Joe Church

Joseph Edward Church was born on January 12, 1899, in Kent, England. His father was a prosperous businessman, and the family was comfortable. He was educated at Tonbridge School and then at Cambridge University. During the First World War, he served in the army as an officer and was wounded in France. After the war, he returned to Cambridge and studied medicine. He was a quiet and earnest young man, and he was a member of the Christian Union. He came to a clear faith in Christ in those years and felt called to missionary work.

He qualified as a doctor and was accepted by the Church Missionary Society. In 1927, he and his wife, Decima, went out to Rwanda, then part of the Belgian mandate in Central Africa. They were assigned to a mission station at Gahini, in the east of the country. He was the only doctor in the area, and he built a hospital and a dispensary. He cared for thousands of patients and also trained local people as medical assistants. He was a hardworking man who found that his heart was not at rest. He sensed that his work was dry and that he lacked spiritual power.

He worked alongside an African colleague, Blasio Kigozi, who had come from Uganda. Together, the two men began to pray for revival. They had a growing sense that the church was lukewarm. In 1929, Church went home on furlough and spent time in England, where he came across the teachings of the deeper life. On his return, he was moved by an inner conviction that he must be honest about his own failures. He said that he had been proud and that he had lived with a barrier between himself and the African believers. He began to speak of his sin and his need.

From 1933, a movement of revival began to spread through Gahini and the surrounding area. The key was the willingness of the missionaries and the Africans to confess their sins and be reconciled. The doctor and the African teachers met together as equals, and they spoke of their failings. People were convicted and came to Christ. They testified to the joy of salvation. They were called the Balokole, which means the saved ones. They walked in the light, a phrase which meant living with open confession. The revival spread to Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, the Congo and beyond.

Church spent the next decades traveling across East Africa to share in the movement. He worked with African leaders, such as William Nagenda, and he was a friend and a companion to them. He was also a writer. He published a number of books about the revival, the most notable of which is Quest for the Highest, an autobiography which appeared in 1981. He also wrote Every Man a Bible Student and other titles. He tried to preserve a record of the revival and to give credit to the Africans.

His work was not free of difficulty. In its early years, the revival met with resistance from some church leaders, who feared its emotional character. There were also divisions among the revival's leaders over questions of practice and authority. Church, as a European, sometimes found himself in tension with the Africans. He was criticized for his enthusiasm and for his closeness to the movement. He admitted that he had made mistakes.

He died on January 10, 1989, at the age of eighty-nine. He is remembered as a physician who gave himself to the care of the body and the soul. His life shows that a missionary who is willing to confess his failings and to walk with the people may become a channel for a great work of God.