Uganda ’10

My most recent opportunity to serve in Uganda was filled with challenges and blessings. The first conference with Equipping Pastors International (EPI) was in Murang’a, north of Nairobi. There over 100 pastors with the Christian Foundation Fellowship gathered to hear sessions on family and marriage. My contribution was on the subject of the Cultural Mandate and its relationship to the Great Commission. Anytime I have had the opportunity to express what Scripture says on this important issue the result is generally the same. In the words of one pastor, “Our minds are being opened to see things in the Bible we’ve never seen before.”

There is already some early discussion about my return to this area of Kenya to speak further on these key issues, in that the pastors are eager to hear more of what the Bible says about the scope of the gospel for the “whole of life.”

One of the great problems that exists both in Kenya and Uganda is that Christianity is spreading rapidly, but is not taking firm root. There is no depth to the faith. It is, as the proverbial expression goes, “A mile wide and an inch deep.” People are therefore without understanding into the potential of Christianity to change areas of cultural life. My lectures therefore focused on the danger of adding concerts into an ancient system of thought that is essentially pluralistic and filled with elements of superstition. This system of thought is African Traditional Religion (ATR).

I presented the pastors with the need to disciple new Christians in the components of an expressly biblical worldview, for without doing so we are only adding new wine into old wineskins. Equipped with a Christian world and life view and also with solid understanding into the Cultural Mandate of the Bible and its connection to the Great Commission, church leaders can train their flocks and together truly disciple their regions and nations for Christ.

You will be able to find the core of my lecture notes from this series of seminars given in Uganda (2010) on this site under Culture/lectures.

The following week saw me in the nation of Uganda with Rev. Martin Odi who serves full-time with EPI. Together, we held two important conferences: one with many of the Bishops of the PAG; the other with the “Missioners”, a group of Christian students from four different local Universities who gathered together at Makerere University to hear me speak for the better part of three days. In both cases I again spoke on the Cultural Mandate, this time spending more time on the basics of a Christian world and life view, challenging these leaders of tomorrow to take every thought captive in Ugandan culture.

A great blessing came at the end of the conference with the Missioners, when a representative from each of the four schools created an impromptu ceremony in which I was given a Makerere University tee-shirt, was made a life-long member of the Missioners, and given the African title “Papa Otim” (mercy).

Bishops of the PAG

Teaching on the Cultural Mandate before "The Missioners" at Makerere University, Kampala, Uganda