Two Tired Men and an Open Bible

What happened on the hill

The two men did not let the conversation end that day. Over what the accounts remember as roughly two days they sat together on Namirembe Hill with the Bible open between them, working through what Scripture says about the filling of the Holy Spirit, and praying.

They prayed to put away every sin they knew of. They prayed to be filled. They prayed to hold nothing back. That is the entire event: two men, a book, a couple of days, and prayer.

Church went back to Gahini a changed man — those who tell the story say he returned in the power of Pentecost — and what he carried back began to work through the mission there. The deeper change was in Nsibambi, and he did not go quietly back to his old life.

Historians of the East African Revival generally point to that weekend as the spark. Within a few years an awakening was moving through Uganda and Rwanda, and eventually through Kenya, Tanzania and Burundi, that would run for most of the twentieth century and touch millions of people. Its people were called the balokole — the saved ones — and the Luganda hymn they sang, Tukutendereza Yesu, we praise You, Jesus, became the sound of the whole movement.

It began with two discouraged men who could not let a conversation go.

The scale is the point

We are so accustomed to thinking of spiritual movements as things that are launched that it is worth stopping on how completely this was not.

There was no venue. There was no invitation, no advertising, no committee, no funding, no name for what they were doing. Neither man had a strategy. One of them was on holiday because he was exhausted. Neither had any way of knowing that anyone would ever hear about it. If nothing had come of it, nothing would have been lost, because nothing had been staked.

And this is exactly the sort of thing that we, who like to be useful, find almost impossible to value. Two days of reading and praying with one other person produces nothing you can show anyone. There is no report to file at the end of it. In the economy most of us actually live by — where a day counts if something was accomplished — that weekend was a write-off.

What they actually did

Strip the story of its outcome and look at the practice, because the practice is imitable and the outcome is not.

They read Scripture together, slowly, over an extended stretch of time. Not a passage before a meeting. Days.

They talked about one thing. They did not range across every question either of them had. They stayed on the fullness of the Spirit until they were done with it, or it was done with them.

They prayed about their own sin by name. Both of them. The senior missionary and the Ugandan layman brought their own failures into it, rather than one man counselling the other.

They refused to stop early. The detail that keeps recurring in the accounts is that they could not leave it alone — that it took the better part of two days, that the conversation would not release them.

Every one of those four is available to you this month. None of them requires permission, funding, gifting, or a platform. What they require is time you have not currently set aside and a companion honest enough to be uncomfortable with.

Why two, and not one

Nsibambi could have prayed alone. He had presumably been doing exactly that for years. Something about this was different, and the difference was that another person was in the room.

There is a kind of honesty that only becomes possible in front of a witness. Alone, we confess in general terms, because in general terms it is less painful and there is nobody to notice the vagueness. Alone, we decide when we have prayed enough. Alone, we can be very devout and change nothing, and nobody will ever know.

Two people praying about their real sin is a different act. It has a cost the private version does not, and the cost is most of the point. The movement that came out of that weekend built its whole culture on this: walking in the light, they called it, meaning open honesty before God and one another, out loud, in company.

They did not invent that idea in a seminar. They discovered it on a hill in Kampala because there happened to be two of them.

The uncomfortable arithmetic

If the East African Revival can be traced to two men praying for two days, then the smallness of what you can do is not the obstacle you have been treating it as.

That cuts both ways, and the second way is the sharper. It means the reason you have not seen more is probably not that you lack scale, resources, or gifting. Those were absent here too. It is more likely that you have never actually cleared two days, never asked anyone to sit with you, and never stayed on one thing long enough for it to cost you anything.

God did not need Namirembe to be a large meeting. He needed it to be an honest one.

A prayer

Father, I have filled my calendar with things that can be reported and left no room for the thing that cannot. Give me two days, and someone honest to spend them with, and the stubbornness not to get up early. Fill me, and do not let me settle for having asked. Amen.