Erica Sabiti — Ordained Six Years Before He Was Filled

Who he was

Erica Sabiti (1903–1988) was born in Rwebishuru in Ankole, in the south-west of Uganda. His father was a chief and died while Erica was young. He was educated at King's College, Budo, and at Makerere, taught in a primary school, and was ordained deacon in 1933 and priest in 1934.

Then, for six years, he was an ordained Anglican clergyman who had not yet met the thing this book is about.

In 1939 he accompanied the Bishop of Uganda on a visit to churches in Rwanda and Burundi, and there he came into contact with the balokole. His ministry was transformed, and from that point he is named in every list of the revival's leaders.

In 1960 he was consecrated Bishop of Rwenzori. In 1966 he became the first Ugandan Archbishop. He retired in 1974 and died at Kinoni on 15 May 1988.

Ordained first, revived second

Hold on to those six years, because they are the most useful thing about him for most readers.

Sabiti was not converted out of nothing. He was a believing man, trained, examined, ordained, and doing the work — and something was still to come that he did not have. He found it not at a convention he had sought out but on a trip he was taking as somebody's assistant, in another country, among people who were not his responsibility.

This is a different story from Nsibambi's, and the difference matters. Nsibambi was a layman who forced the question. Sabiti was already inside the machine, doing the job, when the thing arrived sideways.

If you have been a Christian a long time, and ordained or otherwise employed by the church, his is probably the more relevant of the two.

The archbishop nobody agreed on

His elevation was not a coronation. It was a fight, and it nearly broke the church.

When the expatriate archbishop Leslie Brown retired, Uganda's bishops chose Sabiti to succeed him — the first African to hold the office. But Sabiti was a Munyankore from the south-west, and there was bitter opposition from those who held that the archbishop at Namirembe must be a Muganda. The dispute was not theological. It was ethnic, and it was ugly, and it ran for years.

What finally settled it is the most extraordinary thing in this chapter. The president — Idi Amin, of all people — summoned the province's bishops to Kampala to resolve it. And in that meeting the nine diocesan bishops confessed the sins that had contributed to the division, and then together recognised Erica as their archbishop.

Read that again. A church split along ethnic lines was healed by its senior leadership standing up and naming their own part in it out loud. That is not a diplomatic settlement. That is the revival's method — the thing Nsibambi and Kinuka had been doing in small rooms for thirty years — applied to a bench of bishops in a national crisis.

The bag with the Bible in it

One more scene, from early 1972. Sabiti was called to Amin's Command Post at short notice. He was diabetic and always carried a flask of tea; his assistant carried the bag, and the bag also held his Bible.

At the Command Post, Amin threatened him. He repeated the threat. When it came the third time, Sabiti reached into the bag and took out the Bible.

The accounts of what was said vary and this book will not pretend to more than the gesture. But the gesture is not ambiguous, and it was made by a man in his late sixties in front of the most dangerous person in the country.

What he teaches us

Ordination is not the same as being filled. Six years of licensed ministry, and the best of it still ahead. If you are employed by the church and quietly dry, you are in his company and there is somewhere to go.

The church's ugliest divisions are not theological. Sabiti's crisis was about which people group could hold which chair. Ours are rarely more elevated.

Confession works on institutions too. Nine bishops naming their own sin did what years of negotiation had not. It remains the least-tried remedy in church conflict.

You can be the object of a fight without becoming a combatant. Nothing in the record has Sabiti campaigning, denouncing his opponents, or splitting off with his supporters. He waited, and let the confession be theirs to make.

The text underneath it

“Confess your faults one to another, and pray one for another, that ye may be healed” (James 5:16).

The promise attached is healing, and the instruction is reciprocal — one to another, not upward to a mediator. The bishops at Kampala did exactly what the verse says, in the exact circumstances it was written for, and got exactly what it promises.

A prayer

Lord, I have been doing this a long time and there may be more of You that I have never had; give it, however sideways it arrives. Where I am part of a division, let me be the one who confesses first rather than the one who is finally proved right. And make me the sort of man who reaches for the Bible when he is threatened. Amen.