“Are You Saved?”

The question he asked everybody

After his resignation, Nsibambi became known for one habit above all others. He stopped people — on the road, in the market, at the gate — and asked them whether they were saved.

Not everyone was delighted. The best-remembered reaction is from an exasperated missionary who complained to Joe Church about what his friend had started: he has gone mad, and is going round everywhere asking people if they are saved. He has just left my gardener.

That sentence has survived for nearly a century because it is funny, and because the person who said it was so completely wrong.

Meanwhile the thing was spreading beyond him. Blasio Kigozi, the brother he had led to faith, was ordained deacon and sent to Gahini, and became a burning evangelist in his own right — praying for the mission, preaching for conviction, pressing the same question Nsibambi pressed on strangers in Kampala. In January 1936 Kigozi was called back to Uganda to put the case for revival before the church's synod in Kampala. He delivered his message. He had contracted tick fever on the journey, and within days he was dead, still in his twenties.

Who buried him, the record does not tell us plainly enough to say here. What it does tell us is that the young man's death, coming straight after the plea he had carried to the synod, did more to press the case for revival on the Ugandan church than the plea alone had done. The movement went on growing, and it grew through a grave.

The offence in it

It is worth being honest about why this makes us wince, because it does, and pretending otherwise gets us nowhere.

Asking a stranger about his soul breaks a rule that almost every society agrees on: that a person's inner life is his own business unless he offers it. To ask is to presume — to suggest that you know something about his condition that he has not told you, and that it is urgent enough to override the ordinary courtesy between strangers.

And the complaint about the gardener has a further sting in it. It was a complaint about class. The missionary was not objecting that Nsibambi had spoken to a person; he was objecting that Nsibambi had gone through his household and spoken to the help. The revival that came out of all this would spend the next fifty years breaking down exactly those walls — between tribes, between races, between the respectable and everyone else. It started with a man who did not observe them.

What it assumes

Strip away the awkwardness and look at the belief underneath, because the habit is only as good as the conviction driving it.

To ask a stranger whether he is saved, you must think three things are true at once. That the question has an answer. That the answer matters more than the awkwardness of asking. And that this person — a gardener, a trader, someone you will never see again — is worth the cost of the awkwardness to you.

Most of us assent to all three and behave as though we assented to none. We would say the question matters eternally, and then decline to ask it because the moment was not right, or the relationship was not deep enough, or it would have seemed pushy. We have found a way to hold the belief without the belief costing us anything at all.

Nsibambi's neighbours thought he had gone mad. What they were actually observing was a man whose behaviour had caught up with his convictions. That is unusual enough to look like insanity.

Not a licence

This does not mean the criticism was baseless in every case, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise.

There is a way of asking that is really about the asker — that treats a person as an item to be processed, that presses for a form of words, that mistakes having said something for having loved somebody. The question can be a weapon. It can be used to embarrass, to establish superiority, to discharge an obligation so you can stop thinking about the person.

What made Nsibambi's version different is not recorded in any transcript, but it is legible in the outcome. People kept coming to him. For decades afterwards, when he could no longer go out at all, they came to his house. Nobody seeks out a man who once made them feel small. They sought him out because whatever was in the question, it was not contempt.

The smaller version you can actually do

You will probably not start stopping strangers in the street, and this chapter is not going to tell you that you must.

But there is a smaller version, and it is harder to dodge. There are people you already know — at work, in your family, on your street — with whom you have had a hundred conversations and never once raised the only subject you say is ultimate. Not because the moment never came. Because you decided, each time, that it was not worth the discomfort.

Start there. One person. Not a technique, not a script, not an ambush: just a real question, asked because you actually want to know the answer, from someone who has made himself safe enough to ask it.

And be prepared to be thought strange. Nsibambi was. The judgement of his neighbours was that he had gone mad; the judgement of history is that he was a father of a movement. Both were looking at the same man doing the same thing.

A prayer

Father, I have had a hundred conversations with people I say I love and never once raised the only subject I call ultimate. Forgive the cowardice I have been calling tact. Give me one person this week, and the plain words to ask, and a heart in it that is not contempt. Amen.