Hallelujah

“For I am already being offered, and the time of my departure is come. I have fought the good fight, I have finished the course, I have kept the faith” — 2 Timothy 4:6-7 (ASV)

By the late 1920s Studd’s body was failing. He had asthma, years of tropical illness, and gallstones that caused attacks of intense pain. No surgery was available anywhere near Ibambi. According to Norman Grubb, a doctor passing through recommended morphine, and Studd, who wanted above all to keep working, agreed. In his last years he took it regularly.

His family never hid it. To critics it was a scandal: the leader of a mission demanding total self-denial, taking a narcotic every day, with supplies that some said were brought in without being declared. Some called him an addict. To his defenders it was medicine, the standard treatment for severe pain then, taken to keep working, not to escape. Here’s what can fairly be said. Anyone who takes morphine for a long time becomes physically dependent; that’s how it works, and it isn’t a moral failure. Whether it affected his moods and judgement can’t be known, though it may have. His pain was real. And the Congolese around him had far less medicine for pain at least as great. Paul says to restore people “in a spirit of gentleness; looking to thyself.”

Meanwhile the committee in London was alarmed. They had heard about the quarrels, the dismissals and the morphine. A 1928 booklet with a deliberately shocking title had offended many supporters. After Scilla’s death nobody held the two sides together. In 1930 and 1931 the committee moved to remove Studd as leader. Grubb and another son-in-law, Colonel David Munro, took the mission’s records so control stayed with those loyal to Studd; Grubb said he had the legal right as Studd’s chosen successor. Thirty-six missionaries left and formed a new mission. Was the committee wrong? Not simply. They were responsible for the mission and its workers, and it’s hard to see what else they could have done. It’s also hard to see how Studd could have accepted it. The proverb says, “in the multitude of counsellors there is safety.” Studd had led all his life and never learned to be led.

In his last year he wrote to his grandchildren and included two lines he loved but did not write. The longer poem built around them says its author heard them from someone else: “Only one life, ’twill soon be past, Only what’s done for Christ will last.”

He died at Ibambi on 16 July 1931, aged seventy. Those with him, or who heard from them, said his last word was “Hallelujah,” which means praise the Lord. Nothing else records it, but there’s no reason to doubt it.

A huge crowd of Congolese Christians came to bury him, many from far away; the accounts say more than a thousand, perhaps two thousand. That matters. He had quarrelled with his committee, his missionaries and his family. But the people he had come to serve, who had known his severity, had also known his love, and they honoured him. He lies at Ibambi among them.

WEC nearly died with him. Grubb, a gentler, patient leader, rebuilt it, and by 1965 it had grown from about thirty missionaries to some eight hundred in twenty countries. The forest church kept growing, through revival and through war.

There are two easy ways to remember Studd: only the hero, or only the problem. Both are wrong. He took Jesus’ words with complete seriousness and gave everything. He also let his zeal outrun his love and couldn’t bear to be told he was wrong. Both are true. Neither cancels the other.

Paul didn’t claim to be perfect. He claimed to have finished and kept the faith. Studd stumbled and hurt people, but he didn’t turn back or stop trusting Christ. You have one life too. The question is how to give it to Christ with his courage and more love than he managed.

One thing to do this week: write those two lines Studd loved on a card. Under them, write one way you want to give your life to Christ, and one person you need to love better while you do it.