Tukutendereza Yesu — Four Lines as a Theology

The song itself

The East African Revival had no confession of faith, no founding document, and no denominational statement. What it had was a hymn, and for most purposes the hymn did the work of all three.

Tukutendereza Yesu — we praise You, Jesus. Yesu Omwana gw'endiga — Jesus, Lamb of God. Omusaayi gwo gunaazizza — Your blood has cleansed me. Nkwebaza, Omulokozi — I thank You, Saviour.

The tune is an old American revival melody; the Luganda words are what the movement made of it. It was sung at conventions and at gravesides, on roads and in prisons, in Luganda first and then in Runyankole, Kinyarwanda, Swahili and a dozen more as the thing travelled. People sang it to identify themselves to strangers. It functioned as a greeting.

Four lines. It repays reading them as the theology they were.

What the four lines claim

We praise You. The subject of the sentence is not the singer. This matters more than it sounds, because the standard criticism of the balokole — then and since — was spiritual pride: that they thought themselves better, that the word saved ones was a boast. Their own anthem is an answer. It is about Him.

Lamb of God. A sacrifice, which means something died. The revival's insistence on naming specific sin only works if there is somewhere for the sin to go. Confession without a sacrifice is just an inventory of your failures, and it will either crush you or make you a hypocrite.

Your blood has cleansed me. Past tense, and personal. Not may cleanse, not cleanses believers. The revival's assurance was famously firm, and its critics thought it presumptuous. But notice what is doing the cleansing in that line. It is not their intensity, their confession, or their standards. It is His blood, and they had nothing to do with it.

I thank You, Saviour. The whole thing resolves into gratitude, which is the correct response to a gift and the only response available to someone who has just admitted he had nothing to bring.

Why a movement needs a song more than a statement

Doctrinal statements are for arguments. Hymns are for the rest of life.

A statement of faith has to be consulted; a hymn is already in your mouth. It works at gravesides, where nobody is going to read a paragraph. It works in a truck on the way to a river, where Yona Kanamuzeyi sang about heaven. It works when you are illiterate, which many of the movement's people were. It works when you are eight years old.

And it does something a statement cannot: it puts the same words in the mouths of a hospital dresser, an archbishop and an English missionary, at the same time, in the same room. The theology of Galatians 3:28 is easier to sing than to argue about.

It is also, crucially, short and about Jesus. A movement's song is what it will still have when its leaders have fallen out, its conventions have grown stale, and its second generation has cooled. The revival went through all three. The hymn survived them.

What it teaches us

Notice what your church actually sings. It is a better guide to what you believe than what you would say you believe.

Assurance and humility are not in tension. The same four lines claim to be definitely cleansed and claim no credit for it. Most of us manage one at a time.

Learn something by heart while it is easy. The people in this book had their theology in their memory before they needed it. That is not a small thing to arrange, and there is no way to arrange it in a hurry.

The text underneath it

“Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world” (John 1:29), and “the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin” (1 John 1:7).

The hymn is those two verses with a thank-you on the end. That is the entire doctrinal apparatus of a movement that reshaped the church of six countries.

A prayer

Lord Jesus, Lamb of God, Your blood has cleansed me. I did not do it and I cannot add to it. Put something in my mouth that will still be there when my feelings have gone, and let it be about You. Tukutendereza Yesu. Amen.