THE MASTERS OF IMPROVISATION

Mbale: Saturday October 7th
Last Day of the Conference and Crusade


It doesn’t seem a lot like Saturday when you are in the throws of a program like this. Today was like the four days before it. Jaemin and I went to the Conference to teach our sessions and the rest of the team went to spend some time in the slum areas of Mbale and pray for people there. Seems a little trite I guess, and that doesn’t minimize the value of prayer. But it was a confronting experience for them like so many in Africa.

I preached for nearly two hours today. Jaemin seemed to finish early and they only had a short worship break and then I was on. As I mentioned yesterday, by this time there is a very good connection with the people and we have a greater understanding of each other. I wanted to finish teaching my material on “Finishing the Race,” from 2 Timothy 4 and on a few occasions I felt that they might want to finish up, but no way. This is Africa. These people have travelled for days to be here.

I was talking about one precious young pastor from a town north of Gulu. He is only 50 km. from the Sudanese border and has been there right though the Kony terrorist wars. Many in his family have been killed. Even despite all of this he wanted to give me his email address so we could communicate. Those of you who have worked in African nations would understand the fuller context of this. We have had to hate ourselves so that we won’t get involved in creating false or unrealistic expectations. We made the hard rule that we would say to everyone that we are working through Bishop Patrick and Impact Ministries and that we would channel all the resources we could send through him. I know it doesn’t seem fair but it is the reality. There was some talk of a team coming next year to do crusades in Gulu. That would be something.

At the end of the session we prayed for all the pastors and got the people to pray for them and then we asked people to come to have their needs prayed for and the front was packed as usual. I really felt that we connected better with the pastors this year and I hope we can do something to encourage pastors closer to their own villages and areas. It may be a pipe dream, but I thought if we brought twenty pastors and sent them out to key regional areas with some Bibles and a few other teaching resources it would mean so much more. I’ll be talking with Patrick about it. The needs here are so powerfully enticing and its easy to make promises that can’t be kept. But it is important to provide encouragement. These guys have incredible faith. I said to the pastors that if all pastors in Africa could come to Australia for part of their training we could teach them good Bible teaching practices and if all the Australian pastors could come to Africa the African pastors could teach them to have faith in God.

I was totally emptied by the time the session finished. It was 1:00 pm and I thought that was the end of it, but even though we wandered out to the bus thinking we would be going back to the house, there were more presentations from children and other groups and finally Patrick arrived back and closed the conference officially. I came home and died.

The Crusdade meeting was perhaps the best one of all. There were some wonderful performances by worship and dance groups, so much so that our guys didn’t get a go tonight. We had the biggest response and the presence of God was very noticeable.

They were going to show a DVD (“The Passion of the Christ”). I have brought the video projector with me and Emmanuel thought everyone would like to see it on a big screen once it was dark. I said that I thought we should do a trial run to make sure it worked, but that doesn’t seem to exist in the local language. Emmanuel and his partners in multi-media crime were convinced they could do it on the spot. As usual there were wires patched from here to there and cords that were supposed to do what it took. But when we had to leave I could still see the blue screen with “no signal” up in large letters. Guess what – the masters of improvisation got the movie going and soon the High School ground was packed with people.

We got home by about 8:30pm and Patrick and Christine were planning to go to a restaurant for tea. I was so emptied I asked if I could be excused. I talked with Patrick and said I would be willing to come if it was important to him, but he was gracious and so I read for half an hour and went directly to bed. Having a meal was not on the radar anywhere for me.