The East African revival resulted from profound internal and external dynamics of religious reform. It began amongst a group of African Christians who believed that the Anglican Church in Uganda had become too worldly, both compromising with the material opportunities offered by colonialism and through being too accommodating towards traditional religion. The revivalists formed prayer bands within the Church, preaching a classic message of revivalism, focusing upon sin and repentance, the cross, baptism in the Holy Spirit, sanctification and the quest for holiness. The movement spread across the East African region and across denominations. The revival also had an external impetus, drawing sources of renewal from the Keswick Movement, which was mediated in East Africa by the Ruanda Mission, an autonomous body within the Church Missionary Society. The Ruanda Mission itself was pioneered by the Cambridge graduate and missionary, Joe Church, who used his considerable organisational skills to co-ordinate the activities of the indigenous revivalists. This edited collection of sixteen chapters on the revival emerged out of a conference to mark the acquisition of Joe Church's papers by the Henry Martyn Centre in Cambridge. A good number of the contributors make use of his correspondence, publicity and early popular histories of the movement. The authors – a collection of historians, former missionaries and African church leaders – examine the origins and context of the revival, its appeal and reception across the region and, lastly, its impact on culture, society and politics. They demonstrate the considerable legacy of the revival in para-church organisations and recent Pentecostal expressions in East Africa and show how its moral code, spiritual thought and practice have become embedded within East Africa culture. Beyond the Church the revival impacted on social and political arenas. Testifying was a subversive act, a means of imagining alternative communities to the status quo. It gave young men and women the opportunity to repudiate the social morals of their elders and to assert a united fellowship that challenged the exclusive boundaries of clan and ethnicity. Far from being quietist, the revival provided a means for its adherents to assert autonomy against aged leaders who treated them as subjects. Although revival was a great catalyst for the indigenisation of Christianity in Africa it has been neglected as subject for research because of its antecedents in European Evangelical missionary activity. Scholars have preferred to work on supposedly more exotic movements of Christian independency, which seceded from mission Churches, in a misplaced search for African authenticity. Yet reform movements within mission Churches were certainly more widespread than independent ones outside of them. The essays in this volume begin to set right that imbalance.