Empower Uganda President Pastor Joyce Ouko and Bishop Joseph Wanjala recently facilitated a training at Bujwanga Divine Rescue Church, located in the Busia District of Eastern Uganda. The district borders Kenya. About 85 people attended the training, making it one of our largest gatherings so far this year. Here is Pastor Joyce’s report, edited for length and clarity. (Pastor Frank Tweheyo also contributed to this report.)
In Busia, some of the strong cultural pressures and unethical practices include:
Incoming wrong doctrines
Wrong theology has real life consequences. Wrong doctrines weaken people’s faith. One doctrine, the use of so called “holy water,” comes mainly comes from Kenya. Sometimes Christians are duped by pastors and other leaders (sometimes of different religions). They falsely believe that when water is prayed for, it becomes holy, and therefore is capable of driving away or exorcising demons, give birth to children of barren women, remove curses, and so on. Empower training corrects this errant teaching. We remind participants that Jesus alone redeems and heals us, not any “holy water.”
Some local pastors who espouse a “prosperity gospel” encourage couples who are not doing well financially to separate. This has caused marriages to break, it has affected the church because some of the members who end up leaving their spouses are church members and even in church leadership roles.
Poverty
Because people in the area are desperately poor, they turn to illicit ways of earning income, such as sex work, prostitution, gambling, growing and promoting drugs, because they seem to provide an “easy” way to earn money. These actions have become a challenge to the church.
Farming of marijuana
Poverty and lack of right teachings has led to some Christians, including some pastors, to resort to farming marijuana drug because it has high market around the border areas.
Polygamy
The Samia tribe in Busia practices polygamy. Even in our seminar we realized, more women than men attended, because it is not uncommon to have more than one wife.
Women are just property
The women in this district have very few rights. They are to be used as donkeys to do all the domestic work like produce, carry and care for children. They do not sit at the same level with men or husbands like sitting on chairs. Both men and women here believe that women do not deserve respect. As a result, men often behave irresponsibly and do not care for their families.
Alcoholism
The district is home to many bars, where patrons can drink alcohol and find sex workers. These bars often cater to travelers, especially truck drivers, which results in the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, which affects families and the church.
Some of the sex workers are very young girls, who are pushed into sex work as a source of income for their families. The local people see this as a normal practice.
Sorcery witchcraft
Witchcraft is highly practiced in Busia. Obviously, this contradicts the gospel.
Gambling and smuggling of goods
This also puts the church and Christian families to the test: will they act with integrity? Smuggled goods become very cheap compared to genuinely purchase ones, and so doing the right thing becomes a costly choice.
Local cultural norms
Local customs hurt women. For example, if a husband’s father dies, his wife is required to purchase a new blanket to cover the dead body of her father-in-law. If she does not, or cannot afford to do so, the marriage might be terminated by the family. It becomes a challenge if the daughter-in-law is a Christian while the husband’s family is not Christians.
Also, if a husband walks with his wife in public, the culture sees it as an abomination. The elders in the clan will not respect that husband. This puts men in a dilemma: should they show love to their wives, or respect elders? They cannot do both.
Despite these cultural challenges, the training was well-received. Here are some stories of the impact of the training in Busia.
Bishop Joseph Wanjala who attended Empower training NMNW in Tororo town, then went through the Master class facilitated by Pastor Frank and Pastors Julius and Joyce. He invited Empower to Malaba in the past, and this time connected Empower to Busia. He is a trained theologian and oversees a big number of churches in eastern Uganda and a Samia by tribe.
He says, one of the hardest cultural norms to break is the Samia one, but ever since he attended with his wife the Empower trainings, it changed a lot of things in their marriage and ministry.
He used his personal story on how Empower teachings have transformed his life, family and ministry. Bishop Joseph drove the message home by using the local language to help the participants understand clearly.
Pastor Patrick Masindey Kaambu, the host, says the teachings are helping the people in his church to respect women as equally created in the image of God as men, not just property. Because of the training, he has a basis to challenge the cultural practices which seek to prohibit women from being leaders.
Moses Wanyama, Local Council 1 Chairman, was invited to come by, and ended up attending the entire training. He said this is what our nation needs to make leadership easy. He believes that if people would respect each other, especially women, and men would be responsible for their families, it would help the people of Busia.
Pastor Harriet Lyaka says the teaching came at the right time and opened her eyes. Harriet testifies that in the Samia culture, women do not own or inherit land. They are not given any position of power within the family. However, she was able to share with us the impact of our training when she contacted us a week later. A few days after the Empower training, a man died and left a widow, sons and a daughter. When her bishop officiated the burial, they had to pray for the heir, and the widow wanted her daughter to be an heir. She was hesitant to speak up, but when she quietly did so, others who had attended the training affirmed her. They reminded her and the bishop that in the Empower seminar, they learned that girls can as well be heirs because God blessed both man and woman in the Bible. As a result, the girl was put as an heir. Harriet says this gospel is continuing to spread.
Pastor Patrick Masiga Leta testifies of the teaching making scriptures clear for him to teach and exercise the right attitude for work not as curse but as a tender of the garden trusting the owner to make it fruitful.
As always happens, the participants came away from the seminar with a new perspective on God. Because they learned that God did not curse people, they were better able to focus on God as a loving Creator.
