A Long Story of God’s Faithfulness

Not many weeks back, I heard for the first time the testimony of one Angella Paul, recounting the genesis of his faith. It began, he said, when he had dropped out of school and had become a shepherd. In God’s good providence, he was watching his cows on a hillock near where our mission was having one of its weekly Bible studies. As he tells the story, pastor David Okken came over to him and encouraged him to come and hear the teaching. At first, he was hesitant to leave the herd, but in the end, Dave prevailed upon him, and he came to listen. After the study, Dave asked Angella his thoughts and encouraged him to come to church on Sunday. As testimonies go, it’s not particularly dramatic, and as he was recounting it at length, I couldn’t help but think that the telling could use a little polish and a good editor. But then, Karimojong are fond of telling and listening to stories—even comparatively dull stories—in their minute detail, and in that spirit, I want to supplement the bare-bones summary I’ve given above with a few more details that to my thinking are crucial to its telling, not as Angella’s testimony, but as the Mission’s testimony.

The Bible study where Angella’s testimony begins was happening at Naturukan, a village not far from the Mission compound. As a freshly sprung-up home, it had been identified as a potentially fruitful new location for ministry, and the Mission had decided to drill a community well there as a work of mercy to accompany the Gospel ministry we were undertaking. As with many of the Mission’s strategic attempts over the years, this particular site soon dried up (figuratively; the well is still producing water), a short-lived foray from a strategy that looked good on paper but that failed to live up to its promise. For ten years, every time I have driven past that well, it has looked to me simply like another failed endeavor of the Mission—until I heard Angella’s story. 

But God’s ways are so often inscrutable to us; Angella is not from that village. In fact, he is from another home where the Mission had years of active ministry—none of which had any apparent effect on him. In God’s providence, he was following his cows past a different village on the right day at the right time, and God used it to capture his heart. 

Several months ago, I went along with Angella and several other members of our mission’s ministry team as they went to one of our local schools to teach the Karimojong translation of the Children’s Catechism. Arriving, we found that the school had sent the children home for the term’s end a week early, and so there was to be no ministry that day. As we rested before riding our bicycles back to Nakaale, I asked a question. Another member of the ministry team, Locap Emmanuel, had given a message on James 2 in church on Sunday, and he had been unequivocal in stating that it was a sin for a Christian to show favoritism in any circumstance. Showing favoritism is a deeply ingrained part of Ugandan society, so his message was sharply countercultural. I asked whether, if I attended a Ugandan wedding and was shown special honor by the host because I’m a missionary or a foreigner (not a hypothetical situation), it was a sin on the part of the host to show me that honor or a sin on my part to accept it.

The effect my question had far exceeded my expectations, lighting off an intense discussion between the five young men present that occupied not only our respite, but our entire journey home. It grew in several directions to include questions of what it means to show honor, and whether some of our local political leaders, who are antagonists of the Christian faith and corrupt in their official duties, are still worthy of honor and to what extent. Since I was not guiding the discussion and had only intended to lob the bomb into the group, I cannot report any consensus that was reached. What most caught my attention was that these young men who are spearheading the Mission’s current evangelistic activities are thinking critically about manifold implications of the Christian life in their own cultural context to an extent that was unthinkable for most if not all of our church members just a few years ago. 

Recently, Chloe and I gave a loan to another church member to help him start a small shop in a nearby trading center. Several weeks after he had opened for business, I was asking him how things were going, and he was generally positive, but wanted to ask my opinion on one matter which had been bothering him. He said, “customers keep demanding that I sell booze. Is that right or wrong for me to do?” What a question! Everyone knows that selling alcohol is the fastest way to turn a profit in Karamoja. The Mission, since its inception, has been consistent in saying that drinking is not sinful (contra most Christian churches in Uganda), but that getting drunk is sin (contra the culture), to very little effect. Pessimistically, I have often thought that, along with polygamy, drunkenness is simply one of the Karimojong culture’s besetting sins that will take generations to be overcome. But here is a man not simply wrestling with the issue in his personal life—a hopeful enough step on its own—but with his agency in the culture of drinking and what effects his participation has for his witness and the good of his community.

It strikes me that what these late breakthroughs share in common is that none of them are the results of a grand strategy, successfully planned and executed. None are able to be plotted on a chart of church growth; none tick off any box in a five-year plan. Each of them are single stems, flowering from that strange alchemy of dogged missionary work and Holy Spirit power. Perhaps these flowerings might best be thought of as sharing a common root in the faithful presence of the Mission and its missionaries in Nakaale. We are able to hear Angella’s testimony and the good report of these other young men only because of the toilsome work of missionaries who went before us, who worked the fields of Karamoja in faith, not seeing the abundance that we have today. 

This work of discipleship progresses often at a glacial pace, and its movement is easily missed in the need to report on tasks accomplished or account for resources used. Grand visions are often too impatient to stare at the soil. And yet, Jesus tells us, in that dirt the whole drama of death and new life takes place unseen.

We must not forget the man who went out to sow—the most infamously bad farmer in the whole Bible and perhaps all of literature—whose strategy veered from the commonsense approach of maximising return with minimum outlay. He scattered widely and wildly so as to be sure that no possibly promising corner of the field would lie fallow. As a farming method or a way of balancing the books or providing for one’s family, the idea is farcical. But in the growth of Christ’s kingdom, it bears the divine endorsement. Missionaries are given no more assurance than any other Christian that our efforts, however well-conceived and carried out, will be successful. We are only given, together with all believers, the promise that God remains faithful.

A better-edited and less-verbose version of this article appears in the January issue of New Horizons.