Church, Where Least Expected

"Here we are," Mr. Guthrie said as he turned the land cruiser down a long dirt road and stopped abruptly at the bottom of the hill in front of a pile of garbage.

 

Climbing out from the backseat, I stepped up onto a surface carved out of the garbage pile and stood still. Beside me a small tin building, maybe 12 x 15 feet, awaited our entrance. Before me a group of grey-and-white speckled ducks, holes in their feet, stood placidly outside the doorway. Beyond me stretched the dump and road, meandering down to where a maze of mud brick houses comprised the village below.

Mr.Guthrie had said that we were going to be speaking at a church in the ghetto today, but I hadn't quite expected this.

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Five of us had filed into the land cruiser for the now familiar drive into Kampala that morning: Mr. Guthrie, Dr. Pysar, Jordan, a Bible School student named Jacob, and me. Mr. Guthrie had warned me as I sat down in the backseat, "be prepared to have something to speak this morning!" Thus I spent part of the drive pondering what sort of "testimony or something" I could give to fill a few minutes' space. You see, as a visitor here from North America, it doesn't matter who you are or whether or not you can talk: if you've come in a group along with a guest speaker, you're automatically a guest speaker too! 

Looking in through the church door

I didn't have long to worry. Sunday school started soon after we stepped in through the dark church doorway and sat down at a bench stationed along the wall at the front. Taking a seat, I immediately noticed the slope on which the church was built. The task of not sliding down onto the person beside you required a bit of effort!

We listened as the Sunday School sang a song about Baby Jesus; one child near the back kept time on a small drum. At one point Mr. Guthrie looked over at me and asked if I had a story I could tell the class. Good thing I brought my balloon pump to tell the Jonah story! 

After one last song, the Sunday School part of the service closed and the main service began. Of the thirty or so people filling the building, only about ten were adults. (The population of Uganda is very young as it is, as according to a 2012 revised UN study, nearly half of all Ugandans under the age of fifteen. In fact, Uganda is second only to Niger as the youngest nation in the world!)

 

A worship service started, comprised of Lugandan songs sung a cappella except for the beating of the little drum. Some of the songs I could catch on to; others not so much! Next all the visitors in the church stood to give their spiels. Mr. Guthrie would stand and introduce each of us in turn, and then sit in the spot of whoever he had just called on to speak. In this way we used a form of musical chairs to juggle five people on a bench that seated four!

 

Stella, the pastor's wife, served us a fantastic meal of matooke,
 beef, rice and Irish potatoes (as potatoes are called here),
all kept warm in banana leaves.

I didn't speak for long; mostly I shared about my first experience "helping with the kids" at a church here, tying it into a verse from Psalm 37 about committing your way into God's hands. Then when you face something that seems too much for you--in my case having to preach on the spot to a group of kids--you look at God to see how He'll work it out instead of having to look to your own hands to find a solution.

At last, when all the other guests had spoken, Mr. Guthrie stood and preached a sermon from Hebrews on Christ, Our High Priest. Then when the service had ended and the people had dispersed, I found myself walking with the group down the dirt road towards the pastor's house for lunch.

Getting there involved navigating red dirt alleyways between mud brick houses and fluttering clotheslines. Open water flowed along shallow trenches in the streets. It was an amazing, surreal feeling to look down and see my own sandals walking through such a setting!

Over the meal we heard the story of how the pastor and his wife are actually graduated students from the Bible School here--they even used to be in Mr. Guthrie's class! They could have had a large, comfortable church in an "easier" part of town, yet press on steadfastly here with this church they've planted because of the certainty they feel of their calling to this area. It's hard for me to explain the extent of their commitment and sacrifice without using clichés. What word can I use to describe what it's like to meet people with such perseverance--people who remind me of the characters from Hebrews 11--who are disciples in the hard places, in the dusty streets, obedient to God even in the trenches of the Kampala ghetto?

"Beautiful" will have to do.