Last week, we interviewed candidates to join the Mission’s Timothy Discipleship Training (TDT) program, a program that combines school sponsorship with discipleship and church involvement with an eye toward developing future church leaders. The interviews, while somewhat dispiriting, were nevertheless useful as a study in the religious or spiritual milieu in which we operate.
What part of the answers we received were rote and which were genuinely understood and believed is hard to tell. What came across strongly was the almost total lack of Bible knowledge among our interviewees—an absence in spite of the fact that public schools in Uganda have Religious Education as one of the subjects taught. When asked to find a particular passage in the Bible, only a few could do so without either flipping pages randomly until they found the right book or resorting to the table of contents. None asked could identify that Jesus was being spoken of in Isaiah 9. When asked to read a favourite passage of Scripture, the results were almost comedically bizarre. One read the first three days of Creation in Genesis 1, another the account in Job 1 of God questioning Satan as to his whereabouts, a third from Job’s speech about how it would have been better if he was not born. One claimed that Isaiah chapter 1 was important to him, then proceeded to read Song of Solomon chapter 1 instead.
Pressing on to matters of doctrine, people scored highly on Who made you? and pretty well on Who is Jesus?, most managing to answer either “Jesus is the son of God,” or “Jesus is our saviour.” On questions of sin, most were able to at least name a sin—stealing, murder—and most were able to acknowledge that they were sinners. Where things got interesting was in connecting the dots from sin to the need of a saviour. Not one person managed to do it. Pretty much across the board, these young men answered that one gets to heaven by doing more good than bad. Even those who were asked to read from Ephesians 2:8-9 could not articulate salvation by faith.
This inability was especially notable to me because when asked What does sin deserve or What happens to sinners when they die?, everyone was readily able—but reticent—to speak of hell. In almost every case, hesitation was followed by a noticeable drop in the volume of the voice as the answer was made. To my interpretation, it seems they felt that hell is not something frivolous; it bears the weight of reality to them. I asked one of the young men, Gabriel, whether he believed he had done more good than bad—whether he would end up in heaven or hell. After considering the question, his rather hangdog response was that he wasn’t sure.
If Gabriel’s perspective holds more widely in our community—that the threat of judgement really has weight, and that many are not at all sure whether they will escape, we as missionaries should be thankful, for this is indeed fertile ground. To those living under this burden, the Gospel presents nothing less than total liberation. May we find fresh ways of communicating this good news to our neighbours, and may Gabriel and the other men who have been added to the Timothy program find in Jesus the answer they so urgently need.