Joe Church — The Doctor with Nothing Left

Who he was

John Edward Church (1899–1989) — Joe to everyone who knew him — was an English medical missionary of the Ruanda Mission, sent out to run the hospital at Gahini in eastern Rwanda.

He arrived to famine, disease, and a station that was not thriving. By 1929, two years in, he was at the end of himself: tired, discouraged, and short of the very thing he had come to dispense. He went over the border to Kampala for a few days off, stayed with friends on Namirembe Hill, and had no plan beyond resting.

He was thirty years old, and the most important thing he ever did happened because a stranger asked him a question he could not answer casually.

The missionary who had nothing left

Notice the position he was in when it happened, because the usual shape of a missionary story runs the other way.

The expected version has the European bringing the gospel to the African. What actually happened at Namirembe is that a Ugandan layman identified the need, asked the question, and pressed a burnt-out Englishman until the Englishman gave him what little he had — the Keswick "victorious life" teaching on the fullness of the Spirit, which Church had received in England and had not himself mastered.

And then both of them knelt down. That is the part that matters. Church did not counsel Nsibambi; they confessed together, prayed together, and were filled together. The revival began as a partnership between two men who were each, in different ways, empty.

Church took it back to Gahini, where it met Yosiya Kinuka and the hospital staff and began to spread through the mission. For the next several decades he was one of the movement's most tireless carriers — travelling, writing, organising conventions — and one of the very few Europeans the African leadership fully trusted.

What he teaches us

Ministry does not require a full tank. Church had nothing to give and gave it anyway, and it turned out to be the hinge of a century of African church history. If you have been waiting until you are spiritually in good order before you help anyone, you have the sequence backwards.

Let the person you came to serve teach you. This is the specific gift of Joe Church and it is rarer than it sounds. He was the qualified one, the sent one, the one with the training and the mission board behind him. He allowed a sanitation officer with no theological education to tell him what was wrong. Almost every failure of the missionary movement in that century is a failure to do what Church did in that one conversation.

Stay for the long unglamorous part. The two days on the hill are the famous bit. The fifty years afterwards — the hospital, the conventions, the travelling, the endless letters — are what actually carried it. Sparks are cheap. Church stayed.

Hold the movement, do not own it. He could have made himself the head of it; European missionaries in that period routinely did. He did not. The revival's leadership went African early and stayed there, and his willingness to be one man among them rather than over them is a large part of why it survived the end of the colonial period intact.

The text underneath it

Church came to Namirembe carrying the Keswick teaching on the fullness of the Spirit, and the passage that tradition leaned on hardest was Ephesians 5:18 — be filled with the Spirit.

The Greek is a present imperative and a passive: not fill yourself, once, but go on being filled, by someone else. Both halves matter, and Church's own life is the argument for them. He was not filled once at thirty and coasting afterwards. He was empty again and again over sixty years of work, and the pattern of his ministry was to keep coming back for more rather than to trade on what he had received in 1929.

It is also a command, which means the state of being empty is not a spiritual weather event you wait out. It is something to do something about.

A prayer

Lord, I am often empty and usually pretending not to be. Teach me to bring what little I have and to kneel with the person in front of me rather than over them. Where I am the qualified one, make me teachable. Where I begin something, make me willing to be one of its servants and not its owner. Amen.