What the Revival Asks of Us

What we have been reading

Twelve people and two themes: a health officer, a burnt-out doctor, a man who dressed wounds, a deacon who died at twenty-six, a preacher who sailed to Europe, an archbishop who waited twenty-seven years, a man who sang on the way to a river, an evangelist who wrote his enemy's name on a book about love, an archbishop who went to the meeting anyway, an Englishman who let his students teach him, a great crowd of women whose names were not kept, and a hymn of four lines.

They do not have much in common on the surface. Between them they had two continents, five decades, several languages and every level of the colonial hierarchy.

What they share is a method, and it is not complicated.

The four things, one more time

Name your sin specifically. Not that you are a sinner — what you did. Out loud. To God, and where another person is involved, to them. Every life in this book turns on somebody doing this, usually at a cost to their standing.

Walk in the light with other people. Continuously, not in a crisis. The revival's genius was making honesty a habit rather than an emergency measure, which is why its people were ready when the emergencies came.

Rest the whole weight on the blood of Jesus. This is what kept the movement from becoming what it was accused of being. Intensity without a sacrifice underneath it turns into pride or despair; the hymn is the safeguard.

Tell somebody. The dresser told the doctor. The brother told the brother. The layman told a stranger on a hill. Nobody in this book waited to be qualified.

What it will cost

It would be dishonest to end without this, because the book has been full of it.

Nsibambi lost his salary and his reputation, and was thought mad by his neighbours. Kigozi lost his life at twenty-six, before he saw anything come of it. Kinuka had to confess to people he had a genuine grievance against. Nagenda gained a hearing across the world and became a difficult man, and the movement he led went through bitter division. Kivengere lost his archbishop, his country, and any right to the anger he had earned. Luwum lost everything, having been warned.

None of them got a version of this where it was free. The one thing you will not find in the East African Revival is a cheap example.

What it is not asking

It is not asking you to resign your job. One man in this book did that; most did not. Sabiti stayed a parish priest for twenty-seven years, Kinuka went on dressing wounds, Barham went on training clergy.

It is not asking you to seek out martyrdom. Kivengere fled and was right to.

It is not asking you to be extraordinary. The whole argument of this book is the opposite — that these were ordinary people, that the movement's engine was ordinary rooms, and that the parts of it we can name are a fraction of the parts that happened.

What it is asking

One honest sentence, to one other person, this week.

That is where the whole thing started. A man with a good job and a settled faith stopped a tired stranger and said: there is something missing, in me and in us — can you tell me what it is? He did not know that anything would come of it. Nothing about that conversation was designed.

You are not going to start a revival, and you should not try; not one person in this book set out to. But the sentence is available, and so is the person to say it to.

The rest of it — six countries, sixty years, the archbishops and the martyrs and the singing — is what God did with a question.

The text underneath it

“But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin” (1 John 1:7).

One verse. Everything in this book is in it: the walking, the company, the cleansing, and the order they come in.

A prayer

Lord, I have read about people who paid for this and I would like it cheaper. Give it to me anyway. Show me the specific thing I have been keeping general, and the person I should say it to, and let me not put it off until I feel ready. Tukutendereza Yesu — Your blood has cleansed me, and I thank You. Amen.