Lawrence Barham — The Missionary His Students Converted

Who he was

Lawrence Barham was an English clergyman of the Ruanda Mission, stationed at Kabale in south-western Uganda, and one of the revival's most committed European supporters. He worked for years alongside the movement's African leadership — Nsibambi, Kinuka, Kigozi, Nagenda, Sabiti, Kivengere — in Rwanda from 1938 to 1946 and in Uganda from 1961 to 1972. Much of his effort went into training an ordained African clergy in the south-west.

The detail worth the whole chapter is how he came into it.

Barham did not bring the revival to his students. He was revived through them.

The missionary who was evangelised by his pupils

Consider the position that puts a man in.

He is the missionary. He is ordained; they are not, or not yet. He is the teacher and they are the class. He is English in a British protectorate in the 1930s, with everything that arrangement assumed about who instructs whom. And the spiritual life he has come several thousand miles to impart turns out to be more evident in the young Africans in front of him than in himself.

Almost every incentive available to him argued for not noticing. He could have called it emotionalism. He could have been concerned about excess, about order, about doctrine — and there were plenty of missionaries in East Africa in those years who did exactly that, sincerely, and set themselves against the revival for reasons they could articulate well.

Barham let his students be right. Then he spent the next three decades serving the movement they had brought him into, largely by training more of them.

The part Europeans mostly got wrong

This book is not going to be sentimental about the missionary movement, and Barham is only interesting against the background of how unusual he was.

The revival was divisive among Europeans in East Africa. It made converts who confessed publicly, who wept, who named the sins of respectable people including missionaries, and who would not accept that spiritual authority followed the colour line. That was experienced by many good and hard-working Christians as disorder, and they resisted it.

The complaint recorded about Nsibambi — that he had gone mad, that he had just been at the gardener — came from a missionary. It is not an outlier.

What Barham did, and what most of his colleagues did not, was to accept that he had something to receive from people he had been sent to give to. It cost him nothing material. It cost him the assumption that he was the senior party in the room, which is more expensive than it sounds.

What he teaches us

Being right about doctrine is not the same as being alive. Barham's orthodoxy was never the issue. What his students had was not better theology; it was that theirs had caught fire.

Watch what you call excess. Some of it is. But the word is also the standard way of dismissing something that would cost you to take seriously, and the honest test is whether your objection would survive if the same thing were happening among people you consider your equals.

Let the people you serve minister to you. If you are always the giver in a relationship, it is not a relationship and you are not safe in it.

Then do the boring, structural work. Barham's response to being revived was three decades of training clergy. Not a platform — a curriculum.

The text underneath it

“Let no man despise thy youth” (1 Timothy 4:12).

Paul says it to Timothy, but it lands on everyone older than Timothy, and it assumes the obvious temptation runs the other way. The verse takes for granted that a young person may have something the senior room needs, and warns the room. Barham did not despise his students' youth, or their inexperience, or their being taught by him. That is the whole of his contribution and it was enough.

A prayer

Lord, I would rather be the one who gives. Show me where I have been calling something excess to avoid being changed by it, and give me the humility to be taught by people I was sent to teach — by the young, by the new, by the ones with less standing than me. And when You have done it, put me to work on something unglamorous. Amen.