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His dream was to study abroad. So he applied for a scholarship, finished filling out the form, and placed the envelope carefully in the mail. With the posting of that letter, in ways he could not imagine, he was about to become the leading figure in the East Africa Revival, a 40-year awakening that changed the spiritual map of Eastern Africa.

Simeon Nsibambi was born in Uganda in 1897 to Walusimbi Kimanje, a chief of Uganda's most dominant tribe, the Buganda. He received his formal schooling at Mengo High School and King's College Budo. During World War I he joined the African Native Medical Corps and was decorated for his distinguished service. After the war, in 1920, he was made Chief Health Officer in the Bugandan king's government. He excelled as an athlete in both football and wrestling, and as a singer and artist. But it was his natural leadership abilities that would loom largest in the future.

Nsibambi became a Christian in 1922, three years before his marriage to Eva Bakaluba, with whom he would have 12 children. But education—the one thing necessary to cement his status as one of Uganda's elite—seemed to occupy this young rising star more than the gospel. Study abroad, in his mind, was essential.

The reply to his application finally came. He was turned down. His best hope for advancement had been dashed.

Deeply frustrated, Nsibambi turned to God for answers. A vision came. God spoke to him and asked him a troubling question. What value did a scholarship to study abroad have compared to what he already had been given, that pearl of great price, the gospel of salvation? Nsibambi was disturbed by this vision. Ashamed and repentant, Nsibambi began to preach on tree-studded Namirembe Hill, overlooking the busy center of Kampala, Uganda's capital. On the street corners near the great Anglican cathedral of St. Paul the Apostle with its rounded dome, he proclaimed the themes of brokenness and renewal. With those sermons in the streets, the first leaves of revival began to stir.

Bigger winds of change were blowing across African Christianity in the 1920s and 1930s. Most of the change was a reaction to a missionary Christianity that many African adherents felt was too Western and too rigid. In 1929, Reuben Spartas left the Anglican church of Uganda in reaction to perceived abuses by white leaders and founded the African Orthodox Church. Similarly in West Africa, the Aladura (praying) churches of Nigeria stressed the role of supernatural evil and healing in reaction to the mission churches that emphasized moral evil and personal justification. These churches were founded by African prophet figures dissatisfied with the missionary churches in which they had found their own salvation (see p. 35).

For African Christians like Nsibambi, however, the greatest challenges to faith did not come from missionary imperialism, witchcraft, or ancestral spirits. For a growing number of second-generation African converts in the 1930s and 1940s, the main issue was spiritual dullness. They confessed a Lord who rose from the dead. Yet many felt rigor mortis rather than resurrection power was the normative experience in their churches and in their souls.

After his scholarship crisis and God's call to preach, Nsibambi still struggled with an inner emptiness of soul. He longed to know the power of the divine will and a full experience of divine grace. Help came in the form of a white stranger.

J. E. Church, Joe to his friends, was a new medical missionary with the Rwanda Mission (an offshoot of the Church Missionary Society), working at Gahini Hospital in Rwanda. Like many who worked in the Rwanda Mission, Church was an Anglican deeply affected by the "higher life" teaching of the British Keswick revival, and openly critical of the spiritual state of the church in Uganda and Rwanda.

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