MISSION: Uganda Blog Update 01-17-2015

Happy New Year, and welcome to 2015! I trust everybody had some great holidays – we sure did. We bought turkeys out at the refugee camp for Thanksgiving. I try to buy everything I can out at the camp, from church members if possible. It’s a way for people to earn money without my having to harm them with charity. Christmas went great. We took gifts out to our church folks like we always do, and had a big meal at Sangano for everybody.

In December we had another Lord’s Supper for the churches. I am preparing to organize some more churches, and the Lord’s Supper is a good opportunity to review the ordinances, and the importance and necessity of an organized church membership.

The kids are off school for Christmas, so we did our first Marathon VBS of the year like we do every school break. This time, we had over 500 children between the four preaching points on the last day. We got to give the gospel to a lot of children who don’t attend our church, and also hand out lots of cookies, Kool Aid, and candy bars for the guys who could say their memory verses. It was a lot of fun, and only moderately exhausting.

In February, I’m having another Baptism/Wedding service. Please be in prayer for that. I find that, like the Apostle Paul, I am having to lay a foundation for people with marriage. What we would recognize as Common Law marriage (living together or cohabitation) is very common here. I am having to teach people why God created marriage, and why it remains necessary today. I am attempting to restore a proper respect for marriage in a world that has done its best to defile and demean God’s sacred institution.

Another thing I have started doing is going out to each of the points and just answering questions from the Bible in an informal Bible Study. The people love it, and I really like it because it gets everybody involved, not just the men. Truth always overcomes deception. Plugging people in to the Bible alleviates a lot of the nonsense that can crop up in a church, always due to deception or failure to understand the plain teaching of Scripture.

All the money needed to ship our container of books to Uganda has come. Our church is busy getting everything organized to ship. We should have that thing on its way to Uganda by the end of the month. Praise the LORD! I am attempting to get all inspections and customs done in America so I don’t have to deal with customs in Uganda. Pray that the shipping process will go smoothly.