Janani Luwum

1922–1977UgandanAnglican

The archbishop who handed Idi Amin a protest against the killings, and was dead by the next morning.

Summary

Janani Luwum lived 1922–1977, and was Ugandan. This wing places Janani Luwum in The Church Under Fire & Into All the World, 1930–today.

Lived 1922–1977, Ugandan.
Stood in The Church Under Fire & Into All the World (1930–today).
Hangs on The Martyrs.
Tradition: Anglican / East African Revival.

The life

Janani Luwum was an Acholi from northern Uganda, a village schoolteacher converted in the East African Revival in 1948, who rose to lead the Anglican church in Uganda in 1974 - two years into Idi Amin's rule. As the disappearances mounted, the bishops drafted a protest naming what was happening to their people, and Luwum delivered it. On 16 February 1977 he was summoned to a public assembly with two cabinet ministers, accused of plotting a coup, and driven away. The government announced the next day that he had died in a car crash.

When the body was finally released the family was refused a proper viewing, and those who saw it reported bullet wounds; later testimony from inside the regime pointed to Amin himself. Uganda marks his death as a national holiday, and his statue stands above the west door of Westminster Abbey among the martyrs of the twentieth century.

What was happening while he lived7 moments · 1930–today

May 1934The Barmen DeclarationOne hundred thirty-nine delegates met in a church hall in Barmen, a district of Wuppertal, while the German government was busy fusing the Protestant church to the Nazi state. Their six short theses, drafted mainly by the Swiss theologian Karl Barth, said the church listens to one Word, Jesus Christ as Scripture presents Him, and to no other lord, event, or leader.
October 1945The Stuttgart Declaration of GuiltGerman church leaders, Niemöller among them, admitted before the world that they had not resisted enough, not prayed enough, not believed enough. It is one of the rare times a national church has said plainly that it failed.
1948–1964Richard Wurmbrand's fourteen yearsA Romanian Lutheran pastor of Jewish descent, converted at thirty, was seized off the street in February 1948 and spent fourteen years in communist prisons, about three of them alone in an underground cell where he kept his mind by preaching a sermon every night to no one. He was released in 1964 under Romania's general amnesty for political prisoners and left the country in 1965, after Western Christians paid for his exit.
1949–1955China's long night beginsAfter the communist victory, foreign missionaries were pushed out within a few years and churches were pressed into a single state-supervised body. Wang Mingdao, a Beijing pastor who had refused Japanese pressure a decade earlier, refused this too, and was arrested in August 1955. He signed a confession under interrogation, could not live with it, took it back, and served roughly twenty-two more years.
1958The widows go backElisabeth Elliot, with her toddler daughter Valerie, and Rachel Saint, Nate's sister, went to live in the Waorani settlement, among the men who had done the killing. Years later two of those men baptized Nate Saint's son and daughter in the same river.
1966–1976The Cultural RevolutionRed Guards closed the last open churches, burned Bibles, and sent pastors to labor camps. Watchman Nee, imprisoned since 1952, died in a camp in 1972. Public Christianity in China effectively ceased, and the faith moved into kitchens and back rooms, where it was never counted.
July 1974The Lausanne CongressAbout 2,700 Christians from 150 nations met in Switzerland at Billy Graham's invitation. The Anglican John Stott drafted the resulting covenant; the missiologist Ralph Winter's address put "unreached peoples" on the map; and Latin Americans like René Padilla and Samuel Escobar pressed the point that preaching and mercy are not rivals.

The Church Under Fire & Into All the World: the whole era→

Go further

Read them yourself. Public-domain works are free to read in full; the rest open where the book can be found.

Search Janani Luwum at the Internet Archive · every work MannaFest cites

Why this one hangs here

Handed a dictator a written protest against the killings, and was dead within a day - the government said a car crash; the body said otherwise.

Hangs on The Martyrs: The witnesses who paid with their lives, from the arena at Carthage to the present day, and the confessors who paid with everything short of their lives.

On the wall

Era: The Church Under Fire & Into All the World (1930–today)

Hangs in: The Martyrs

The years he lived in

The Church Under Fire & Into All the World 1930–today

Two counts of the twentieth century's Christian dead are in circulation and they are built differently, so the page gives both. David Barrett and Todd Johnson put the figure near forty-five million in the World Christian Encyclopedia, first edition 1982 and second edition 2001. They counted every believer whose life was cut short by human hostility. That takes in whole populations killed in wars and famines where faith was one cause among several. Thomas Schirrmacher, working for the International Institute for Religious Freedom, puts the yearly figure near seven to eight thousand, counting only deaths documented case by case as killings for confessing Christ. Barrett and Johnson's own Center for the Study of Global Christianity revised the annual rate down in the third edition of 2019. The wide number and the narrow number measure two different things, and even the narrow one is large. The same century saw the church grow faster than it ever had. Both are true of the same hundred years.

The whole era →

Known for

Archbishop of Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi and Boga-Zaire from 1974
Delivering a written protest against state murders and disappearances directly to Idi Amin
Killed on 16 February 1977; one of the ten twentieth-century martyrs carved above the Great West Door of Westminster Abbey

Standing beside himThe Church Under Fire & Into All the World · 37 on this stretch of wall

Corrie ten Boom1892–1983

Hid Jews behind a false wall in her family's watch shop, survived Ravensbrück, and went back to Germany to forgive.

Maximilian Kolbe1894–1941

Stepped out of the Auschwitz line and asked to be starved to death in place of a man he had never met, who lived another fifty-four years.

C.S. Lewis1898–1963

The Oxford atheist who came in kicking and struggling, then explained the faith to a whole century.

Wang Mingdao1900–1991

Signed the confession his interrogators wanted, could not live with it, took it back - and paid for that with twenty-two more years.

Eric Liddell1902–1945

Gave up his best Olympic event rather than run on a Sunday, won a different one in world-record time, and died in a prison camp teaching other people's children.

Watchman Nee1903–1972

Built China's house churches, then spent the last twenty years of his life in a labor camp for it.