Uganda on the Horizon

I just got off the phone with my good friend Mark Manry. It's amazing that I can call him on his cell phone in East Africa and talk without missing a beat or connection.

Mark and I went to seminary together at Lipscomb University in the Hazelip School of Theology. Mark is now a missionary, with his wife and family, in Jinja, Uganda.

This summer, I’ll be going to spend time with the Jinja Mission Team to work with the Busoga Bible School, and to encourage the missionaries in their efforts of evangelism, creating avenues for clean water distribution, and reforestation projects. I'm also going with two groups of students (from Rochester College and Rochester Church of Christ). One group will be doing a six week internship while another is doing a survey trip to Gulu to see about the possibilties of starting their own team in the future.

We have not gotten all the details worked out, but we're hoping the most beautiful woman in the world will be joining me on this trip.

I’ll be teaching a class at BBS on “Preaching and Teaching.” I have to admit that I’m intimidated at the prospects of teaching the art of preaching to Africans who think, learn and live very differently. In fact, as many have argued, Most Africans live in a world that is much more akin to the world Jesus entered in the first century world than life as I know it in these United States.

I will have to comb my ideas on preaching and teaching for American/Western metaphors that might not translate: airplanes, advanced technology, individualism, digital information, etc. Instead I need to begin thinking about the role of communal formation, texts, spirits, and the spoken word (over the printed word).

This is not to say that American/Western life is superior by any stretch of the imagination. Rather than asking “which one is better?” I’m interested in asking “how are they different?” And . . . consequently, how might preaching and teaching look differently in Uganda but still be faithful to the preaching and teaching of the New Testament and the witness of the church in history?

In other words: I assume that preaching and teaching will sound, and look altogether different in Africa, not downplaying the role of “Christian colonialism”, for the questions, assumptions, language, and ethical staples are altogether different. I am not interested in teaching African ministers how to preach “white” any more than I trying to be a Hispanic preacher in my own setting of Rochester Hills.

The future belongs to the creatively maladjusted a great preacher once said. I’m hoping my time in Uganda will be an experience of seeing my world upside down.