TLT Graduation!

By Anthony:

On January 15th, we had our TLT Graduation in Kaberamaido!  As they say here: "It was a very colorful day of celebration!"  It was amazing to see all these pastors and leaders come together at once to celebrate what God has done for them and through them these two years.  In total we had 104 graduates.  They were from my three groups in Amuria, Katakwi, and Kaberamaido.  There were also three graduates from Serere who were trained by Baker Obua (a fellow facilitator).

Here are the graduates getting their graduation gowns and trying them on.  In the meantime many people are happily greeting friends from far off places.

We marched throughout the town before going to our chairs at the church to begin the ceremony.  Amazingly, we started the march on time and started the ceremony on time.  Here are a few videos of the marching taken by Sara.

 



Marching through town not only is fun for everyone watching, but it spreads the idea that training and education are important.  In a country in which many pastors are not trained at all, in which many pastors say, "just listen to the Holy Spirit, you don't need education," this testimony is powerful.

Even family members couldn't help but get involved in the marching and cheering!

They rented tents because the church would not fit all of the people who came.  Each graduate was supposed to bring their spouse and one other person so food costs could be manageable.  Some people were so excited though, that they brought 5 people, and some people brought as many as 8-10 people.  Thankfully, there was enough food for everyone.  Or God multiplied it like the feeding of the five thousand.

The ceremony was supposed to go from 11:30am to 2:15pm.  However, there were many speakers, and when we handed out certificates it was a chaotic wonderful cheerful celebration that took longer than expected.  We finished by a bit after 3:00 and then ate lunch after that.   In the ceremony there was brief praise and worship:

Both of the bishops who helped to organize these trainings spoke.  The local government chairperson spoke.  The principal of Pentecostal Theological College spoke.  A top leader from PAG National Office spoke.  He explained that in order to be a good leader we must first learn how to be a good follower, something he said many African leaders have not understood.

And our guest of honor was Munyiva Wa Kitavi.  She came all the way from Nairobi.  She is in charge of TLT for all of East Africa.  It was special for us and for her as she is one of the people who trained me, and she also trained all of the Soroti graduates who were my co-facilitators.  She called us her children and these new graduates her grandchildren.  I love how TLT spreads.

We then had a testimony from each of the three main TLT groups.  This is Melda saying in my paraphrase, "before I was timid and didn't understand God's Word well, but now I can understand God's word and really preach it well anytime and anywhere!"

I was also able to speak.  I had to cram a lot in 15 minutes - Introduction, recognizing a plethora of people and having us clap for them, saying goodbye which was emotional for everyone, and preaching a very short sermon.  The sermon was on John 13, Jesus washing his disciples' feet.  Foot washing was a part of our graduation ceremony.  It was a new thing for just about all of them, which when they first heard we were going to be doing it, made some people uncomfortable.  But after I explained it, people really valued it and were at ease.  I explained how Jesus served his disciples by washing their feet, as a precursor to his larger service to all of us on the cross.  I talked about how we need to follow his example.

The point of my message was to say that as Jesus has served us, so the facilitators sacrificed their time and energy and money to train these graduates.  In the same way, the graduates should not go out boastfully, but instead should go out and empower others.  They should go out and serve as they have been served.  I explained that the foot washing was not really an act of service itself.  We were not going to be really trying to clean their feet with soap.  It was only a symbol so that it would be forever etched into their memories that they should go out and teach others as they have been taught.

Madalena ushered me to the table to speak:

I didn't get teared up saying goodbye.  I had already got that out of my system during our closing sessions of each of my three groups.  I was mostly just full of joy and smiles this whole day of the graduation.  Here is Betty translating for me:

It got rainy in the middle of the dry season.

Here is the foot washing ceremony.  As Peter was ashamed to have Jesus wash his feet, so I think were many of my students to think of their teacher, who is also a mzungu, wash their feet.  My hope is that this little ceremony helped to make people realize that we are all equal whether Ugandan or American, and there is no reason I shouldn't be serving them.  Some of the men whose feet I washed got choked up while I was doing that.   We had all the facilitators washing at once, plus Munyiva Wa Kitavi as well.  Each graduate had their feet dried with a new towel, that they then got to take home.  Each towel says "Timothy Leadership Training" on it.

When we gave out the certificates there was so much cheering and ululating and yelling that it was hard to keep track of what was going on.  But it was so great to see their joy and the support of their family members.  For most of the graduates, family members appeared out of nowhere as they came up to get the certificate.  In some cases the graduate was even carried in the air by family members as in the case of William here below in the video.  After getting the certificate they shook hands with all the facilitators.

An attempt at getting everyone in one picture:

The facilitating team (minus Jane and Daniel who were not around at this moment).  From left to right, Agnes, Martin, Moses, Joseph, Anthony, Lazarus, Baker, and Betty.

Sara gave me amazing support not only through this whole program over the two years, but especially at the graduation.  She was a jack-of-all-trades.  She was a baker, decorator, usher, photographer, driver, runner, and cake-cutter at the least.  She made four cakes as you can see in the photo below.  I am so thankful for her.

I thank the Lord for how he was willing to use me these two years in Uganda.  It was a tremendous privilege.  Thank you to all of you for supporting me to be here!

Boat Race

By Sara:

Our partner organization, KMDP, in Kaberamaido, is doing a program to help reduce the spread of HIV in a community along the shore of Lake Kyoga.

As a fun event to keep the whole community informed about the project and the way that participants' lives are being changed, they have a couple boat races each year.

People do catch lots of big fish in Lake Kyoga, but they also catch these tiny fish and then dry them like this in the sun:

Before the boat race, the people who have been participating in KMDP's program put on some very dramatic skits to show what they have been learning.  Everyone seemed to be quite entertained!

There was an unexpected guest at the event too - a wild Grey Crowned Crane (Uganda's national bird) just walked in and was eating grains of corn that little kids were throwing to it.

After the dramas and speakers, everyone headed over to the lake shore for the boat race.

From the following pictures and video, you can see how excited the spectators got, cheering on the members of their community who were competing in the race.

When Helping Hurts in Irundu

By Sara:

Last year in December, we visited our friend Silas in Irundu, across Lake Kyoga from Soroti.  We discussed the When Helping Hurts training with him and he said he would like to have one of us come teach it there.  After several attempts at planning and having to keep pushing the dates back, I was able to go there the week before Christmas to facilitate the training.

To get to Irundu, I took a motor boat across the lake.  It was very beautiful!  I am always amused that people even carry motorcycles with them on these little boats (there are two plus a bicycle in the boat pictured below that I was on - I was in the back by the motor).

After so much struggling to try to plan a time for this training, I was starting to despair and even hoping that it wouldn't work out because it didn't seem worth it.  However, once I was there, I was very thankful that I came.  Irundu is somewhat remote, so they don't get many trainings like this and Silas, our friend, is the only pastor who has been to the Bible College.  The Pentecostal Assemblies of God (PAG) church there is pretty young as well.  Although there was not a large number of participants at the training, those who came were enthusiastic and learned a lot.

Some people commented that they hadn't known before that Israel was sent into captivity in the Old Testament, not only because of idolatry, but also because they did not care for the poor.  They also appreciated thinking about what kinds of different situations require giving relief, what needs rehabilitation, and what needs development.  They said that it will help them in their churches to know when to give money to people who come asking for help.

Since I stayed right there next to the church for all four nights I was in Irundu, I was able to do some other interesting things in the evenings.  One night, I taught some young people how to make friendship bracelets out of yarn (I never thought that I would use that skill outside of elementary school).  They started out struggling, but the next morning, they showed me what they had done and it was perfect!

And on the last evening, I taught all the training participants (and quite a few neighbors) how to make a cake by steaming it.

As usual, it was very fun and many people said they would go home and bake their families a cake for Christmas.  One person actually called me the day before Christmas to make sure he understood the technique correctly since he was in the process of making his family a Christmas cake.

When we cut the cake, it was like the feeding of the 5,000 because lots of kids from far and wide came to see what we were doing and to taste the cake.  They lined them up and gave them all a bite.  I think we fed about 50 people with this little cake.

Eating Lablab Leaves

By Sara:

One of the green manure cover crops that we are promoting with farmers is called lablab.  This is a legume and you can eat the seeds just like beans.  The leaves are also edible, but none of the farmers had ever tasted them before.  I learned from our friend Neil, that you can prepare the leaves just like cowpea leaves, which are a common green vegetable in this region.

So, Sam the agriculture field officer of KMDP, Trent, and I met with some of the lead farmers to try it out.  I "taught" them how to cook the lablab leaves.  And when I say taught, I mean encouraged because they already know how to cook cowpea leaves and we did these leaves exactly the same way.  But since I had tried it at home, I was able to attest to the fact that it tasted good and give encouragement that they were doing the right thing as they cooked.  Here are the leaves they picked:

Josephine shelling peanuts for the sauce:

Everyone knows how to cook cowpea leaves.  Sometimes there were a few too many opinions about how to do it!

The final product!

Everyone was impressed that it tasted just like cowpea leaves.  They are especially excited about being able to eat lablab leaves, though, because the plants continue to produce tender leaves throughout most of the year, whereas cowpea leaves can only be harvested for a short time before you have to let the plant go to seed.

Last Katakwi TLT - Work and Worship

I recently finished my last training in Uganda.  It was the "Serving God in Work and Worship" manual in Katakwi.  It went well.  Let me begin by sharing with you some of the reports from their action plans for the "Teaching" manual.

Rose was intentional about teaching new Sunday School teachers.  In the process, she first demonstrated to them how to teach the children.  She and the children had a really fun time during the Sunday School sessions as she utilized a ball and a jump rope as she helped the children to memorize and understand Bible verses.  Now she says, "when children see me, they come running!"  What I love is that she made the jump rope from grass, from local materials.  Many people in Uganda don't bother trying to teach Sunday School at all, because they say they don't have money for it, and they want to just wait for some day in the future when a missionary or someone else will give them Sunday School materials.  But Rose has shown them what you can do with local materials, little money, and creativity.  You can begin to work with what you have to teach children the Word of God.  Picking up on my passion for When Helping Hurts topics, let me remind all of us again: the goal is to encourage and help people use what they have.  When we give material, like Sunday School material, it can have the adverse affect of causing all the other churches who didn't get the material to not even bother trying.  My personal opinion would be that the best thing would be to not give any materials, but to instead invest in starting a printing company in Uganda that can make and sell the materials locally.

I was also encouraged by several reports of pastors being able to have better times of teaching their own children.  These pastors, who are overworked and tired most of the time because they don't really get paid, and have to work in their gardens for their livelihood, often don't spend enough time with their own families.  The last manual convicted them strongly that they weren't giving enough attention to their children.  So it was great to hear about how they had spent time together as families having devotions, and memorizing Bible verses together. 

Lazarus led this training with me, he is on the far left of this photo:

 

  During this new manual we had a lot of good discussions similar to what you read in the other posts from Amuria and Kaberamaido.  Let me highlight just a couple of the discussions.

 

One lesson in this manual is about confession.  We talked about the common misunderstanding here that if you sin, you immediately lose your salvation until you confess again.  I hit home the point as hard as I could that we are saved by grace, that we sin constantly even in our thoughts and motivations, and in ways that we don't even know.  I told them I don't personally believe you can lose your salvation, but even for the Pentecostal Assemblies of God (PAG) denomination, which does believe you can lose salvation, the real doctrine is not that you lose your salvation every time you sin, but only if you reject Christ, for example by leaving the church and persisting in unrepentant sin.  One of the saddest things to me is that perhaps most of the Christians in Pentecostal village churches here think that if you sin on the way to church, but die before getting there to confess, you won't be saved. 

 

One pastor asked a serious question during this discussion, because we emphasized that the real problem is not sin, but unrepentant sin.  He is officially married traditionally/culturally, but he has not yet "wedded" in the church.  He wondered, "Will I still be saved even though I'm living in sin by not being wedded?  My wife refuses to be wedded in the church."  It broke my heart to hear such a question.  The whole issue of weddings for Christians in Uganda really frustrates me.  Unlike the US, Christians here must be married in two ceremonies in order to be considered to be officially married and not living in sin - the traditional marriage ceremony, and then the church ceremony where you make the covenant before God and his people.  That's not so bad in theory.  But in practice the church weddings are mainly about having another big celebration and doing things the American way, down to the details of wearing a white wedding dress and a tux.  Because people are trying to impress the community with a big celebration, these church weddings cost a lot of money.  So what ends up happening is that people wait ten years to be wedded while saving up the money.  In the meantime, they are married and have children and life goes on.  So by the time the church wedding happens, it is relatively meaningless, and is really, in my opinion, more about just wanting the celebration. 

 

Thankfully I am not alone in this opinion.  In Soroti, the main PAG church in town is encouraging people to be wedded right away and to have smaller, more simple ceremonies.  They have even done simple weddings where people are married during the regular church service.  They also had a mass wedding last year of about six couples at once that cut expenses.  I am so happy about these changes!  Back to the original pastor who raised the question, we were all able to comfort him that he would still be saved, and that he cannot force his wife to wed in the church, so he should not live with guilt over this.

 

On this theme of confession, sin, and salvation, we also discussed the Lord's Supper and how so many Christians in their churches refuse to take part in the meal even when the pastors encourage them to.  I think the PAG churches are going through something similar to what my denomination, the CRC, went through in the past.  Some pastors have emphasized the warnings in 1 Corinthians 11 so much that people are viewing the Lord's Supper as a meal of fear and judgment, rather than of grace.  Some people refuse to take part because they know they are sinners.  It's so sad to me that they don't realize the meal is specifically for sinners, those who need Christ and to remember the grace and forgiveness we have in him!  The warnings in 1 Corinthians 11 are for those living in unrepentant sin and those mistreating the body of Christ and the poor.  But the TLT participants will now be giving their churches good teaching about this.

 

We also discussed baptism.  An unexpected issue came up.  Can you baptize a woman who has accepted Christ but is still living as a man's second or third wife?  Polygamous marriages still exist here so it's a real issue and just happened this month for one of the pastors in the group.  I didn't know the answer according to PAG doctrine.  Most of the group told him he could go ahead and baptize her and that it's not against their doctrine, but others were not sure and told him to consult the PAG leaders.

 

There is also a lesson in this manual about "blessing."  We discussed the power of words.  In traditional African religion, from my understanding, words have power on their own apart from God's power.  So if you bless or curse someone, it can happen, just because you say it.  I realized that most of these pastors believe that curses still have power, and they have to be rebuked in Jesus' name.  They all told so many stories of people who cursed others, who weren't Christians, and what they cursed/prophesied happened.  For example something like: "the old woman told a person who annoyed her, 'you will die this week,' and then the person died."  I told them that I don't believe these curses have any power.  But could this be a cultural blind spot for westerners?  Is this somehow connected to spiritual warfare?

Whereas I would view their stories as coincidences, they did not think so.  But during the discussion they came to agree with me that words do not have power alone, it is only that God that has the power and he may or may not act on our words.  However, most of them then came to the conclusion that somehow God must be acting on the words of these people uttering blessings or curses even if they are not Christians.  But I wonder if other African Christians would say it is Satan who is acting on people's curses.  It was a long discussion that needed to be much longer.  I think this is a great example of how traditional African religion is still having a big effect on modern African Christians, and I think the TLT members themselves were confused as to how to integrate all of their experiences and ideas with what the Bible says.  If I do start a doctorate program someday, I'd love to research and learn more about the intersection of African traditional religion and modern Christianity.  There is so much I still don't understand.

 

 

In the picture above you can see me and my friend Robert.  He has been the coordinator for this Katakwi group and has been a friend since we first taught him at Pentecostal Theological College six years ago.  At the end of this last training, he publicly appreciated me, for both my time at the college and in TLT.  He said that they had experiences of other teachers coming in telling them what they must believe even if goes against PAG's doctrine.  He said I've always been very respectful and gentle and telling people to respect their own denomination's doctrine and leaders, instead of trying to convert them to my views.  It was really nice to hear this as I have indeed tried hard to share my views without forcing them to change theirs.

 

Rose appreciated me as well.  She said when they go out and train others they must follow my example in that I have showed humility in being willing to say, "I don't know" to certain difficult questions.  Culturally here people often give an answer to everything even if they truly have no idea.  Even on simple matters.  If you ask someone, "which way to this store?"  even if the person on the street doesn't know, they will tell you a direction just to give you an answer, because they want to be helpful.  The TLT students noticed this difference in me and want to emulate it.  That made me feel good.

 

As usual, there were exciting new action plans.  Most of the students are going to go out and train other pastors and worship leaders in this manual.  Annah is going to write new worship songs using biblical language from the Psalms and teach them to her church.  Samuel was touched by how little Scripture is used in church services, so his goal is that his church will read Scripture at least four times in every worship service.  Continue to pray for these leaders as they make good change in their churches!  

I am so glad I had the privilege to do these trainings for the past two years in Uganda, but I am actually really relieved to have it all finished.  The trainings are quite tiring and it will be good to do something different for a while.