values came under particular pressure in the next generation. A general liberalization of the strict ethos within the main body of Revivalists created pressures and resulted in a number of controversies appealing to a return to the original core values of the Revival. The emergence of the Bazukufu (the Reawakened) revivalists in the 1970s was one symptom of those tensions, appealing perhaps most to those who were least able or willing to take advantage of the possibilities of education and social mobility. On the other hand, children of revivalists often prospered educationally or socially – gaining entry into elite jobs in the civil service, becoming successful entrepreneurs, going into politics. It was not impossible, but nor was it easy, to identify closely with the old Revival values for such children. But perhaps the biggest threat to the continuation of the East African Revival as the leading edge of Protestant spirituality has been the emergence from the 1970s of the charismatic renewal movement, whose appeal was largely to the young and educated. In the popular mind of ordinary East Africans, the Pentecostalism which emerged from the schools and formed new churches (rather than remaining within the older mission initiated organizations) was just a new version of the old revival. All were Balokole. But for the Fellowship itself the charismatic movement presented a challenge: young people were seen as rejecting the guidance of their elders, refusing to abide by the strictly conservative values of the older generation of saved even if, in other respects, they expressed evangelical values. As a result, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, in some parts of East Africa, the Balokole movement is seen as a movement of the old, which is slowly giving way to newer forms of revivalism and to spirit-focused rather than cross-centred movements. Perhaps only in Uganda, does the Balokole movement (at least its ‘orthodox’ forms) continue to represent a strong and vigorous tradition.

Joe Church is a crucial figure in the definition of what is ‘orthodox’ Balokole. Even after their retirement, Joe and Decie Church continued to live in East Africa – they made their home in a suburb of Kampala, and Joe became a participant in the controversies within the Fellowship in Buganda which gave rise to the Bazukufu movement, siding with the more ‘moderate’ forces. His own published writings were important for making known to a wider Evangelical world, the unique characteristics of the East African Revival and commending its particular spirituality on a global scale. It is, by and large, his understanding of the Revival movement, which informs the worldwide Evangelical interest in the East African Revival.

I first consulted Joe Church’s meticulously ordered and fascinating archive of unpublished papers and correspondence in 1980 (the visit has even left a record in the archive!).2 It provides fascinating data on Joe Church’s involvement in all three arenas of mission, revival and church, complementing and extending the rich archives of the CMS Ruanda Mission, which are housed (for material before 1960) at the University of Birmingham. The Ruanda Mission was renamed the Mid-Africa Ministry of CMS in 19903 and in 2002 was re-integrated into the parent mission, the Church Mission Society. The archive of RM/MAM from 1960 to 2002 is deposited in Oxford, near the CMS headquarters and is not yet open to public access. The Joe Church collection, now held in the Henry Martyn Centre at Westminster College, Cambridge, is a tribute to his importance for the development of the movement. Its availability for scholarly research will greatly enhance the ability of historians, theologians and missiologists to assess the importance of the Balokole movement.

There is a dawning realization, however, that there are, in a sense, a number of ‘Balokole’ movements, sometimes only loosely connected. There is the dominant tradition, inscribed in English, represented by Joe Church, William Nagenda and Bishop Festo Kive...