Anna & Me
Yesterday I was showing Anna Wilks (Barry & Scarlett's daughter) pictures on my camera and she asked if she could take my picture. I told her she could only if she let me take hers. I thought the results were too cute to pass on posting, and that if I were going to post my pictures of her then out of fairness I had to post her pictures of me as well. She didn't do too bad a job on her pictures of me either, especially for being just (recently) 4 years old and sitting next to me in the chair (distance kind of requires a closeup).
Church Planting Tour: Ruti
Just outside Mbarara on the road to Kabale there is a trading center called Ruti. Not far off of Kabale Road there is a small Bible study group of women that meets in a nursery school. Led by Roland, who also leads several other groups including Katete, it is a small yet dedicated group. It is not, however, really growing much, and as is the problem with many groups there are no men involved. Please pray that God would place a burden to share the gospel on these women and that He would provide some men as well.
The school in which the women meet.
Walking into the small meeting room.
Barry preparing for the Lord's Supper (using black currant juice and cookies, because you can't always get grape juice and unleavened bread everywhere in the world), with Curtis (middle) and Richard (right), two volunteers from Barry's home church, Brainerd Baptist, in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
Roland with Curtis and Richard.
The whole Ruti group minus myself and Barry...yes, I cut off a few faces, but it's all for the sake of photographic artistry :).
Church Planting Tour: Nakivale
Towards the Tanzanian border, far south of Mbarara town, sits the Nakivale Refugee Camp. A UN camp, Nakivale is situated in a big bowl in the hills next to Lake Nakivale. It is home to thousands of Rwandans, Congolese, and some recent Somalis and Sudanese. People are not allowed to have jobs nor can they live in permanent structures, so they live in mud buildings with tarp roofs weighed down with branches and other debris. Medical care is also poor and limited, with most Red Cross provided drugs being sold through corruption, never making it to the refugees to whom it was intended. There is no electricity or running water, and some Rwandan refugees have been in the camp so long that there are 12-year old children who were born in Nakivale and have never known life outside its bounds.
These people have next to nothing, are dependent upon the aid of others, and have had to flee their homes and jobs to escape war. By the world's standards these people have lost everything and have nothing. And yet there is a vibrant, growing, evangelistic church flourishing in its midst. Largely due to the work God has done through a Congolese pastor, John Peter (on the far right in the first picture) there are now 5 Baptist churches in the camp.
These churches appear to be doctrinally solid (a rarity in Uganda indeed) courtesy of the work of John Peter. They have a burden to share the gospel as well. When Somali and Sudanese Muslims began to come to the camp, the pastors drew up a strategy (without any outside pushing or influence) to reach them with the gospel and start churches. They've even brought the gospel to villages outside the camp, sometimes walking 30+ kilometers in a day to share the good news. Outside of Kampala, this may be the best work happening in all of Uganda. It just goes to show that God doesn't need missionaries, but by His grace He gives us some roles in His work.
Barry has provided some small pastoral and discipleship training at times, but really that's the only work any missionary has ever done with these churches. This is truly an indigenous church led by indigenous people. On Tuesday we took Curtis Hill, who works on the staff at Brainerd Baptist Church in Chattanooga (and is good friends with Ben Janssen, who was an intern and Sunday School teacher at Northlake, my home church) to teach about the Lord's Supper and Baptism. Despite the controversy surrounding these ordinances in a heavily Anglican and Catholic part of the world, you could tell that John Peter had already done some solid training with his pastors. I have been to this camp now three times and the churches never cease to amaze me. On December 12 I'll be returning to do some teaching myself (topic to be decided). This is also nice because they prepare the best meals in all of Uganda :).
Various Black & Whites
If you know me very well then you probably know that I'm a big fan of photography and an even bigger fan of black and white photography. From the group at Ruti into town and then back to the Wilks house the other day I took a variety of different black and whites...hope you enjoy my artistic indulgences.
Two kids at the group at the nursery school in Ruti.
Barry Wilks at the Ruti group behind the silhouettes of three kids.
Matooke trees in Ruti. Matooke are a variety of bananas picked before they are ripe and then mashed and steamed to bland, near tasteless perfection. Our region of Uganda is especially known for its matooke production.
Boda drivers lined up along the street to Kakoba, just outside Friend's Corner (local food restaurant) and the Central Market (no, not quite like Central Market in Texas). Bodas are the motorcycle "taxis" that serve as the main method of transportation around town. I'll use them, but only on a few select low traffic roads.
An older man pushing a rather large amount of clothes on a bicycle. Bicycles are one of the main methods of transporting goods, be they hundreds of pounds of matooke, innumerable pineapples, furniture, welding equipment, people, or any of a number of other things. The roadside is always lined with men pushing bicycles loaded down with cargo.
Bodas lined up from a more familiar angle.
Barry cutting a pineapple with Emily looking on. You've never really had pineapple until you have a 27 cent Ugandan pineapple, considered amongst, if not the, best in Africa. A whole lot better than the ones you'll buy for $4 in the States for sure.
They say that if you want a really good group shot, take some pictures of the group before and after the official group shot. This would be an after of the group shot you see in the Church Planting Tour: Ruti post.
While You Were Sleeping...You Were Born Again!
When it is evident that a Ugandan believes that salvation is not a matter of who chooses God but whom God chooses I'm always very interested to hear their testimony. I say this because for the most part in the Ugandan church teaching is very shallow at best and there is certainly little to no grappling with the deeper issues of the Word of God. What I've found is that if someone believes that man of his own freewill would never choose God but that God gives men salvation, most likely there is something in that person's conversion experience that has led him to that conclusion.
George, a first-year student at MUST who is involved in almost every ministry at UBC including my Evangelism and Discipleship Ministry and my Gents' Discipleship (because here they aren't guys, they're gents), is one such believer. Though I've gotten to know George some the past couple of months I must admit that I had failed to ask for his testimony. Intrigued by how, in our prayer time, he asked for us to pray that God would save his family because he knows the only way for them to get saved is for God to choose them and bring them to Himself, I asked how he came to salvation.
It was a short yet interesting story. He had heard the gospel throughout his life but rejected it; in fact, he had even spoken out very vocally against Christianity. Then one night he woke up, got out of bed, and fell on the floor asleep. He then woke up, got back in bed, and fell asleep again. I'm not sure what, if anything, is significant about this, but what happened when he woke up again was incredible. Though he had always stubbornly rejected God, he woke up desiring God. Whereas before he had hated Christian music, he woke up wanting to listen to nothing else and finding it inspiring. Though he had always believed the Bible to be mere words of men, he woke up feeling it the word of God and desiring to read it and it spoke to him. And it was then that he came to saving faith.
Last night we were looking at chapter 2 of Desiring God by John Piper. This chapter is about conversion, and amongst its main points are (1) that before we can have faith and repentance God must give us new birth, must change out our heart of stone for a heart of flesh, because on our own because of our sinful nature we would never choose God; (2) conversion is a gift of God; and (3) in new birth/regeneration God creates in us a desire for Himself that was not there before and could not be there otherwise.
George greatly loved this lesson because all of a sudden his whole salvation experience made a whole lot more sense. Sometime between when he went to bed and when he woke up (the last time) God regenerated Him, God granted Him new birth, God took out his heart of stone and gave him a heart of flesh. And this was not because George had done anything himself. He did not choose to be born again; he went to bed thinking Christianity to be pure foolishness. His attention had not been caught by some verse or some song or some friend sharing the gospel. He did NOTHING; his new birth came while he was SLEEPING. Then when he awoke to his new birth he found created in him a desire for God, a hunger to know Him and to be in His presence. If his regeneration were dependent upon himself then his testimony makes no sense whatsoever, but if regeneration is dependent "not on human will or exertion, but on God, who has mercy" (Romans 9:16) then it makes perfect sense.
An interesting testimony indeed, especially as normally you don't see the order of salvation played out so clearly in real life.
Knocked!
In Uganda, you don't get hit by other cars, you get knocked by them, and I got knocked indeed. When turning left (which, as we drive on the other side of the road here, is the same as if you were turning right) a bus hit (sorry, knocked) me from behind! And then he tried to say it was my fault for stopping too abruptly! The police have tried to imply the same in what was in all likelihood an attempt to get bribe money. When I explained to the police officer that he must have been following too closely too quickly if he hit me from behind (and left a seriously dark treadmark in his wake, whereas I had none), and asked that if a kid ran in front of me, was I supposed to hit the kid so as not to cause an accident with any cars that might be behind me, he asked, "So are you thinking that he was guilty of not following at a safe distance?" Yes, OBVIOUSLY he either wasn't following at a safe distance or wasn't paying attention; he hit me from behind! And yes, the rule is the same here: if you hit someone from behind, you are guilty. Period.
This shows two things about Uganda. First, it's rife with corruption. In Transparency International's most recent corruption index Uganda came in tied at 105 with several other countries (there being a total of 163 in the rankings, with Haiti coming in at 163 as the world's most corrupt country). The police were trying to scare me into giving a bribe because they know they can't just directly ask a muzungu for one. Justice, like every thing else here, has its price, and with enough money you can get away with about anything. Second, the roads are dangerous here. Very dangerous. And the buses are amongst the greatest culprits. The drive too fast and too recklessly. They pass on blind curves, run people off the road, follow right on people's tails, even pass on the right when someone is turning right (which is like passing on the left when someone is turning left in America...this having happened to Kari) instead of just slowing down and waiting for them to turn. Please always be in prayer for our safety on the roads, because driving is the most dangerous thing we face.
It's Me
I know I don't post too many pictures of myself on here, so here's a really nice, serious self-portrait for you to look at. At least, unlike previous self-portraits posted on this site, it's not a shadow, a distorted partial reflection or just a portion of my face :).
