Karamoja TLT - Caring for God's People

By Anthony:

In September we went to Kotido, in the Karamoja region of Uganda, for me to start Timothy Leadership Training (TLT) and for Sara to train a group of women in baking, Bible studies, and the fireless cooker. It was a very fruitful week of trainings. First let me talk about the journey there. We drove for four hours, mostly on very bad roads full of bumps and potholes. But the scenery was breathtakingly beautiful. Much of the drive was like the pictures below, with interesting rock formations coming out of the flat terrain. At least the road was flat for part of the way as you can see in the photos.





Driving through Karamoja is completely different from driving through the rest of Uganda. After you pass through a town, you can drive 20-50 kilometers through empty bush with almost no homes. The land is nearly devoid of people until you get to the next town, but that land is used for cattle grazers during certain seasons.

We drove through areas that in the 1980s and 90s would have been off-limits, full of bandits and cattle raiders. When you think of cattle raiders, picture in your mind 10-50 men walking in a group, sometimes for days, carrying AK-47s. Many people died in those days from the fighting. But the government did a good job of disarming the people of their guns (guns brought from Sudan mostly) and things have become very peaceful in Karamoja. The Karamajong were feared cattle raiders who had long-term conflicts with the Iteso (the tribe we live among in Soroti). But there have been a lot of really powerful reconciliation efforts between the two tribes in the past years. What I learned during this trip was that within the Karamoja region people also suffered because the various groups within were all raiding cattle from one another. Furthermore, they had raiding conflicts with the Pokot and Turkana from Kenya. People in Karamoja have been through a lot of suffering, especially with regular droughts and famines.



This TLT training was with PAG (Pentecostal Assemblies of God). But the pastors and church leaders came from various districts spread throughout the Karamoja region. Some of them traveled far. And they represented various tribes and languages. With my small training group of 16 participants, we had 5 languages represented, not counting Swahili which was also used in bits here and there. Even more interesting was that several people were supposed to attend the training but failed because of other commitments, and they would have added 2 more languages to the mix. They might come next time. Thankfully, we were able to do the whole training in English, only having to do interpretation for certain key words and ideas. We are starting with the most educated pastors, and then when they graduate they can start new TLT groups themselves in their various local languages.



I was accompanied by Rev. Ekubu Daniel (photo below) from Soroti who co-led the training with me. He is an excellent facilitator and was a great help to me. (Read here for more information about the people helping me with TLT).





Although God really blessed the week and made the training effective, it was really tiring. It's a good thing I had Daniel there to help me. God gave us all strength and energy to finish well. We went from 8:00am to 6:00 or 7:00pm each day. We spent long hours each day because people are busy and it's hard for them to be away from home, and also because the money people bring for food is limited so we cannot meet for too long.



This PAG pastorate in Karamoja covers 7 political districts. The area is wide. Some of the pastors had to travel extremely far to make it to our training. The long distances regularly make ministry challenging and expensive for pastors in this region. It is also a region with a history of underdevelopment and challenges of poverty. To make things more complicated, there is a lot of dependency in the region because of too many NGOs giving handouts and paying people to come to trainings. That said, I didn't have any of those issues with this TLT training. People were eager to learn and willing to pay their own transport and food costs in order to come. My impression of the people in the training group is that they love God deeply, are sacrificing in immense ways in order to follow God's calling in their lives, and they are really caring for their people.

One of the fun things in this group was that we got to be with our former student David (pictured in blue to my right in the photo below). We were with him at Pentecostal Theological College back in 2009! It was nice to reconnect. Most of our previous Bible college students have risen to high positions of leadership and quickly. This is because most pastors in PAG throughout Uganda still do not have a Bible college education. David is in charge of education for Karamoja pastorate.



The training was a great success, so much so that we are planning another training for November that will cover the same manual, to try to get 15-20 more people who missed this week. That way those new people can also join us for Manual 2 in February. I'll send Daniel and another facilitator to handle this extra training. The pastorate leaders think this training is just what their pastors need, especially since most have not been able to go to Bible college.

The group has been learning to be good stewards of time. They decided to give each other heavy fines for being late. Being good stewards of time is an important aspect of TLT. The money will go towards their graduation, so they aren't actually losing it.

In our group, we had mostly men, but we had four women as well. One of the confusing things was that we had two people named "Grace" in our group, but one was a man and one a woman.

We covered many topics such as how to be a good shepherd, how to visit God's people during crises, training other church members in visiting, getting enough rest as a pastor, how to guide and counsel people, what Bible passages to use when comforting those who are grieving, the problem of favoritism in the church, and the ministry of reconciliation.

One of the more sensitive topics was about taking care of your family as a pastor. Unfortunately, because of the needs of ministry, many pastors live away from their families. This is true especially in this pastorate, but it is common throughout all of Uganda. The main reason for this is that if you are called to pastor a church somewhere, you are not given land to farm in the new place and you are given very little in a salary. So a pastor's wife and children will stay on the land that they own, however far away it is, to keep on farming to support themselves and the pastor. There is no quick and easy fix to this problem. But besides the obvious problem of making people prone to sexual temptation, it also has been stressing mothers, making them feel like they are single mothers raising their children alone. Some participants said that children of pastors are some of the most problematic and disruptive children in the community because of this.

Another interesting conversation was about making visits to people's homes as a pastor. Should it normally be a 30 minute visit? Or should you follow the Ugandan culture where the pastor is served a meal and he is there for many hours? There were various opinions, but in the end all agreed that the culture is keeping people stuck to some degree. Church members fear having their pastors visit because they may not have nice chairs for them to sit on, or they may not have a chicken to kill for the meal. Yet culture demands a nice meal. Pastors fear visiting because they don't want to spend all of their time sitting alone waiting for the host family to prepare the meal, and they don't want to have such long visits when they need to visit many different people within a single day. Yet culture demands being served a meal and staying a long time. But if they as pastors are making five visits in an afternoon, it doesn't work to have lunch five times! So we talked about how to change the expectations of church members and yet still honor the Ugandan culture of hospitality. The best advice was to tell church members in advance that you will be visiting many people in one day for brief visits so no one should prepare a meal. But that if someone wants to have the blessing of giving a meal to the pastor, they should be the ones to invite the pastor another time for a meal.

As always happens in this manual, we spent way too long on the lesson about healing. It was very controversial talking about anointing people with oil. There are so many charlatans selling "holy oil" or "holy water" in Africa that these pastors refuse to ever anoint a sick person with oil, even if it is just supposed to be symbolic of the Holy Spirit. They fear people misinterpreting it, so they think it's better just to avoid it completely in the current culture. Perhaps that is the wisest decision.

It was controversial for people to find out that I don't believe God heals us from a sickness every time we pray with faith. I've talked about this in many posts before, so I won't repeat everything here. We spent hours debating about this, which was fruitful since it also touches on the important issues of suffering, prayer, God's Will, and faith. People learned so much from this discussion and appreciated it very much. Some of the most interesting comments for me to respond to were:

• We believe that every time we pray with faith for a demon possessed person to be delivered that Jesus will deliver them, so why should healing be any different?
• Yes, God's will sometimes is to allow suffering into our lives. But when you pray with faith, you can't be praying, "heal them only if it's your will," because you need to pray with faith, without doubts, believing that you will get the healing you will ask for. Otherwise your prayer loses it's power.
• You can know and believe with faith that God will heal the person because if you are in touch with the Holy Spirit, God tells you which sick people to pray for healing for and which ones not to. So you pray for healing for only those God tells you about, and all of them will be healed, whether today or next week or next month.

During the week I learned that one of the pastors, Luke, is good at receiving feedback. He asks his congregation for critique three times a year about anything. His life, character, plans, preaching, etc. They all write on paper anonymously and then he goes home and reads them and works on changing. What he reads he announces back to the church, explaining what he wants to work on, and then he asks people to meet with him to give him help. Then people meet with him to give him advice and ideas to work on those things. I asked if it was painful and he said yes but it helps him grow. And he said that they write a lot! Haha. I really respect him for this.

One of the lessons in the manual is about caring for church members during times of community crisis. We happened to arrive in the middle of a crisis and one of the pastors, John, almost had to leave in the middle of the training to deal with it. It's quite complicated, but I'll try to summarize. In many parts of Karamoja there are some rigid clan structures and traditions (a clan is a smaller unit within a tribe, but larger than an extended family). There are expectations that chickens and other animals be given at designated times to the elders of the clan to take care of their needs. But Christians have been resisting this practice. They view it as harmful because the amount that is supposed to be given is way too much and people go into debt just trying to give these gifts. Furthermore, there are rituals and sacrifices involved that Christians cannot do in good conscience now that they are followers of Christ.

The elders and others in the clans have been persecuting Christians who refuse to give in. Christians are being beaten all the time for their refusal and some have even been killed. Other times each clan may send youths to steal people's animals and cook them up before the animals' owners can be identified. Pastor John who was dealing with this was receiving constant phone calls during our training. His friends were telling him about the people ready to snatch him as soon as he would arrive at home. Police, government officials, and human rights organizations have all been getting involved in these disputes, so there is good hope for change.

We drove pastor John part of the way to his home. He was laughing and ready to face anything with courage, knowing that the Lord is on his side. He heard by phone that the elders planned to curse him and his family. To this, John only laughed knowing that their curses could do nothing against him! I called him a couple weeks after the training and found out that one of his pastor colleagues had been beaten, but survived. Also, 30 men with clubs showed up at John's home recently and he had to run away. But he is now back home and they are getting the police involved. Please keep him and other Christians in this area in your prayers.



This was the participants' first time to be introduced to TLT action planning. They found it challenging to learn at first, but they have really appreciated it so far. Their new action plans were about:

• Training pastors or church members on how to visit Christians
• Evangelism
• Counseling and teaching people with HIV
• Cleaning health centers with volunteers from church and encouraging doctors and staff
• Visiting and comforting the sick in hospitals
• One pastor wants to install a solar light in a children's ward that is always dark

Here is a video of people praying for action their action plans. They are passionate in prayer.

At the end of my training, we were gathering outside to take a photo. Then all of a sudden from the other building I see Sara being escorted by her women's group over to us. Watch the video. I could see she was dressed more like the traditional Karamajong people. I didn't know what exactly was happening! Haha. All I could think of was our wedding, and wondered what kind of ceremony was about to happen. But they only wanted to give me the same attire and then take photos together. It was a fun gift.

Below is Daniel and then Amadi and his wife who worked extremely hard to feed us during the week and organize the trainings.