Jinja Missions

It has been a loooong summer . . . but a good one!  Here are a few things that have been happening over the past several months with our families, our team and the work here in Busoga.

New Teammates

First of all, our new teammates Bobby and Candice Garner arrived in February.  They are here to work with villages in areas of development through the Mvule Project.  The Mvule Project is coordinated by Kibo Group, a faith-based development organization.  The project encourages reforestation through community building; the Busoga church movement makes a great partnership for such a project.  Needless to say, the Garners have hit the ground running putting in many long days and hosting people in their homes.  Moving to a new place and settling in is not easy task in itself, but the Garners have been overly impressive in that in addition to adjusting to a new life, they have immediately jumped into service with passion and with pace.

Candice has worked many hours helping to reorganize and digitize the library at the Source Café, in an effort to make the library more accessible and efficient.  Bobby has been working long hours with Abraham Mulongo (pictured below and director of Mvule Project) and several of our villages churches to plant over 800 trees and help organize sustainable community projects to both improve the educational and economic opportunities for rural Christians and their neighbors.  Bobby has also volunteered his time, along with another church leader Paul Wandera, to help Busoga Bible School (BBS) develop 5 acres of land for the production of sugar cane. BBS’s board of directors hopes the land and the sugar cane will make sustainable, long term profits that will subsidize the school’s budget and allow BBS to continue its work of training church leaders in Busoga.

The Kings

We lost some teammates in April.  Jason and Jody King, who had joined our team in October of last year made the difficult decision to return to the U.S. for personal and family reasons.  We loved the time we had with them and they blessed us as well as many Basoga in the time they were here.  Their presence is and will be missed and we pray God’s blessing on them as they enter back into a new life in America.

Pepperdine

Our team was blessed to be a part of Pepperdine University’s first East African studies abroad program.  Nineteen students lived, took classes, participated in ministry activities with us, volunteered at local health and social services, and traveled to Rwanda and Tanzania to gain credit and experience for their undergraduate studies. Gary Selby and his wife Tammy were the faculty sponsors for the trip.  Gary is professor of communications and Tammy works in student services at Pepperdine. Mark, Spencer and Ben co-taught a course on “Christianity and Culture”.  Our whole team was blessed, as were Busoga churches and the Jinja community, by their service and eagerness to learn and build relationships.  From what we have heard, the program was viewed as a huge success by students and administration.  Pepperdine hopes to continue the program for years to come.  We feel blessed to be apart of the program and our hope is that Pepperdine will continue to be a blessing to the Basoga and that the Basoga will bless the students and faculty of Pepperdine.

Internship

We hosted 16 interns from Rochester College and Abilene Christian University (and one Ugandan named Tom Ngobi who became a student at Rochester College this Fall).  Internship is one of our favorite events as we get the chance to share life and ministry in Uganda with college students who are seeking God’s will and calling for their life after college.  

Internship is not a vacation for students.  They keep our regular schedule including hour-long language and culture lessons in the morning for five days a week, regular village visits and teaching, working at the Source Café, building relationships and engaging in both problems and opportunities that Basoga face and are found in ministry here.   

One of the best experiences interns encounter is a three-day, two-night stay in the village with a Christian family.  “Bonding” as we call it, is an opportunity for church members to receive a visitor, which is considered a great blessing is Soga culture.  

We also took the students to western Uganda to survey the area of Bunyoro (which is one of the traditional places of origin of the Basoga), to the cities of Hoima and Masindi where there are very few churches as compared to other areas of Uganda.  Our hope in this trip is that God might provide a desire for some of the students to consider coming back to a place like Bunyoro to begin churches and proclaim the good news about what God is doing there.  We don’t have to hope for long!  Several of the students began to seriously consider moving to that area and were asking the concrete questions of what it would take and what would it look like to live and do mission in that place.  We were blessed to have such a wonderful group of students and pray God’s blessings on them and their futures.  Visit the “Internship” section of our website for more information and pictures.

Urban Ministry

In spite of all these events, ministry has not stopped or slowed down.  Mark continues to work at the Source Café  with Ronald Mugulusi and Lazarus Wagoli, two talented and capable men who are effectively managing a dynamic and creative ministry.  Ronald, Lazarus, and Mark are working on ways to improve the opportunities and resources the Source provides to the community and the ways it can serve the movement of churches in Busoga.  The Source serves as a hub for a variety activities including church ministries – housing the Busoga Bible School and Jinja Church of Christ, development projects initiated by Kibo Group, such as the Mvule Project and Water Source, while establishing its own place in the community through the craft shop, restaurant, internet café, and library. There is a lot going on here!

Mark also works with Richard Bazonoona, the minister of Jinja church.  The Jinja church has strengthened this year around a core of committed church leaders, most of whom also work with the Source Café and in Kibo Group projects.  The church is teaching and preaching through the book of Psalms, in order to have a fuller understanding of the way God’s people related to God, and the way God related to them, in a variety of life’s circumstances.  Mark considers time invested Ronald, Lazarus, Richard, and the Jinja church leaders his primary task and his greatest privilege!

Rural Leadership Development

Spencer and Ben continue to travel out to the village 4 or 5 days a week to primarily teach and work with rural church leaders in what are called cluster meetings (basically a cluster is a group of small, rural churches who are relatively close to one another in proximity and who work together to build up the God’s people in their area).  

Their lessons over the past 8 or 9 months have centered on the theme of maturing in Christ, drawn from the book of Ephesians, and have dealt with questions of culture, Christian identity, values, problems and sources of power the churches face and how Scripture encourages us to handle them.  Our hope is that our times of study and prayer will build up the churches, its leaders, and us by instilling a long lasting mentality for these often isolated Christian communities to come together and not be alone. We hope local church leaders, who are scattered among many churches in Busoga, will see these regular meetings as opportunities to come together, pray and study together, discuss problems and work together to plant new churches and build up the body of believers in their communities.

Water Wells

In addition to village visits, teaching and discipling of church leaders, Spencer has been working with Kibo Group and the Source Café on the “Water Source.”  A great need expressed by village churches is the lack of consistent, clean water within walking distance.  Spencer has been working with our good friend Ronald Bwana (pictured) who helped begin a church in home village of Bugaya Bulinda in partnership with a water well organization called Busoga Trust to provide village sanitation education and install water wells in 6 villages where there are churches of Christ.  It is a wonderful ministry where people are participating from the U.S. by donating funds for the wells and churches are working with the community to improve sanitation levels and contribute to the cost of installing and maintaining the well.  

Church Planting

Ben has been working with young churches and going with church leaders to new villages to aid in planting new churches.  In the past year, a new church in Niabowa has begun in a cluster with very few churches and over the past few months, Ben has been going to a village on the western side of the Nile, in the region of Buganda, with John Patrick Bagole (maybe pictured below)to begin a church in the village of Nakakonge, 2 kilometers from the Nile.  On Ben’s last visit with John Patrick, 4 people were baptized into Jesus in the river.  The setting provided an appropriate backdrop for new creation.  God never ceases to amaze us as He invites us to discover and participate with Him in what he is doing here!

At Home

On the home fronts, the Manrys and the Langfords are preparing for their furloughs this fall.  Mark, Lori, Luke Conner, LJ and Tessa have sent Tom Ngobi (who they consider part of their family) to study in America at Rochester College, located in their hometown in Michigan.  Emily and Kym have been busy chasing Adam and Noah (respectively)who are both one year olds and exploiting their new found freedoms of mobility. On that note, Adam Bogle, Tessa Manry and Noah Langford all turned one this year.  All the women on the team have been working tirelessly hosting and preparing meals for interns and visitors. Luke, Conner and LJ Manry along with Eli Langford have been enjoying going to school together at a local international elementary school called Kiira Kids. All in all, we are blessed that God has called us together to be a team and we truly consider our time together as a team and with the Basoga to be a privilege and a blessing which we will always cherish.