The great interest that is being stirred in the church to study history is the grace of God to help us to do it right if He revives us again. We shouldn’t neglect so great a grace. However, as much as we learn from these past revivals and how God moved in the hearts of His people, I must express in the fullest terms that the whole lesson from these examples of revivals will be missed if it leads us readers to glorify man instead of glorifying God. As Leonard Ravenhill once noted “biographies are so fallible and often incomplete. God alone knows all men’s tears and their travails. The “great day” alone will give the full score.”
Almost all of the great revivals in history died in some kind of infamy and we don’t think it’s God’s will for any revival to end the way most of them do. The enemy has been able to sidetrack almost everyone using the same tactics, and they are seldom discerned. We need to honour the missionaries who sowed the seed in Africa and enabled something as extraordinary as the East African Revival Fellowship to happen in the first place. But we also need to examine some of the things that went wrong during that revival, not for the purposes of criticism, but if possible to avoid repeating the same mistakes if God desires to revive us again.
The inner struggles that affected the Christian church in Uganda, and subsequently the East African Revival Fellowship had begun almost 100 years earlier, soon after the founding of the church. After the turn of the century, a new generation of missionaries arrived from England. They were men and women committed to ‘Christianity, Civilization and commerce.” Postmillennialists believed that Christianity opened “not only the prospect of eternal life but also the road to unlimited social and economic development,” which they usually called ‘civilization.’
Christianity, Commerce and Civilization
Development could best be promoted through market economies, private property, free trade, the use of ploughs and irrigation to maximize production, and increased levels of consumption. The three Cs (Christianity, civilization and commerce) were closely interlinked and reinforced each other.
When missionaries exhorted Africans to wear European clothes and use European goods and utensils, they fostered commerce. To generate the income not only to support this new consumption but also to make the missions viable, they advocated increased production and economic development.
Increased trade and economic activity, in turn, would help the spread of the gospel. As David Livingstone, the most famous advocate of Christianity and commerce put it:
When a tribe begins to trade with another it feels a sense of mutual dependence; and this is a most important aid in diffusing the blessings of Christianity, because one tribe never goes to another without telling the news, and the Gospel comes in to be part of their news, and the knowledge of Christianity is thus spread by means of commerce.
The trinity of Christianity, commerce, and civilization is often interpreted as evidence that missions were driven by the needs and interests of European capitalists. But while chambers of commerce strongly applauded Livingstone’s speeches in 1858, it was the religious public not the captains of industry who subscribed most of the money for his scheme of evangelizing Africa.
Missionaries themselves grew to question the mutual benefit of commerce and Christianization. By the late 1860s, “Christian confidence in the redemptive function of commerce was waning” and even began to be repudiated.
These men and women who were committed to Christianity commerce and civilization were unwilling to entrust the church to national and local leadership. Before that believers were practicing Koinonia-true intimacy and fellowship with one another on a sound scriptural basis. But as the vested economic interests of these missionaries began to infect evangelism programmes, the national church was centralized away from the local community.
The responsibility for spreading the gospel was taken from village chiefs and an ecclesiastical structure under missionary control replaced mission stations. Frank Bartleman in his first hand account of the Azusa Revival summed up this mistake of ecclesiastical hierarchy succinctly:
This has been the condition of the church since the Dark Ages. No movement has ever recovered itself, as a body, when it has once gone on the skids…..The great mistake has been to stop with sectarian, partial, and abnormal revelations. We must keep our eyes on God, not on a party. Keep free from party spirit…. Seek only God and His plan as a whole, His Church as a whole. Every company, in time, repeats the experience of the early Church. They compromise to escape the cross and accept positions, salaries, titles, and ecclesiastical power. An ecclesiastical hierarchy arises, just as it did in the early Church during the second and third centuries.
Cultural and Traditional Tensions
Although the revivalists had been critical of cultural values and lifestyles which they saw as inimical to the gospel, yet it can be argued that this very critique of traditional values caused very deep cultural tensions. In just a few short years the indigenous church in Uganda was cut off from its cultural roots. The adopted Christianity which would have been examined through a distinctively African idiom was replaced. Imported liturgies replaced native tunes and Western clothing replaced native robes. The village chief was replaced by the local pastor, and baptized Ugandans were given ‘Christian’ or English names.
With no indigenous theological convictions and often without any understanding of Christian commitment, these ‘converts’ gave themselves by thousands to European denominations. For these reasons the Ugandan church never grounded itself in the life fibres of the African community.
The Ugandan believer never found his cultural identity. While every Christian has a dual nationality, belonging to his human family and to the faith family, the Ugandan Christian was forced into a tripartite allegiance. He was a member of his tribe, a member of his church, and an illegitimate child of the West. The problems created by these cultural tensions were never resolved.
The pervasiveness of Western influence had alienated many Christian believers from the church. The awakening of their African conscience made it difficult for them to worship in the cultural mode of another civilization. Ugandans did not want to forsake their culture to become Christians.
They did not want to forsake their villages, their clans, and their music. They wanted God to speak to them as Africans. One outspoken critic of the Westernization of Ugandan culture was Katongole Sabaganzi. He was a distinguished man and a private adviser to the last Buganda king. Katongole said,
The church has made many mistakes, we have had political independence for ten years and the church is not yet free. But if after all these years of hearing the gospel we are still criticizing those who brought the message; that is the biggest mistake of all. It is not the fault of the signpost if the wayfarer sits beneath it. It is not the fault of the Westerner if Ugandans do not take their church where it needs to go. It is time for us to take responsibility for our own house…. God has called us to himself, but our eyes have turned to the West. Instead of hearing God’s message to us as Africans, we have heard a culture-bound gospel. We cannot believe that He wants to speak to us alone!
At the same time, many national leaders were making sharp denunciations. They attacked the church as a stronghold of Western religion or dismissed it as a fading remnant of Uganda’s colonial past. Who could blame them after all, some powerful people who belonged to the Western church had in the past, argued passionately that slavery was God’s way of rescuing Africans from their barbaric practices and heathen beliefs and introducing them to Christianity.
Ecclesiastical Roman Hierarchy
When the ecclesiastical Roman hierarchy, which in time dominated the whole world, both political and religious took over, Ugandan clergy lamented to the failure of being promoted to positions of real responsibility. This became a persistent source of irritation, especially to politically-conscious Baganda. Why for example, was a Muganda not appointed assistant Bishop in 1920, instead of importing a European who had never even worked in Uganda before? And why, when a Ugandan bishop at last was appointed in 1947, was he not a Muganda?
All this seemed to have caused conflicts within the Church. It was the East African Revival fellowship that could directly confront these spiritual problems and provide spiritual leadership during this time. They had to tell their fellow Ugandans that they did not have to forsake their cultural selves to become Christians. They did not have to forsake their villages, their clans, and their music. God was going to speak to them as Africans through a personal relationship with His Son Jesus Christ.
It is worth pausing to remember that there were many other forces that ranged in opposition to the revival, and the differences remained as wide as ever as we shall examine in Part 5.
