Jesus spent years with his 12 disciples. When he found them they were a rag tag group of fisherman, crooked IRS employees and generally not cool dudes (I’m looking at you, James the son of Alphaeus). But by the time Jesus ascends to heaven we find these men have been prepared for something more, and once the Holy Spirit gets ahold of them the whole world was rocked by their witness. Jesus didn’t just tell these guys what to do to get to heaven, and then split. No, he hung around - apparently even he couldn’t condense his witness to a single speech.

Have you ever noticed that most of the Epistles are written to Christians? Paul apparently didn’t consider his job completed once people became Christians. In fact it would seem based on the Epistles that “getting saved” was really just the beginning, sometimes Paul even spent years living with and cultivating the growth of Christians.

The first missionaries arrived in Uganda in 1877. By 1906 EVERY tribe within a seventy mile radius of then Mengo, now Kampala, was considered Christian. Today the Buganda people, who live in the central and southern parts of Uganda where Heather and I are located, are more than 98% Christian. The Uganda census reflects a lower population of Christians because the northern tribes have a larger Muslim percentage, but the point I’m trying to make is Heather and I have been sent by many of you as missionaries to a place that already knows about Jesus. So what are we doing here?

Imagine you’re Ugandan and that you attend a big crusade event, there is loud music blasting over a fancy sound system and inspiring speakers get up and preach about this guy Jesus. Then you pray a prayer that a white preacher shouts out across the venue for you to repeat. Finally he tells you to raise your hand if you prayed that prayer, so you do. He tells you you’re now a Christian. The next day the sound system is packed up, the white pastor hops on a plane back to his home and there you are, a newborn Christian. You save up for months and buy a Bible for some answers to all the lingering questions you now have. You try reading the Bible but it’s confusing and you need help so you go to a church. At the church you find lots of people like you, all confused and just doing the best they can with what they learned at big crusade events. You keep going to that church and keep giving money because the pastor says if you do, God will bless you, and if you don’t, you’ll go to hell - and surely, if anyone knows, it’s the pastor.

Years pass and you have children. You tell them they are Christians as well. You send them to a Christian school where the teachers got saved at a crusade just like you and have found at least one book of the Bible that makes sense, so they teach your kids all the wisdom they have found in the book of Proverbs. You still go to that same church and sometimes the pastor will even start the sermon by reading a single verse, and so you have learned and thus taught your children that the Bible is basically a book of wise quotations.

Those children one day have children, and they tell them that they are Christians, and on it goes.

Welcome to Uganda, where the sins of one culture are magnified into another. Tommy Nelson said the West has had had doctrinal revivals, prayer revivals, Biblical revivals, but we have never really had a revival of discipleship. Discipleship just never really took, especially in American Christianity. One thing that did take in America was numerical results, and while discipleship is a hard thing to measure, number of people saved is a concrete figure. Have them raise their hands, count the number of hands you see raised, report this number to the churches you visit when you return home to America, add a slide show of some foreigners with raised hands while praying the sinners prayer, and soon you have more money to go do it all over again.

The problem is while by 1906 most of south-central Uganda was already Christians, many Westerners were convinced that “it’s an African country, therefore IT MUST need saving.” While we were raising support and sharing our story for why we were going to Uganda, even I was certain I would meet non-Christians here. Truth be told I have, but they are few and they are Muslim. Meanwhile crusades continue on to this day - and remember the loud sound system and ranting preaching I described in an old blog post about the local church? Well guess where they got the idea a Church needed these things? In fact many pastors I talk to don’t want to be shepherds or teachers of the Bible, they want a stage and a crowd and a sound system.

Heather and I may not lead a single person to Jesus while we are here in Uganda. It just may not happen – sure, there are some Muslim friends who we do earnestly share our faith and the Gospel with, and there are some here who call themselves Christian who maybe don’t really know what that means and by our witness and teaching may have the Holy Spirit awaken in their soul, but as far as a non-believer never knowing or hearing of Jesus and suddenly becoming saved, likely not going to happen.

But here is my question. When did bringing someone to Christ become more valuable than discipling someone in Christ? Jesus didn’t live that way. Paul didn’t live that way. John didn’t live that way. When did we make crossing the threshold more important than what happens after you have crossed?

Here is what Heather and I ARE doing. We ARE studying the Bible together with the students and staff of AHI. I wish you could witness how exciting and fun this has been. How their eyes light up when they start to get it. This idea of God always doing what is right and good and perfect. The idea that all men have worth because they were created in the image of God. Why Israel painted lamb’s blood on their door during Passover and how that foreshadows Christ. Even the timeline of things, that Noah had never heard of the Ten Commandments and that Isaiah was written 500+ years before Jesus showed up. This basic Bible literacy is something we take for granted in the States yet is completely absent and absolutely craved here in Uganda.

There is more too, I often get to teach at CLA where I make the boys read the Bible and figure out what words like “Stewardship” or “Integrity” mean from the source rather than lecturing to them like I am some white guy in the know. Maybe the biggest impact of all is just living real life with our Ugandan brothers and sisters and finding examples in that everyday life of cool biblical principles (Imago Dei has become a real favorite around here). I have even had the pleasure of teaching a few classes to local pastors and answering their questions on topics like Satan and the purpose of the Church, but really I don’t teach much of anything, I just hide behind Scripture and watch them discover the truth it holds.

My friend David said it best, Christianity is a mile wide and an inch deep in Uganda. Sadly that “crusade knowledge only” Christian that I gave as an example is not an outlier here but generally the rule. Uganda needs Bible teachers, Uganda needs Pastor trainers, Uganda needs Disciple makers. That need is beyond overwhelming; in fact it often feels impossible, like Heather and I are just too small to have any lasting impact. All I can do is trust in my omnipotent God and pray that he would send more people – after all, he spread the Gospel to the world with just 12 men, surely he could disciple all of Uganda with even less. --PHD