SATURDAY LAST DAY OF THE CONFERENCE MBALE

Today was the last day of the conference. It was a great meeting. Jaemin preached from about 9:00 till 10:00 am and it was wonderful stuff. We are still working with two interpreters and it makes the going slow. No way to keep speaking momentum. When there are two interpreters you need to speak in longer phrases or sentences so that people can get a whole thought at one time. It’s a bit harder but by no means impossible.

They had a great time of worship after the first session and then I was up. I spoke about the fourth imperative, that being the need to operate by the power of the Spirit and not on human ability. I spoke from about 10:30 to 12:45 and then we had ministry and the Holy Spirit certainly broke out in a big way. It was quite some time till things were back to normal. At the end of all of that the Bishop closed the meeting and recognized the pastors who had been attending and with whom he had relationship. He was quite candid in his comments about the fact that for many years the churches of Kampala had looked down on the pastors from the regional towns and villages. He re-emphasized his own vision and the vision of a large number of pastors from the eastern region, to come together to see the revival flow into every small village and every town. He said that a Kampala pastor had stopped by the Crusade and was amazed at the crowds and the responses and said to him the if he was in Kampala he would have a much bigger church than he had (Mbale is known for it’s hardness against the gospel. It is the main centre for Islam in the East Africa Region. They actually have an Islamic University here and Muslims come from all over Africa to study here. It is also a place where there is a lot of witchcraft. Churches have struggled to grow here, but the Spirit of the Lord is moving in a new way at this time and the Christians are very encouraged. Patrick said when the pastor from Kampala made the comment, that he didn’t want to have a big church in Kampala. He wanted to see the churches growing in Mbale and in all the villages.

They are holding a pastor’s convention at the end of August and there will be about 500 pastors coming. They will be seeking God for the ways to work together to see the work expand. They speakers are all going to be local and the prayer is going to be very focused. Jaemin and I have made an undertaking that we will make sure that all of the pastors who don’t have Bibles get Bibles. There may be as many as 200 pastors who don’t have Bibles. We are going to speak with the Bible Society in Kampala on our way back through to Entebbe to see which is the cheapest and best way to get them here. We need Bibles in English, Luganda and Acholi. It will be a big task to get them here in time, but we are determined to do it. Unfortunately even the cheapest Bibles here are about 12 dollars US which seems wrong to me when we can buy one for about three dollars in Australia. We will see if we can ship the English ones in from somewhere else. We will be trying to raise about three thousand dollars to cover the costs.

The team went to the jail outside of town today. A number of the prisoners made a commitment to Christ. The Governor of the prison is a Christian and once again there will be good support. They took a few boxes of soap to give to them. It was a great experience for the team to go there without Jaemin and as they preached people responded so they were really pumped up. Being Saturday there were no schools to go to so they had a well earned rest time this afternoon before going off to the Crusade.

The Crusade was great again tonight. I was wondering who would be there because the pastors and leaders from the Conference (about 1,000 in all) made up a part of the crowd each night. But we didn’t have any concerns as we drove to the ground because the place was full of people. Being Saturday there were a lot of locals who couldn’t come during the weekdays. There were large responses to the call for salvation and the people who are going to show up for baptism in water tomorrow at church will be large. The baptism pool was just being completed this afternoon.

Today the Bishop took me to a shop where he bought me two African shirts. They are formal shirts but have no collar and are much cooler to wear. I was all decked out in a shirt and tie, but he suggested I put it on in the shop and wear it to preach. That’s what I did. It sure felt a lot better than the suit and tie job. He bought me two and they were a good price. I might even buy one more and take them to Soroti which will be much hotter than here.

We are all gearing up for Soroti. We will be doing Conference and Crusade meetings every day from Tuesday to Saturday as well as schools and the displaced persons camps and one or two other places. It will be much more difficult than this week since we are sleeping at a village about 40 km from the town and there is no power or sewerage or any plumbing there. This means we will go into town first thing each morning and come home after the Crusade meetings at night. There will be no place to rest between meetings so we will have to do the best we can.