ABSTRACT
Dr Joe Church and his wife, Dr Decie Church, served for 40 years as missionaries of the CMS Ruanda Mission.1 From the early 1930s Joe Church was intimately connected with the East African Revival. He was not its originator, nor in any formal sense its director, but his organizational skills, his genius for friendship and his commitment to the distinctive form of the Gospel which he had learnt in Africa, had a profound effect on the development of the Revival as it spread far and wide throughout East Africa. It was largely through his agency that it came to have an impact far beyond Africa, including a lasting impact in Britain and the United States. As a lay medical missionary of the Church Missionary Society, Joe Church had a strong loyalty to the mission which sponsored him and to the ‘Native Anglican Church’, the Church of Uganda. Gahini mission station was situated until 1960 in the Diocese of Uganda and this was where Joe and Decie Church were located for most of their time as missionaries. Like all Revivalists, however, Dr Church understood his supreme loyalty to be not to a church institution, but to Jesus Christ as revealed in Holy Scripture and mediated through the fellowship of the Balokole (the Saved), the brethren who had confessed their sins and received new life at the Cross of Christ. For the Bishop of Uganda such critical loyalty seemed all too often to be skewed towards the ‘critical’ rather than the ‘loyal’. Joe Church was, nevertheless, always absolutely certain that he had no interest in establishing another church separate from the Anglican Church. He and his fellow Balokole saw themselves as members of the Church, even when they were critical of it. Their aim was to revive the Church not to overthrow it. This essay will explore the tensions between loyalty and criticism which the Revival has demonstrated throughout its history in its relation to the mission from which it sprang and the Church in which it was formed and to which it witnessed.
