On July 13 I boarded a United Emirates flight with my family, three other families and one college student from my church. We had raised the money to pay for the supplies and the time of Ugandan construction workers to build a classroom in a village serving orphans. We were now going to participate with these workers in building the classroom, and to experience Ugandan church, culture, terrain, and wildlife. We built this classroom through Watoto Church, which is a large church in Kampala started 25 years ago by Canadian Pentecostal missionaries, and runs a ministry to AIDs/war orphans and widows.
Everyone had different takeaways from the trip, but for me, the fascination was in seeing the Watoto Church up close and personal. This occurs at the same time that I’m reading and coding the interviews for my Doctor of Ministry thesis on leadership and management in the missional church! I’ll be processing this experience for years, but over the next few weeks I’ll address here are some initial take-aways that I’m pondering:
The presence of a discerned vision which provides focus to all they do.
The church’s vision is to be a multi-site, cell-based, English speaking church which brings healing to the nation of Uganda. Specifically, they seek to bring healing to the nation through addressing the needs of widows and orphans. The pastor in the worship service we attended said—“There are many needs in Uganda, and many ways a church could address these needs. We have discerned God’s call to address the needs of widows and orphans. Other churches have other legitimate calls, but this is our call.”
They live out his call through four worship centers around Kampala which offer weekly services. Care and spiritual formation in these four centers happens through cell groups of 10 to 12 people. Each cell group is asked to befriend and care for one Muslim person/family (Uganda is 80% Christian and 20% Muslim) and one AIDS widow and her children living in their community.
The church supports and runs the three villages, two outside of Kampala, and one North on the border of Sudan. These villages care for children age 3 and up, through creating family groups of one widow with eight children. Abandoned infants and toddlers are cared for at “The Bulrushes” in Kampala, an orphanage they started, which now has 100 infant and toddlers. The pictures are from our morning spent playing with babies at the Bulrushes, named after the reeds which hid the infant Moses. (Moses’ mother and sister secured the infant Moses in a container which they set afloat in the bulrushes or reeds along the Nile to save him from the Pharaoh’s decree that every Hebrew male infant was to die,Exodus 2:3.)
The pastor talked about how when they first discerned a focus of widows and orphans, they started with one house in which they cared for 16 children, and he encouraged us to consider always how things start small. He explained that cell groups were the place where the ministry of the church really happens, and not within the walls of the church. (Which made sense, because one of the four worship centers doesn’t have a building, they worship in a tent. In addition, the central church is a very small building for the size of the congregation.) So they don’t have a lot of focus on maintaining buildings and church campuses. The more extensive campus and buildings they own are in the villages which serve the orphans, where we built a classroom.
It was indescribable watching this ministry up front and personal. A particularly moving moment was in sharing a meal with one mother, Bonnie, and her children in the village. I stood outside Bonnie’s house chatting with her, and mentioned that the view out her front door would be the envy of anyone living in America (she looks out over a valley, with houses spotting the hills on the other side.) She was surprised to hear that! (see picture of Bonnie’s view, behind Monica and her children)
Members of our team kept raising the “chicken and the egg question” of which comes first: Does this church have such a clear focus of call and effective ministry in living it out because the need of widows and orphans in Uganda lend itself to this type of focus and clarity? Or are they effective in addressing this need because they have focused on one thing? Could a church in the U.S. have this type of focus and effectiveness in addressing a need in their community? Or does our context in the U.S. not lend itself to people being motivated and galvanized around addressing a community need because the needs are not so glaring?
We didn’t come up with any answers here, only identified the struggle we all felt as we watched this ministry in a very different context from our own. What would be your thoughts, as outside observers to our trip?
Next week: The way the vision was clearly communicated at every turn.
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