Janani Luwum — The Archbishop Who Went to the Meeting

Who he was

Janani Luwum was an Acholi from northern Uganda, a schoolteacher who came to a living faith through the revival, was ordained, and rose to become Archbishop of the Church of Uganda in 1974.

He held the office for less than three years. Idi Amin's regime was then at its worst, and Luwum was, by the ordinary arithmetic of survival, in the most dangerous job in the country: the head of the country's largest church, expected to say nothing.

He did not say nothing. In February 1977 he delivered a protest to Amin on behalf of the bishops against the killings, the disappearances, and the arbitrary power of the state security agencies. He was arrested days later. On 16 February 1977 he was dead. The regime said a car crash. Almost nobody believed it, and the evidence has never supported it.

His statue stands on the west front of Westminster Abbey among the martyrs of the twentieth century.

The choice he actually made

What makes Luwum's death instructive is that it was avoidable and he could see that it was.

He had options. Silence was one, and it was defensible: he could have argued that a live archbishop serves the church better than a dead one, that speaking would bring reprisals on his clergy, that the church's job is not politics. Exile was another; others took it, including Kivengere, and it was not cowardice.

He also had every warning. People close to him knew what happened to men who crossed that regime. He is remembered as saying, in the last period, some version of: I am prepared to die in the army of Jesus.

He went to the meeting anyway, and the protest he delivered was not veiled.

Why a revival produced a political martyr

There is a common assumption that a movement concerned with personal sin — confession, private morality, purity of life — will be politically quiet. Regimes have often counted on it.

The East African Revival broke that assumption, and Luwum shows how. A movement that trains people to name sin specifically has no mechanism for making an exception when the sinner is the state. The habit is the same habit. You say what is true about the thing in front of you, whether it is your own adultery in a small meeting or a president's murders in a letter from the bishops.

It also trains people who are not afraid of losing their position, because they have already given up things that mattered. And it trains people who have made their peace with God in public, repeatedly, over decades — which removes most of what makes a man biddable.

Amin could take Luwum's life. There was nothing else of Luwum's that he had leverage over.

What he teaches us

Personal holiness is not a substitute for public truth, and it is not opposed to it. The same discipline produces both.

Count the cost, then go to the meeting. He is not admirable for being unaware of the danger. He is admirable for being entirely aware of it.

Not everyone is called to this, and exile is not betrayal. Kivengere left and was right to. Luwum stayed and was right to. Do not use another man's martyrdom to shame someone who fled.

The text underneath it

“And they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb, and by the word of their testimony; and they loved not their lives unto the death” (Revelation 12:11).

Three things, in order: what Christ did, what they said about it, and what they were willing to lose. The revival had the first two in its hymn and its practice for forty years before it was asked for the third.

A prayer

Lord, I am silent in small rooms about small things, and I tell myself it is prudence. Give me the habit of saying what is true where it costs a little, so that if I am ever asked where it costs everything, the words are already mine. And keep me from admiring martyrs while despising the frightened. Amen.