William Nagenda — The Preacher Who Sailed the Other Way

Who he was

William Nagenda (1912–1973) was a Muganda, related by marriage to Simeon Nsibambi, and he became the East African Revival's most travelled preacher.

He gave up a government career to enter the ministry, joined the movement in the 1930s, and became one of the small group of African leaders — with Yosiya Kinuka, Festo Kivengere and others — who carried it far beyond the region it started in. In 1947 he and Kinuka went to Switzerland and Britain. It was the first of many such journeys, and Nagenda spent much of the rest of his life on them: preaching in Europe, in America, in India, at conventions and universities and mission conferences.

He remained, throughout, a layman's kind of preacher — plain, personal, and relentlessly concerned with whether the person listening had actually repented of anything.

The reverse mission, forty years early

Stop on the year. In 1947 the British Empire still governed Uganda. The assumption of the entire missionary enterprise, held sincerely by good people, was that Christianity travelled from Europe outward and that Africa was its field.

Nagenda and Kinuka got on a boat and went the other way, to tell European Christians that they needed to repent.

That was not always welcome, and it was not always handled well on either side. The revival's message did not soften for its audience: it asked Englishmen at Keswick the same questions it asked traders in Kampala, about specific sin, named and confessed. Some received it. Some found it intolerable coming from where it came from, and said so in terms that make uncomfortable reading now.

What Nagenda demonstrated, decades before anyone used the phrase, is that the African church had something the European church needed. He did not argue that abstractly. He turned up and preached.

The cost of being the travelling one

It is worth saying plainly that this life had a price, and the records show it.

A man who spends his years on ships and in other people's pulpits is not at home. The revival's leaders were criticised, sometimes by their own people, for being away; and the movement itself went through hard internal divisions in the 1960s and 1970s over exactly how rigorous its demands should be, disputes in which Nagenda was a central and not universally beloved figure.

This book is not going to tidy that up. A movement built on confessing sin is not a movement of people who had stopped sinning, and its leaders fell out with each other in ways that hurt. Nagenda's stature and his difficulty are the same man.

What he teaches us

The gospel is not owned by whoever brought it to you. Nagenda received Christianity from British missionaries and then went to Britain to preach to them. Gratitude to those who taught you does not mean permanent junior status.

Do not adjust the message for the room's prestige. He asked Cambridge the same question he asked Kampala. Most of us do the opposite without noticing.

Being right does not make you easy to live with. The revival's rigour, which was its strength, could become severity. If you have a message people need, the danger is not that you will stop believing it; it is what believing it will do to your patience with people who do not.

The text underneath it

“I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ: for it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth; to the Jew first, and also to the Greek” (Romans 1:16).

Paul wrote that to the church in the imperial capital, as a provincial intending to visit. Nagenda's whole career is a commentary on it. The order in the verse is about priority, not rank, and the word that governs it is everyone. A gospel that can only travel from the powerful to the weak is not the one Paul described.

A prayer

Lord, I trim what I say to fit the standing of the room. Give me one message for every audience. Where I have received much, keep me from thinking I must stay a pupil forever; where I have something to say, keep me from becoming hard while I say it. Amen.