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
