Introduction: The Song That Names the Movement

There is a hymn that runs under this whole book. It is short, it is in Luganda, and for most of the twentieth century you could tell where the revival had reached by listening for it.

Tukutendereza Yesu — we praise You, Jesus. Jesus, Lamb of God, Your blood has cleansed me, I am grateful, Saviour.

People sang it in churches and at graves, on the road and in prison, in Luganda and then in a dozen other languages as the thing spread. It was the movement's greeting and its argument at once. And it is the right door into these lives, because it tells you immediately what these people thought was worth singing about, and it is not themselves.

What the revival was

In September 1929, on a hill above Kampala, a Ugandan health officer named Simeon Nsibambi asked an exhausted English missionary doctor named Joe Church what was missing — in himself, and in the church of Uganda. They spent roughly two days with a Bible open between them, praying to be filled and to hold nothing back.

What came out of that weekend ran for most of a century. It moved from Uganda into Rwanda, and from there into Kenya, Tanzania, Burundi, the Congo and southern Sudan. Its people were called the balokole — the saved ones — sometimes by themselves and often as an insult by everyone else.

It had no founder in the ordinary sense, no headquarters, and no denomination of its own. It stayed inside the Anglican and Protestant churches of the region, sometimes uncomfortably, and it changed them from within. It produced archbishops and it produced martyrs. It also produced a very large number of people whose names nobody wrote down.

What it actually taught

Strip away the history and four convictions do the work.

Sin is specific. The revival had no patience for general repentance. You did not confess that you were a sinner; you confessed what you had done, out loud, and where it involved another person you went to them. It broke marriages open and put stolen property back.

Walking in the light. The phrase is from 1 John, and they meant it as a practice, not a mood: open honesty before God and before one another, continuously, in company. It is the single most distinctive thing about the movement and the hardest to imitate.

The blood of Jesus is enough. Hence the hymn. Against every suggestion that the balokole were claiming to be better than other Christians, their own song said the opposite: what they had was not attainment but cleansing, and it was not theirs.

Everyone testifies. Not only the ordained, not only the men, not only the educated. A hospital dresser and an archbishop stood up in the same meeting and said the same kind of thing.

Why these fourteen

The chapters that follow take twelve people and two themes. Some of the names are famous — Kivengere preached alongside Billy Graham, Luwum is on the west front of Westminster Abbey among the twentieth century's martyrs. Most are not.

They are here because between them they show the shape of the thing: a layman who would not settle, a missionary who had run dry, a hospital assistant, a deacon who died at twenty-six with one word on his lips, a preacher who took it to Europe, an archbishop, two men killed by their governments, an Englishman revived by his own students, and a great crowd of women whose work the records kept badly.

Read them for what they have in common rather than what makes them remarkable. Every one of them was ordinary before something happened, and most of them stayed ordinary afterwards.

A word about what is not here

This book will tell you where the evidence runs out. That happens more often than devotional writing usually admits.

Some of these people left almost nothing in their own words. Some are remembered mainly through the letters of missionaries who had their own reasons for describing them as they did. Dates disagree. Famous sentences survive in three versions. Where that is the case the text says so, because a movement built on refusing to pretend deserves better than a book that pretends about it.

A prayer

Lord Jesus, these were not extraordinary people, and that is why we are reading about them. Do among us what You did among them: make our sin specific, our honesty costly, our confession real, and our song about You rather than ourselves. Tukutendereza Yesu. Amen.