Lee Grady, Charisma, Balokole-ism, and False African Revivals
http://www.yesumulungi.com/index.php/apostasy-watch/376-lee-grady-charisma-balokole-ism-and-false-african-revivals.html
Kato Mivule | October 13, 2009
I was stunned and amazed at the recent article by Lee Grady in which he details his experiences in search (research) of a Revival in East Africa commonly known as the East African Revival. According to the article Lee Grady visited East Africa for two weeks especially Uganda and he witnesses 'remnant experiences' or what he refers to as an 80 year old East African Revival still going on in Uganda.
Lee Grady mentions the Balokole in Uganda and how they have been central to the 80 year old East African Revival in Uganda. Lee Grady goes on to even wish that the same Balokole-ism would spread over to the USA that is already dealing with fake and false revivals. I stand and wonder what Lee Grady went to see in Africa. This is the whole trouble with “Revival seeking”…always the danger lies in “seeking” the revival verses a genuine call for Christians to repent. The result is that a pseudo revival is always present.
For those of us who have grown up in Uganda, and preached the gospel in Uganda, Lee Grady and Charisma Magazine must be talking and writing about another Uganda on a different planet other than the earth. I do respect Lee Grandy’s efforts in exposing false teachers in many of his articles and his sincerity in search for a “genuine” revival around the world. This is understandable yet at the same time a very big and large loophole for the same thing Lee Grady is fighting…falsehood in the Church.
I happen to be from Uganda, the very place that Lee Grady and Charisma visited. There is no Revival in Uganda, not even a remnant revival! What is happening is a rapid acceleration towards apostasy in Uganda and unless something is done, Evangelicalism (Balokole-ism) as we know it in Uganda ended years ago and all is left is a dead religion but still with the Pentecostal effects like shakings, goose bumps, overnight prayers, large gatherings etc…these things are mistakably called Revival by unsuspecting two week visitors to East Africa.
The Balokole (Evangelical or Saved ones, as Lee Grady calls them) have largely been invaded by the very same ills and debacles that Lee Grady writes about in Charisma Magazine, from the Prosperity Gospel, Sexual Abuse, Divorce, Greed, Materialism, etc, to other weird doctrines of devils and demons.
On Christian TV and Radio Stations, messages of repentance are extinct, instead messages of materialism and wealth are proclaimed. The Church has become political and preachers have embraced politics similar to Right Wing Conservatives Evangelicals in America. This website(YesuMulungi.com), Ugandan Secular Newspapers, Secular TV and Radio Stations have documented countless gross corruption inside the Balokole Movement, yet Lee Grady fails to even simply use Google to find out the current state of Balokole-ism in Uganda.
I still wonder what Lee Grady and the Charisma Team went to document in Uganda… Lee Grady's Article in Charisma Magazine, a major Evangelical Publication in the USA totally paints an incorrect picture concerning the spiritual affairs of Uganda's Evangelical Church, let alone East Africa.
The Church in Uganda is not at anytime experiencing Revival and I CHALLENGE Lee Grady and Charisma Magazine to substantiate such spurious claims of a 80 Year Old East African Revival in Uganda.
The Church in Uganda is just increasingly becoming a photocopy of the Church in America, from preaching styles, doctrine, and mannerisms. What Lee Grady experienced, was Christians still locked up in the gone days of Pentecostalism in Africa, long unending prayer meetings, long sermons, screaming, shouting, goose bumps, proclamations of Faith etc…these things to a undiscerning two weeks visiting Western Missionary sound like ‘Revival’.
Where did Lee Grady witness messages of Repentance in Uganda? Where did he witness folks coming to renounce their sins? What did Lee Grady hear on Uganda’s Christian TV and Radio? Uganda’s Christian TV and Radio do have Internet Streams and witness is there that they preach an American version of the Prosperity Gospel. What Doctrines did Lee Grady hear being taught in Churches in Uganda for instance? For simplicity and ‘revival talk’, compare Charles Finny and Jonathan Edwards’s sermons, did that occur to Lee Grady that any similarity could be found…?
Yes, there is no doubt that there existed a historical East African Revival (Renewal) probably up to the late 1980’s, but from then on a fake revival is taking place in Uganda – one spearheaded by the Prosperity Gospel movement…an apostasy is happening in Uganda’s Balokole-ism movement and there is urgent need for Sound Bible Teachers to help Christians there be grounded on solid New Testament Bible Truth and not the flattering of revival seekers.
What Lee Grady needed to do in Uganda was not “seek” revivals but to preach a message of repentance and a call for the Evangelical Church to return back to Bible Truth and Sound Bible Doctrine. The insinuating proclamations in Charisma Magazine of a 'continual' 80 year old East African Revival are spurious and a danger to Christians in America and Europe who have a habit of traversing geographical territories in search for revivals. From the Toronto Revival to the Florida Revivals, Christians in America have been misled into searching for the wrong thing – a Revival.
I would not be surprised of Christians boarding planes to go to Kampala, Uganda in 'search' or 're-search' of the new Balokole-ism experience, since Lee Grady is in prayer that Americans would experience a similar Ugandan Balokole-ism experience.
The New Testament does not at any one time teach us to go traverse the globe in search of revivals. This is a danger that I see with the Revival seeking Christian crowd. Nowhere in the New Testament do we have Jesus Christ, Paul, Peter, John and other apostles running to and fro seeking revivals, worst of all fake revivals like the one happening in Uganda, Africa. Brethren watch out!
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LEE GRADY'S ARTICLE IN CHARISMA
http://charismamag.com/index.php/fire-in-my-bones/23526-spiritual-awakening-the-only-thing-that-will-save-us#readmore
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SPIRITUAL AWAKENING: The Only Thing That Will Save Us
-by J. Lee Grady.
We can learn an important lesson from the East African Revival, which transformed a region 80 years ago. The people of Uganda call it Balokole. In the Luganda language it means "the saved ones," but the word became synonymous with the East African Revival—one of the most significant Christian
movements in modern history.
This revival had humble beginnings in September 1929, just before America's Great Depression. Historians trace it to a prayer meeting on Namirembe Hill in Kampala, Uganda, where a missionary to Rwanda, Joe Church, prayed and read the Bible for two days with his friend Simeoni Nsibambi. They felt God had showed them that the African church was powerless because of a lack of personal holiness.
It is impossible to explain exactly what happened after this prayer meeting or how the resulting spiritual fervor spread. When God comes, unusual things happen. Within weeks after the Rev. Church returned to Gahini, Rwanda, Christians gathered to pray and confess their sins openly. A heavy spirit of conviction fell on the people. Whenever they repented for their sins and failures they would weep uncontrollably, ask others to forgive them and
pledge to make restitution.
The weeping spread to farmlands and open fields. Unbelievers who visited these gatherings were converted after they witnessed the sincerity of the Christians. Repentance went deep. Husbands publicly apologized for adultery and farmers repented for stealing cows from each other. Eventually, as the revival spread from Rwanda to Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania and Burundi, even the centuries-old tradition of polygamy (which was still common among professing Christians) was unraveled in some areas.
Balokole changed African Christianity forever. In a 1986 article for Christian History, Michael Harper writes of the revival: "It's effects have been more lasting than almost any other revival in history, so that today there is hardly a single Protestant leader in East Africa who has not been touched by it in some way."
I spent the past two weeks ministering in Uganda and Kenya, and everywhere I went I met people who still talk about the East African Revival—80 years after it began. It breathed resurrection power into dead, traditional churches and triggered aggressive church-planting movements that affected a variety of denominations.
Whether sermons were delivered from pulpits or under trees, six important themes were emphasized in those days: 1) the blood of Jesus; 2) the name of Jesus; 3) the cross of Jesus; 4) the Word of God; 5) the testimony of the saints; and 6) the anointing of the Holy Spirit.
Leaders also stressed the message of 1 John 6-7: "If we say that we have fellowship with Him and yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth; but if we walk in the light as He Himself is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus His son cleanses us from all sin (NASB)." As was true in other spiritual awakenings in history (such as the Asbury Revival in Kentucky in 1970), people stood in front of
each other and admitted their sins, no matter how embarrassing. The honesty cut deep into human pride and dealt a fatal blow against entrenched sin and religious hypocrisy.
After hearing more details about the East African Revival while I was in Uganda last week, I was convinced that this type of movement is the only thing that will pull the United States out of its current despair.
We must have a spiritual awakening, or we die. Political engineering, economic policies, government bailouts and stimulus packages will not save us. No politician, Democrat or Republican, will reverse our course toward destruction.
Our only hope is that a backslidden American church—a church that is as smug, blind and lukewarm as the Laodiceans-—will "be zealous and repent" (see Rev. 3:19).
What encourages me is that God, not man, initiated all the spiritual awakenings of the past—including the First Great Awakening, which gave our country its historic Christian identity. Yes, we play our feeble part by praying, and we must storm heaven. Yes, awakenings come in response to our weak attempts to repent, and we must passionately seek a fresh baptism of holiness.
But we cannot manufacture revivals. Pentecostal fire comes from heaven alone. It is a sovereign blessing from a God who loves us and desires to rescue us from ourselves. We charismatics have generated a lot of our own sound and fury in the past 30 years, but much of what we have created is a shameful substitute for revival. We must become desperate for the real thing.
Today our movement is mired in the shallow waters of self-centered, carnal Christianity. May God mercifully send us our own version of Balokole. May gut-wrenching repentance and public confession of sin interrupt our trendy worship services. May this holy fire spread until the people of the United States see genuine Christians living the message we preach.
-J. Lee Grady is editor of Charisma.
SOURCE - http://fireinmybones.com/
