The Question He Could Not Put Down

The Englishman who came to Kampala to rest

In September 1929 a medical missionary named John Edward Church — Joe Church to everyone — came over the border into Uganda for a few days off.

He was twenty-nine or thirty, an English doctor of the Ruanda Mission, and he had spent the previous two years running the hospital at Gahini in eastern Rwanda through famine and disease. By his own account he had come to the end of his own resources: tired, discouraged, and short of the thing he was supposed to be dispensing. He was not on a preaching tour. He was staying with friends on Namirembe Hill, the ridge above Kampala where the Anglican cathedral stands, and he was there to recover.

Nsibambi found him there and asked him a question.

The one thing he wanted to know

The wording is remembered slightly differently depending on who is telling it, but the substance is always the same: there is something missing — in me, and in the church of Uganda. Can you tell me what it is?

That question is the reason this book exists. Almost everything else about Nsibambi is disputed, thin, or reconstructed. This is not. It is the most solidly attested thing he ever said, and everything that follows in his life turns on it.

Church, as it happened, had something to say. He had absorbed the “victorious life” teaching of the Keswick conventions in England — a strand of holiness preaching concerned less with forgiveness than with the fullness of the Holy Spirit and a Christian life lived in power rather than defeat. It was not a subject he had mastered. It was a subject he was himself hungry about, which is probably why the conversation went where it did instead of ending politely.

Notice what he did not ask

He did not ask for a method. He did not ask what programme the mission was running, or what he might organise in his parish, or how to grow the church at Namirembe. He did not ask for a technique he could take away and apply.

He also did not ask for a diagnosis of somebody else. This is worth sitting with, because it is the rarer half. He said: there is something missing in me, and in the church. He named himself first. A man in his position could very easily have asked what was wrong with the younger generation, or the chiefs, or the missionaries, or the nominal Christians filling the pews. Instead he put himself at the front of the sentence.

And he asked it of a stranger. A tired one, at that — not a famous preacher, not a bishop, not anyone whose answer would have carried weight in Kampala. Nsibambi was a man of some standing asking a wrung-out doctor on holiday to tell him what was wrong with him. There is no way to do that while protecting your dignity. He evidently decided his dignity was the cheaper thing.

The question we ask instead

Most of us do ask questions about our faith. They are usually a slightly different shape.

We ask what should I do? — which is a good question, and also a safe one, because the answer arrives as a task and a task can be completed. We ask why is the church like this? — which locates the trouble at a comfortable distance. We ask how do I feel more? — which turns out to be a question about ourselves wearing the clothes of a question about God.

Nsibambi's question is harder than all three because it is unguarded. It admits a lack without knowing the remedy. It hands the diagnosis to somebody else. It leaves him standing there with nothing to offer and no idea what will be said next.

That is why the question is rare, and it is why it works. You cannot ask it and remain in control of the outcome.

Asking it out loud

There is a difference between privately suspecting you are missing something and saying so to another person. The first costs nothing. It can go on for decades, and often does; a quiet ache that never becomes a sentence.

The second changes things, and not only because the other person might have an answer. It changes things because saying it out loud is the moment you stop managing the problem. As long as the hunger stays inside you, you can decide what it means, when to attend to it, how seriously to take it. Spoken, it is out of your hands.

Nsibambi had presumably been hungry for years. We do not know; nobody wrote it down. What we know is that in September 1929 he stopped keeping it to himself, and that within the decade a movement was running across East Africa that historians would trace to that conversation.

Not because the question was magic. Because a question like that is a door, and he opened it.

Your turn

Is there a person you could ask? Not an audience — one person, who knows God better than you do, or differently, or longer. Someone whose answer might cost you something to hear.

And could you frame it as he did: not what should I do, not why is everyone else like this, but what is missing in me?

You may not get an answer worth having. Joe Church was, by his own reckoning, in no condition to be anybody's teacher that week. He gave what he had anyway. That is usually how this goes.

Ask anyway. The value is not only in the reply.

A prayer

Lord, I have grown skilled at asking questions that keep me safe. Teach me to ask the one that does not: what is missing in me? Give me the humility to put it to someone who may answer plainly, and the courage to still be standing there when they do. Amen.