A Man Who Had Arrived

A kingdom that had just changed its religion

To understand Simeon Nsibambi you have to understand how new his church was.

The first Christian missionaries reached the kingdom of Buganda in 1877, twenty years before he was born. Within a decade the new faith had gone deep enough into the young men of the royal court that the kabaka moved against it, and in 1886 a group of them were burned at Namugongo rather than give it up. Buganda then did something almost without parallel in Africa: it took up Christianity at speed, from the top down and the bottom up at once, until within a generation the church was not a foreign mission station but a national institution with Baganda clergy, Baganda chiefs in its pews, and a cathedral on Namirembe Hill.

Nsibambi was born into the generation after all of that, in 1897. He never knew the persecution. He inherited the settlement.

The man himself

By his early thirties he was a public health officer in Kampala — a sanitation man, responsible for the ordinary, unglamorous business of keeping a growing city from killing its own people through its water and its waste. He married Eva Bakaluba, and they would eventually have twelve children. He was a Muganda of standing, and a baptised, believing member of the Anglican Church of Uganda.

That is close to the whole of what can be said about his first thirty years without reaching. Accounts mention his schooling, service in the First World War, a decorated record, a father of rank. Some of it is likely true. This book will not build on it, because the evidence is thinner than the confidence usually placed in it — and because the one thing no account disputes is worth more to us than all the rest.

At the height of his respectability, Simeon Nsibambi was not satisfied.

He looked at the church he had inherited — correct, established, second-generation — and at himself inside it, and concluded that something was missing from both. Weigh what it cost him to admit that. He was not a young man casting about for a direction. He was established. He held the thing that everyone around him agreed was worth holding.

The particular danger of a good position

There is a hunger that poverty produces and a hunger it cannot. The man who has nothing knows exactly what he lacks, and so does everyone who looks at him. The man who has everything and is still hungry is in a stranger position. He has no vocabulary for his own want. When he says he is dissatisfied, the people around him hear ingratitude, or ambition, or the restlessness of someone who does not know when he is well off.

So he learns not to say it. He becomes the most dangerous kind of respectable Christian: the one who has quietly agreed to stop expecting anything further. He is not a hypocrite. He believes what he professes. He simply no longer looks for it to make any difference he could name.

If you have been a Christian for a long time, you know this territory. You can tell when a sermon is sound. You know which songs you like. You could explain the gospel to a stranger without preparing. You have a place in the congregation and people would notice if you stopped coming. And somewhere underneath all of it, in a room you do not often open, there is a question you have stopped asking because asking it seemed ungrateful: is this all there is of God?

Discontent that is not sin

We are right to be suspicious of discontent. Most of it is appetite wearing a religious coat — wanting a bigger platform, a warmer feeling, a church that suits us better. That kind of restlessness is worth resisting, and Scripture spends a good deal of time telling us so.

But there is another kind, and the whole Bible assumes it. Moses had seen more of God than any man alive and asked to see His glory. David had the throne and wrote that his soul thirsted as a dry land. Paul had been caught up to the third heaven and still wrote that he pressed on, that he had not attained. These were not men in decline. They were men at their height, saying plainly that they had not come to the end of God.

The test is not whether you are dissatisfied. The test is what you are dissatisfied with, and what you are asking for. A man who wants a better position is restless. A man who wants more of God, and knows he cannot manufacture it, has begun to pray.

Where this leaves you

We do not know what Nsibambi's inner life was like in those years. Nobody recorded it, and it would be an act of invention to describe it — to put thoughts in his head, or a scene in his house, or words in his mouth on some particular evening. He left almost nothing of his own in writing. What we have is the shape his life took afterwards, and the shape is unmistakable: this was a man who had arrived and did not think arriving was enough.

That is the whole of chapter one, and it is enough to be going on with. Before anything happened to him, he wanted something. Before the meeting on the hill, before the resignation, before the movement that historians would eventually trace back to him, there was a man with a good job and a settled faith who would not stop being hungry.

You cannot organise a revival. You cannot schedule one. But you can refuse to be satisfied, and that refusal is not nothing — it is the one part of this whole story that was in Nsibambi's power, and it is the part that is in yours.

So begin where he began. Not with a plan. With an admission: that you have more religion than you have God, and that you would like that to change.

A prayer

Father, I have inherited more than I have sought. Save me from a faith that is correct and cold, held because it was handed to me and never because I went after it. Give me the holy discontent that will not settle, and keep me from mistaking it for ingratitude. Amen.