State of the Mission Part 3

So far we have covered the mission work we have done with AHI as well as with Pastor training; but there are many other settings where God is at work here. One particular is the Leadership School here on the Ranch. Cornerstone Leadership Academy (CLA) is a Senior Secondary or A level (Advanced) school that takes the brightest students representing different regions across Uganda. It covers what might be the American equivalent of 11th & 12th grade as well as a community college rolled into one. CLA was begun more than two decades ago with the idea that training up the future leaders of Uganda in a cross-tribal environment would help to build a more united country and help to prevent future discriminatory genocides like Uganda saw under Idi Amin (and more recently in Rwanda, Kenya and Southern Sudan). There are two schools in Uganda, one closer to Kampala for girls, and one here on the ranch for boys. From the first week we arrived, Heather and I have enjoyed being engaged at CLA - in some ways, because the common language spoken at CLA is English, it can be even easier to build relationships with their students. I have also built a strong bond of friendship with the Headmaster, Pastor Ayo, and the Deputy Headmaster Kenneth, both of whom I deeply love and have really enjoyed getting to know. Pastor Ayo in particular lived through the Idi Amin years and can recall some intense events.

In addition to just spending time with the staff and students at CLA I have been given the opportunity, as I am free, to teach discipleship classes at the school. I have thoroughly enjoyed teaching on Stewardship, Integrity, The Church, and a variety of other exciting topics. Just as with Pastor training, I use scripture as our textbook as we dive in together as a class to understand what the Bible has to say on these things (for example, we compared Job 1:8 & 2:3 and noted that Job gains integrity). In addition, I have been teaching a practical computer class using a fabulous curriculum written by John & Amanda Bull wrote for CLA while they were here in Uganda for a year (before us with a couple months overlap).

The most exciting opportunity at Cornerstone has been the genesis of a local newspaper written and designed by CLA students. This is another great example of some people in the States getting on mission with us rather than simply taking a passive role. It started when a CLA student mentioned to me that he was hoping to one day be a reporter for a local newspaper. With my own journalism background I started asking him questions about his interest and quickly came to realize he had little to no opportunity to practice and thus gain the skills needed make that dream a reality.

A few weeks wrestling with that thought, and the idea of a Student Newspaper came to my mind. I learned so much working on a student newspaper and most every high school in America has its own paper - why couldn’t one of the premiere secondary schools in Uganda have one as well? I talked to Eric Kreuter from Cornerstone about the idea and he was surprisingly supportive noting that the paper should not just cover Cornerstone, but the entire Ekitangaala Ranch community. That fit quite nicely in with our desire to build community out here, so suddenly this crazy idea was looking more realistic and also in alignment with our mission! I began communicating with several old writing friends and mentors on the East Coast, who were equally excited about the prospect of financially supporting the project. The real surprise came when I found out there was already an underground writer’s club meeting at the school that currently had their articles tucked away in a folder, forgotten forever.

It was around this time that Dan and Celeste Gracey also confirmed that they would be coming out to Uganda to visit with us. Celeste is a graduate from the Journalism department at UW and works for a local paper on the Eastside, but most importantly she has a real passion for living out a Christian life while using her talents in the field of Journalism. This really couldn’t get any better - it just had to be a God timing thing, so I wrote Celeste about the newspaper idea and she totally took it up and got on mission. Dan and Celeste worked hard to raise support to purchase two good laptops, pendrives and a digital camera for the newspaper. They also used their contacts to get donations both from Microsoft and Adobe for software to make this paper a reality.

Despite all of these material contributions, Celeste’s greatest contribution was teaching classes at Cornerstone about the importance of ethical Journalism and the impact these students could have as leaders if they became Journalists. It climaxed with a meeting of the student staff of the new newspaper (the core formed by the writer’s club) where they decided on a title for the paper (The Ranch Times), divvied up beats around the ranch, and listened carefully as Celeste taught on the basics of article writing (inverted pyramid).

Since that time we have been meeting weekly, working on the premiere issue of the Ranch Times. We originally planned to publish in 2011 but unfortunately we got started a bit late and studying for final exams needed to take precedence (this was a decision I made, I’m sure had I asked, the students would have worked hard to try and reach the deadline). Nonetheless, most of the articles have been completed for the first issue and Celeste has continued to support the paper with templates and materials to help the paper start off on the right foot. Our hope is to release the first issue in early March (the students have been gone December-January for their equivalent of a summer break). Most important is equipping the students with the basic skills they will need to publish papers every other month, before Heather and I depart.

In addition to Cornerstone, there has been other mission work outside of AHI that Heather and I have been involved in. Heather started a woman’s prayer group that meets in the primary school weekly and despite Heather’s absence for several weeks (with visitors and such)the prayer has continued strong. In the midst of that Heather has also built a strong friendship with Jovia, the Headmistress of the Primary School, and that friendship has been a real blessing helping to support Heather when things got lonely. With the backing of AHI and Maggie we have also hosted multiple Community Leadership meetings – gathering the headmasters of all the local schools and other mission leaders to study scripture, share a meal, and come together as a united community under the headship of Christ.

Finally, the internet tree where we can gain our most reliable net connection is located at the local secondary school (not CLA) which has, in a positive way, forced us to build friendships with many of the more curious secondary students. Of course not all of these conversations are fruitful (see Heather’s previous posts) but many are and sometimes I think the internet tree is God’s way of keeping us connected with that part of the Ranch community. I’m sure there are dozens of other little projects and ministries I’m not listing (local bible schools and a fun networking project come to mind) but the point is, God is working and He keeps enabling us to join in His work. The truth is it’s a lot of fun - in fact the hardest times here are when things are quiet. That’s when the solitude of being in the bush can really get to us, which may be why we continue to find projects we can get involved with.

The first bit of news we have to share you may have already heard on Facebook but I would be remiss not to mention it. Heather is pregnant and we are super excited at the prospect of this next stage of our life! We’re not the only ones excited either; it seems like the entire community is talking, and as Lillian said, “I have been praying every night that you would have a baby and God answered my prayers.” Most intriguing, with all of the death, diseases, and risks, pregnancy isn’t talked about much here by the nationals, and yet culture seems to have been thrown out the window in Heather’s case because the whole ranch is very eager to talk about “The Bean.”

"join us in our prayers as we investigate a possible second year here in Uganda"

Second, you can join us in our prayers as we investigate a possible second year here in Uganda. Obviously the obstacles for returning with a baby are greater, and we need to be called by God to be on mission, but it is quite attractive to finish what we have begun here with projects like the new school curriculum and as just mentioned, the CLA newspaper. What we learned on the first trip is that if it is God’s will he will make it happen, so we are trusting Him. In the meantime we have committed to at least renovating a former staff building into a new mission house here for AHI. Currently we stay in the Green House, which is technically owned by ACM, so our hope is to build a house specifically for long term volunteers working here with AHI. This falls right into line with our original call and mission which was to be the first of many who would come here to support Maggie in Uganda - so I am asking that you begin prayerfully considering if you want to partner with us on this new project.

Finally a smaller but no less important project that Heather and I are interested in raising some funds for is to paint the staff housing here. Currently all of the housing for the staff of AHI is painted a plain white with no differentiation between each individual home (they are like small townhomes) and we would love to add a small bit of color to both brighten up the houses and create a dividing line between each individual unit. We also feel it would be a great way to show love towards the staff with something that’s more “fun” and aesthetic, rather than functional. The total cost for such a project would be around 2,000,000 shillings ($800). Heather and I can’t fund this project alone, so we are looking for anyone who would be interested in joining us to help, as a sort of farewell gift from all of us (you included) to the staff that we have struggled alongside and grown to love. Let us know if you’re interested in adding a little color to Uganda!

"as I look back I have NO IDEA how we were able to accomplish these things, and so the only answer can be the empowering of the Holy Spirit and the work of God"

I think this basically completes the “State of the Mission” series and I hope you have enjoyed seeing how God has been working in amazing ways here. I really do want to give the glory to Him, not because that’s the church answer of what you’re supposed to say, but because as I look back I have NO IDEA how we were able to accomplish these things, and so the only answer can be the empowering of the Holy Spirit and the work of God. We are excited to be coming home soon and to share these things with you in person. We have been so blessed to have a community like you who was willing to go on mission with us and we love and appreciate you all! Don’t miss next week when we introduce you to the exciting new students… now aptly titled apprentices here at AHI!

-PHD

Death is so close here, the wall between this life and eternity more like a filmy curtain. We Westerners all know people who have died or are very sick, of course, but we don’t think about it happening to us - at least not until we’re old and wrinkled, right? Death is separated, resigned to hospitals and funeral homes. But in Uganda it’s all around, seemingly inescapable. The newspapers are filled with bus accidents, sickness, lynchings, child sacrifice.

We’ve had many burials this year: Relatives of students and staff; the daughter of our taxi driver; an uncle of the ranch carpenter; the 24 year-old son of Pastor Bosco - in a country with such limited medical facilities, small problems can quickly become deadly. The pastor’s son had malaria (probably for the several-dozenth time in his life) and just let it go too long before going for treatment. And we’ve had many close calls, especially with Jesca’s baby Benjamin, as he was repeatedly sick and near death for months. Praise Jesus he’s been healthy and growing well since autumn!

And then, of course, there’s AIDS. Our new friend Kade (who was here all summer) befriended a young teenage girl in a village up the road. She was a sponsored student of ACM and had become very sick. Since she was so young, her AIDS was probably the result of rape. Kade visited her over a couple months, took her to church, tried to get her help, but she was wasting away. The last straw came when her parents had managed to get medication sent up from a hospital in Luweero, but the boda-driver charged with delivering it decided to blackmail them, demanding 10,000/UgSH ($4) to hand it over. They couldn’t afford it. Kade caught wind of it, found out who the boda-driver was, and went after him, nearly getting in a fight, but to no avail. At least the guy’s name was spread around so he probably won’t be getting much business from anyone else… The parents managed to scrape together enough to send for more medicine, but by that time it was too late and the girl died.

Sometimes it’s easy to close your eyes to these realities around you, simply because they’re so abundant. It hit closer to home, though, when I attended the burial, a few months ago, of Sylvia’s brother. Maggie arranged for a taxi-bus to transport anyone from the staff and students who wanted to go, and we drove North about 40 minutes to her family’s compound in the woods. Once there, we sat around for about an hour as hundreds of people filtered in. The whole affair was pretty quiet and subdued, as speeches were given and the men said prayers over the body. But as they took him away to inter in a cave, Sylvia flung herself across the courtyard, keening violently, and fell on to the porch, as it seemed like she realized at that moment that she’d never be seeing her Muslim brother again. It was one of the saddest sounds I’ve ever heard.

“A voice is heard in Ramah, mourning and great weeping. Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because her children are no more.” - Jeremiah 31:15

All these thoughts were brought up again last week, as Moses, a former student who is the head cook at CLA, came to visit us. As the conversation progressed, we found out that in the 2 weeks of Christmas holiday, a man in his village (Kitwe, just about the primary school) had been killed by a falling tree, and at least 9 in Ntuuti had died, including a 9 year old boy who was hit by a boda. Whew. This is in a village of at most a couple hundred people. Patrick and Heidi went into Ntuuti a few days ago, and they said you could feel the sadness in the air. David Baekwaso, our bike mechanic, said the churches are all praying hard but many in the village are turning to the witch-doctors for dealing with this huge tragedy.

“Since the children have flesh and blood, he [Jesus] too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might destroy him who holds the power of death – that is, the devil – and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death.” - Hebrews 2:14-15

Because we know in our hearts that in creation God intended man to be an eternal being free of death, I think it’s in our human nature to do everything we can to ignore the darkness around us. Especially in our 1st World lives, where we often have the technology and money to manipulate our surroundings, we look for comfort and safety. And yet the effects of sin are still there, hidden just under the surface. Here that surface is stripped away, the hidden darkness brought to light, and the truth of this verse becomes reality:

“Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all men, because all sinned....” - Romans 5:12

At this point, you may be wondering why I’m writing such a depressing post. I wasn't sure either, except that the beginnings of these thoughts have been rolling around in my head for quite a while. As I've been praying about it, this is what has come to mind: I think it’s about jarring me, and perhaps you, out of our self-constructed bubble of attempting to control the world around us, making it comfortable, safe, etc. It’s not. Because of the Fall, “the creation was subjected to frustration” (Rom. 8:20), and if left to ourselves, eventually all we have to look forward to is death and destruction.

Oh wait! There’s good news!

But God…

“On this mountain the Lord Almighty will destroy the shroud that enfolds all peoples, the sheet that covers all nations; he will swallow up death forever. The sovereign Lord will wipe away the tears from all faces; he will remove the disgrace of his people from all the earth. The Lord has spoken. In that day they will say ‘Surely this is our God; we trusted in him; let us rejoice and be glad in his salvation.” - Isaiah 25:7-9

“When the perishable has been clothed with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality, then the saying that is written will come true: ‘Death has been swallowed up in victory.’ ‘Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?" - 1 Corinthians 15:54-55

“For the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd; he will lead them to springs of living water. And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.” Revelation 7:17

I need to be reminded, often, of the seriousness of the war we are fighting in this world, against evil and death. And that in the end, God is victorious.

“And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘Now the dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and will be their God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.” - Revelation 21:3-4

State of the Mission Part 2

Wow, what a week this has been! Between the festivities of pre-graduation, the massive party of Graduation, fixing a local borehole, attending as honored guests a preschool graduation, saying goodbye to our students, saying goodbye to many of the visitors and planning for our week ahead with Heather’s parents, it has been busy, busy, busy. The reality that I won’t see most of the students again hasn’t really hit me yet, and maybe I don’t want it to hit me because I really love those guys. Every morning it is my joy to be greeted with a chorus of “OFWONO!” that will now be silent. I’m praying that the new students will be as cool, and you can join us in prayer as we look ahead to January 23rd and the interview process for the six new students that will be starting school in February. Pray that God would reveal the right students to us and that we would have Solomon-like wisdom and discernment as we choose only 6 students out of possibly hundreds of applications.

Back to the mission, again really none of this has been Heather and my doing but God’s doing and allowing us to join in. I suspect that’s something many people say to show some false piety but you must know that for us it is the real deal, God seems out to prove to Heather and I that he is dependable and “slowly slowly” (an African term) we are learning to trust him. As I reviewed my previous post I realized there were so many other things God had done with AHI that has had effects on the local community - fixing 6+ boreholes (wells), building 2 schools and several widows homes, all this year and all with Heather and I helping or in some cases organizing the project.

Anyway, for this second part I would like to talk about all the things God is doing outside of AHI that we have gotten to be a part of. When we came here it was primarily to serve AHI and I have often had to keep blinders on and repeat that focus to many of our friends in other organizations out here - after all people supported us to assist AHI and so Maggie “gets dibs” on our time. However God is great and has opened a few opportunities for Heather and I outside of AHI where we have been able to pour into the local community. Most excitingly, we have been joined by many of you who heard our pleas for different needs and have taken the idea of “being on mission with us” to heart and jumped right in.

One example was an e-mail I sent to Brian Geihsler back in April. Brian (like myself) has a real heart for church planting and for the mission of Christ going out through the Church. One of the ministries that African Children’s Mission (the sister and original parent organization of AHI) serves here is a training center for Ugandan pastors. As I have mentioned in previous blog posts, Bible literacy is a real problem here, as are wild ideas (doctrinally) from various local pastors and spiritual leaders. The root cause of this is lack of training - there are very few seminaries in Uganda and virtually nothing for leaders without a college education, which pastors in the villages don’t have access to. So this training center serves a key need here in central Uganda and pastors from all over the country travel here once a month and literally sleep on the floor of the conference hall in order to participate.

One vital need these Pastors have is training materials and good study Bibles. I sent an e-mail to Brian asking if he would be interested in organizing some resources for the pastors and I’ll let Brian share with you in his own words what happened from there:

It started out with announcing one night at community group that you guys saw a huge need for theological resources among the pastors in training. I shared some background about what you guys were doing in Uganda and then we brainstormed about what we could do. A few community group nights later, we announced that we'd be collecting money for the effort and God showed up in a mighty way. The next week, tons of people in our group brought cash and checks to fund it.


We originally thought we'd collect money to buy different books, but after talking with you and thinking about it more over a couple weeks, we figured that getting study Bibles for each pastor as graduation gifts would be more fruitful.


We then had to figure out which study Bibles to get. It was an interesting task because we wanted to get Bibles that were solid theologically, but also accessible to pastors who speak English as a second language. I did some research and had some email exchanges with Patrick and we settled on NIV Study Bibles using the 1984 NIV translation.


After that came the difficult task of figuring out how the heck we'd get the Bibles to Patrick and Heather. We wanted to send them with a group of people already headed to visit them so that we could save on shipping costs. I worked with Heather's dad some to see if he knew of any groups going, but then Patrick (and Phil later) gave the exciting news that Dan and Celeste Gracey were headed to Uganda soon. I contacted Dan and Celeste and they graciously agreed to take the Bibles. We set up a time for me to drop them off, and on the day they were packing to leave, I dropped off a suitcase full of Bibles for them to include in their already huge collection of luggage. - Brian

This Friday the Pastors will be graduating and they will be receiving their new Bibles. What’s so exciting is how Brian took a single e-mail and ran with it - he really got on mission and his excitement brought his entire community group into the mission with him. So I want to publicly thank the members of Anchor Church in Seattle who were willing to serve these men. It’s one thing for me to be here, sit in classes with these pastors, hear their voices and their needs, it’s something else to be meeting in a home in America and be willing to bless people you will likely never meet, and never hear their appreciation… at least not until eternity. I’m sure pictures of the graduation will be on the blog shortly and more good news is that there is a pastor from North Carolina is raising funds to build an entire pastoral Library here on the ranch.

ACM has also recently started a remote version of the pastor training, where instead of the students coming here the teachers are going to different locations around the country and teaching on weekends in vacant primary school classrooms. The second change in the remote training is that it is taught in Luganda rather than English. While there are very few options for pastoral training in English there is literally NO pastoral training in the country in Luganda, the most common language, and many pastors only speak Luganda. Our friend David Semeyn has been an integral part of the remote training and I also have been fortunate enough to go out a few times and teach (while being translated). David tells a story of a pastor who had a dream that someone would come to him and teach him about the Bible, but the pastor woke up confused knowing that there was no place for him to get such training. The next day he found the Remote Bible Training Center for Pastors and David said the pastor embraced him with tears because God had answered his prayers and confirmed his power with such an impossible yet prophetic dream. It’s my opinion that no ministry, no NGO, no mission organization is more important than this Pastor training, because it is not money or business practices or even vocational training that can transform Uganda, it is only the Gospel and the Gospel specifically lived out by local church communities impacting Ugandans. So the first step for these local churches is for the leadership to be called on mission by God and have the knowledge and training so that they can best steward Christ’s church and teach their congregation the Gospel. So many Americans look at Uganda and think it’s “broken”, and by broken they mean it’s not American. But then they come home to a country with rampant materialism, high divorce rates, mixed up morals, and plenty of corruption to go around. As Maggie often says it’s not about changing Ugandan culture to American culture, rather it’s about bringing forth a Kingdom of God culture and no entity is better at being the example of the Kingdom of God than a local church.

So the next logical step after pastors get training and their congregations get on mission, is for those Churches to begin planting new churches. Which brings us to yet another place God has completely poured gasoline on our spark of a mission here in Uganda. I have often been given the opportunity to teach the Bible in local Churches. I begin almost every “sermon” with the preface that I am not a pastor nor called to be a pastor, rather I have led Bible studies for many years and that my real call is in helping men who desire to plant churches. Well, in Uganda you have to be careful what you say because people will run with it and once local pastors heard my desire in helping with Church Planting they started asking, or perhaps even demanding that I share more.

Currently Church Planting looks something like this in Uganda: Some young, energetic and charismatic person decides they want to be a pastor, so they go around petitioning local churches and Mzungus (whites) for the finances to build a church building. Once the building is complete they bum favors off friends for old sound equipment and the ability to borrow a generator on Sundays. They find some local singers (many Ugandans desire to be a professional singers) who are excited because they get to sing on microphone, and church services begin. They blast the sound system, the singers sing, the pastor teaches on whatever topic he feels appropriate and people hear all the noise and come. Boom, church planted… only that’s not what church planting looks like in scripture, and more importantly it’s pretty dangerous for the spiritual health of the congregation with no measure of sound doctrine, no accountability for the pastor’s teaching, no sense of shepherding and often it just becomes a place for you to get on stage. I really wish that I was exaggerating, but too often local churches are not places of worship or community, they are stages.

So when the local pastors heard I wanted to help men plant churches, what they really heard is that this is a Mzungu who wants to buy us church buildings, sound equipment and generators. God was in control though and he had a different plan. I worked with some trusted local friends who had been through the aforementioned pastoral training and we began to draw up what assisting church planting could REALLY look like in Uganda. We together devised two conferences, one for local pastors to teach them about the Church and bring them on board with the mission of churches planting new churches (ala Antioch in Acts) and a second follow up conference with any church member who felt they were called to be a church planter. Our final plan was to then pair each prospective church planter with a mature and established pastor to be mentored under for one year. Then the idea is that after that year the church planter can plant out of the local church with the support and resources of that church behind them.

My role was very minimal, first to be an excuse for all these pastors to come together on the topic of Church Planting (Mzungu teachers draw crowds, sadly) and second for me to teach about the church straight from scripture. Everything I teach here I teach directly from scripture. Why? Because it protects me from ever being the White Man who came and told the Africans “This is how you’re supposed to do it.” Instead I teach “this is what the Bible says” and allow the Africans to contextualize it into their own culture and figure out how to do it on their own. Things didn’t EXACTLY go as planned though, because well, God was at work. The first conference for pastors had a smaller attendance than we anticipated - something like 12 pastors. However, that enabled two unique things to happen - first I was able to get really personal and discuss with them individual obstacles they each faced as pastors, hear their own perspectives on what Church Planting looked like and get a lot of feedback I would later use in the next conference. The second thing this allowed was an open and yet authentic Q&A time where we were able to delve into the struggles of the Uganda church and talk frankly about a lot of bad doctrine that was floating around. For example, we talked for a long time about prosperity gospel and looked at scripture and why it simply could not be true. One pastor even asked me, “If I can’t promise my congregation that God will make them rich, how will I keep them coming to church?”

Some other things that really surprised them was that the early church wasn’t rich, that Jesus was poor and homeless and the disciples didn’t fare much better, that Africans heard the gospel long before the British (Phillip with an Ethiopian), that the early church didn’t have dedicated buildings until 100+years after Jesus, and that a Sunday service wasn’t the primary purpose of the Church. I think we spent an hour on Acts 2:42 alone and another hour on verses 43-47. Then they got really excited by the prospective of what a church on mission would look like and that church planting didn’t require a huge operating budget (or sound system) but instead a core group of dedicated believers. So four hours later my teaching was coming to a close and the pastors basically said “We need to do this again, so when can you teach again, and we will bring LOTS more people.”

Remember I said in my first post that part of why we haven’t told these stories is because it feels like we jump off cliffs and God provides the miracle of flight and telling the story feels like we are claiming wings of our own. So I need, NEED you to know it was NOT my teaching that had this response, rather it was the Holy Spirit working and God revealing himself in scripture to these pastors. Listen I am NOT the right guy to be teaching on Church Planting - I have nearly zero qualifications here, but for whatever reason God decided he was going to get the word out and he was going to let me be the voice.

So we told the pastors yes, we would be having a second conference and that we also wanted them to invite prospective Church Planters to that conference. They said no problem, so we asked them how many people we could expect, and they told us about 100 people. We set a date and said ok!

When the second conference started God did it again. When I first arrived it was nice comfortable 30 people, but sure enough by lunch the number was closer to 100. More importantly the first session had given me the perspective I needed so that I could teach to a much larger group and yet be very specific about obstacles Ugandan church planters face. Again everyone was surprised that you didn’t need money or a church building, that treating God like a piñata is not good doctrine, that studying the Bible is actually a key responsibility of the Church, and I basically taught straight from Acts, and some pieces I stole from the Church Planting chapter in “Total Church” …. But again mostly just straight from Acts and the Epistles. We talked a lot about the qualifications of a pastor (1 Timothy, Titus and 1 Peter), about the heavy and eternal responsibility of a pastor (James and Hebrews) and we talked about what it means to be “called” as a Church Planter.

One common question was “what if someone is certain they are “called” by God but doesn’t meet the qualifications in scripture or isn’t willing to spend a year mentoring under the authority of another pastor?” So I used an example of the huge tour busses that constantly ride up and down the main roads here, with one the most common transportation accidents you see on the road being one of these busses flipped on its side. I asked everyone to imagine they were boarding a bus with their family, and as they got on the bus they asked the driver what qualifications he had. The driver answers, “None at all, I’ve never driven a bus like this.” You naturally ask, “Well, do you have a license, have you ever even driven a car or a motorcycle?” He answers “No, I’ve never driven a vehicle in my life!” So then of course you ask… “Well why are you driving this bus?” And he answers, “Because God has called me to drive this bus.” I found by a show of hands that 100 out of 100 Ugandans would get their family off that bus! Then we talked about how a pastor who claims to be called but doesn’t fit the scriptural criteria is even more dangerous, because he is dealing with eternal lives.

My teaching went on for 6+ hours with some breaks into small groups in between for discussion and prayer. You also have to remember that in Uganda a one hour sermon takes two because every word has to be translated (even if only Ugandans are in attendance many don’t speak but English speak Luganda). Then Pastor Bosco, one of my trusted pastor friends, got up and started speaking in Luganda specifically about the mentorship program. The question came up about what role I would play in this Church planting project. My answer was simple: I have already played my role and taught from scripture, I didn’t come to start an NGO or some Mzungu-run program, instead Pastors Magezi and Bosco would be taking it from here and it would locally organized and run. They formed a committee of a few of the respected pastors and agreed to meet monthly. We had about a dozen candidates sign up for the mentorship program and over a dozen pastors offer to be mentors. The mentorship is set to begin in January and you can be praying that this micro-church-planting project in Kakooge continues to gain momentum. God is SO COOL!

Last week I thought I was writing one blog post and by the end it was looking like it was a two-parter, but here we are again a long way down the page and now I haven’t even covered a sixth of what I was hoping to cover. So I suppose the Ranch Newspaper and Women’s Prayer Groups and lots more will have to wait until next week! Thanks for all the positive response from last week’s post and I hope this id helping you to identify both specific ways you can be in prayer and also possible ways you would like to get involved! By the way, Heather’s parents and John Shimer are doing great out here, but we might not let them come home. Peace be with you!
-PHD

State of the Mission Part 1

One of the primary goals of this journey was for Heather and I to not be on mission alone. One day you, our supporters (whether by a single prayer or a large check) will stand in Heaven and hear fully of the mighty things God has accomplished in Uganda because of you. We did not want to raise support from others to send us on mission. Rather our desire was to join in mission with our greater church community on a mission together to Uganda. The difference between these two ideas is a subtle but important one and in many ways I feel we have been successful. However I don’t think we have done the best job, even with this blog, of communicating exactly what God is doing here. Often the blog has focused on painting a picture of Uganda for you, to make it more tangible, but not focused on the mighty works of God here. The reasoning I believe is twofold. First Heather and I have had a wrong view of how we spend our time working on the blog, e-mail and other communication at home. There is so much to be done here that often we emotionally feel like time spent on e-mail or a blog post is laziness or “not real work.” The reality is quite the opposite - in fact if we did nothing with our time here but tell the story of what a year at AHI is like and how God is working here, to you on the opposite end of the earth, that would be a success.

The second hindrance may be harder to explain, but I’ll try. The crux of it is this: Heather and I TRULY have done nothing by our own power here. I’m not being modest or trying to give some fake sense of humility, we have TRULY done nothing except by God doing things with us. Over and over again we have put ourselves on a ledge and jumped and every time God has granted the miracle of flight. To talk about these things publicly seems in one sense as if we are taking credit, as if we are claiming that we have summoned wings all our own. Both of these excuses are deceptions from the enemy, counterintelligence trying to muddy the message of the work of God in Uganda, so my hope for future blog posts is to shed more light on the many works of Jesus.

First AHI itself: African Hospitality Institute has gone through tremendous change in the 8 months we have been here. It has very little resemblance to the school that existed when we first arrived. AHI of old was very focused on theory and classroom time and run by a few staff members with Maggie always kept at a distance. Vocational schools have a negative connotation in Uganda (much like the United States) for being for stupid or otherwise incapable people. So some members of the staff did everything they could to try and build AHI into something more like a secondary or specialized school and remove the appearance of it as a vocational school, more for their own pride than the wellbeing of the students (it’s more impressive to be the headmaster of a school than the headmaster of a vocational school). Maggie for her part did not like this but allowed it to be run this way - trying to be culturally sensitive and allow the school to be Ugandan organized and run (a very noble and right idea). It’s amazing how confusing things can get when you’re trying to lead but also serve in a culturally sensitive way, and up can quickly become down even with the best motives. The beauty of it all is that God knows our hearts and he knew Maggie’s and though individuals may have had selfish motives and thought they were getting away with it, God always brings things into the open and did so here. In the early summer of this year God began to clean house, bringing to light several conspiracies and character flaws that literally forced Maggie’s hand to fire these staff. The details of those situations are best described on Maggie’s blog but are not really what is important or in my opinion even why it happened. Rather I think God had held his hand of mercy out for long enough and decided the time for justice had arrived, before this class of students graduated without the knowledge or skills they needed.

So with most of the head staff gone Maggie was able to go back to the drawing board and rebuild AHI with the blueprint of the mission God had placed in her heart a half-decade earlier. Heather, Maggie and I sat down several times a week and began to hash out what AHI would look like. The basic premise we came to was more practical learning, more interaction with Maggie (since she is the specialist and the only person here who has worked in Hospitality), smaller class sizes but with a new class entering every year rather than every two years (hopefully creating a sense of mentorship by upper classmen) and most importantly a curriculum built from the ground up by the current staff and students based on what skills they needed to get a job and be successful in it. That is the new AHI. The old AHI had students with their heads down on desks while a teacher lectured for hours about “work ethic.” The new AHI has the staff demonstrate work ethic every day and encourage the students to join in. The old AHI would spend hours writing on a chalk board why bread rises. The new AHI has the students bake a loaf of bread. The old AHI had tests that were mostly theory and very subjectively based on which students a teacher preferred. The new AHI has students actually complete the expected activity (clean a guest room, serve a guest) and grades on objective expectations (was the floor mopped? Did they smile while they served?). Heather moderated the student forums on curriculum and I contributed most of the material for testing and guided the staff through the process, but that wasn’t us, that was you, and specifically it was God doing his thing. How do I know? Heather and I are not trained teachers, and we are certainly no school principals, and yet somehow God has used us to build a new school program. That has to be God.

One class I taught last semester was called “Job Preparation.” It’s a perfect example of the “New AHI” way of doing things. It was an entire class dedicated to filling out job applications, gaining confidence in mock interviews and building a resume. Furthermore, I taught the class with an American accent and marked students down if they did not arrive on time. I gave them important papers needed for the class and refused to replace them if they got lost, citing their need to be responsible employees. Basically I was equipping the students with the tools and professionalism they would need in looking for a job. As a retail store manager I have done an innumerable amount of interviews and looked at thousands of applications and resumes. Ask my old staff and they will tell you Patrick likes to interview several dozen people for each one person he hires. On top of that I’ve done a few job fairs where I was interviewing hundreds of people in a single day. I’ll be honest that when I began the class I was a bit worried - I wish you could see some of those first job applications. But one thing I love about our students is how fast they learn, in fact it seems to me that if given the opportunity they could learn anything you would be willing to teach them. It was my joy to watch the students go from meek, nearly-couldn’t-hear-their-answer to an interview question, to bold salesman of why any employer would be lucky to hire them. In fact I may have pushed them too far because when Kyaninga Lodge, a five star resort in Fort Portal, came to interview for employees, most of students came to me after their interviews with the owner and told me how much easier that interview was than the ones we practiced in class.

How successful was that class? Well the students haven’t even graduated yet and of nine students, six were hired on the spot by Kyaninga Lodge (they start work a week after graduation). One has even been hired as a dessert chef, a pretty prestigious position for your first job. Obviously classes other than Job Preparation gave them the skills to get those jobs and have the confidence they did in the interviews, but I’m sure there have been stellar employees I have missed out on just because they had a bad interview, and the goal of that class was to not let that happen to AHI students. Again, was that me? No way, even the IDEA of a Job Preparation class happened some morning between breakfast and reading my Bible. God was at work.

Heather has had a huge impact in her cooking and baking demos. The students are no longer just following recipes but asking smart questions about why recipes work or don’t work. They are getting creative, tweaking and understanding more of the art of cooking rather than just the rote of following directions. That’s a huge development in Uganda where the school system is built on conformity (how else do you manage class sizes of 90+ students?) and such experimentation is often frowned upon. The reason we have a student going on to be a dessert chef in a five star lodge is because of the skills Heather has taught him. Somehow Heather never seems to get tired of teaching others to cook, maybe because your prayers keep her energized and because God is leading her.

For Maggie our role has often been one of a sounding board, a brainstorming partner and most of all a voice of encouragement when things get ugly. In many ways we came to Uganda not to support AHI but to support Maggie directly. I remember one night after things had gotten particularly dire she looked at us and told us how for the first time she really felt like she had partners and friends out here struggling with her. That she felt loved and taken care of. I also remember one day when she ran over to the Green House while Heather was teaching and shouted in to me, “Your wife is the BEST teacher!” My favorite word of encouragement from Maggie is she often says “I love all your ideas!” Maggie has really allowed us to join with her at AHI and try crazy ideas and the testament to God is how many of them are both crazy and yet work, because God makes it happen.

One big change that has happened is switching from having a staff and student fellowship time once a week to three times a week. Now on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday we start our day with singing, prayer and a study of scripture. The first fellowship each week we have been studying a series called “The Story of God” (the material comes from our home church Soma) that is a sort of flyby overview of the entire Bible. Nothing has perhaps had a greater spiritual impact on the staff and students then simply looking at the Bible and allowing God to reveal to all of us who he is. Like I said earlier these students are so smart and they have just soaked up the study, and Imago Dei has become a common term around here, reminding us all to treat each other with the respect of being an Image Bearer of God. It’s been so cool to see them connect the dots and get really excited to know their Creator.

One day in Story of God when we were looking at the early Church and how they lived, ate, prayed, studied, and shared everything together an argument broke out. One of the staff and one of the students began arguing over their denominational differences (see my previous post about the power denominations hold here) and basically who was right. I actually let them argue a bit because I knew what was next, and laughed to myself and how awesome my God was. Because the very next verses we looked at were 1 Corinthians chapter 3. “For since there is jealousy and strife among you, are you not fleshly, and are you not walking like mere men? For when one says, "I am of Paul," and another, "I am of Apollos," are you not mere men? What then is Apollos? And what is Paul? Servants through whom you believed, even as the Lord gave opportunity to each one…For no man can lay a foundation other than the one which is laid, which is Jesus Christ.” Much of the lesson was about how the church went from being united as we saw it in early Acts to divided as we saw it in 1 Corinthians. By the end the two who had argued found themselves apologizing to each other (and to the rest of the class) and repenting publicly. I have personally even heard them continue to apologize and gain a greater respect for each other. There is just no way Heather or I could ever take credit for something like that. God is at work.

The second fellowship each week one student shares a few verses that are important to them and what those verses mean to them. Then the rest of staff and students join in sharing the implications that verse holds for them as well. Everyone’s favorite part is that at the end the person who shared gets to choose who shares next week. This popcorn style has been so successful we have implemented it in many other school practices. The third fellowship of the week we start by sharing a verse but then everyone goes off alone and spends time in prayer and meditation over that verse. Eventually we all gather back together and voluntarily share what God has been saying to us in our quiet time. All fellowships end with a rousing singing of the Ugandan National Anthem. Heather and I surprised many Ugandans at the National Prayer Breakfast where we were able to recite their national anthem as well as any Ugandan.

The real point of all of this was to build a rhythm that the students could carry with them for the rest of their life - being invested in scripture and allowing God to lead their lives. So we are really excited and encouraged when we hear that the six who are going to Fort Portal are planning to continue to hold fellowships together and even include others at the resort to join with them. Also important has been the realization at AHI that character development really has to come from Jesus. Only he has the power to change hearts in a lasting way, and the deep character flaws we saw in the staff that were fired rooted from a priority on things other than Christ. We now know if we can just allow God to change hearts then the rest (work ethic, honesty, kindness) will flow naturally from that.

Some other accomplishments of God with us over the last eight months have been: Opening a new school library where the students and staff are almost constantly checking out books and reading; a new intern program starting next year with two of our students now being hired on as staff for a one year contract; an exciting field trip to Ziwa Rhino reserve where the students got to work in the kitchen alongside the staff, and of course got see rhinos for the first time in their lives; a future partnership with a new lodge being built on the Rhino reserve where students will get to work with a mentor there for two weeks and spend some time at a “real job” in hospitality. Based on the success of these six students at Kyaninga Lodge the owners plan to tell many other lodges and resorts about AHI students (so be in prayer for the success of these six students, because their success is intertwined with AHI’s). We have also seen tremendous growth in individual staff - I could write an entire blog post on the growth of each staff person here at AHI (and maybe I will) but just know that God has used us to really have an impact on their lives and we love them all dearly.

So this blog post has gotten quite a bit longer than I expected and I have not even covered half of what I was hoping to. Further proof of just the sheer amount of work God is doing out here. So I’ll try to cut it off and we will continue in a week looking at all the things God is doing outside of AHI - a Ranch Newspaper, a Church Planting Network, Pastor Training, and much more. Man oh man I can hardly wait! In the meantime I hope this helps give you a better perspective on what God is doing out here. I want to give a special thanks to the church bodies who have been supportive of us, Soma Issaquah, Catonsville Baptist Church, FBC Savage, Memorial Baptist Church and the many community groups of Mars Hill. It’s so cool when the Church gets on mission!

-PHD