Christianity in Gulu

It’s so strange that our group is separated now! Rachel and Charity – come back!!

But back when all of us were in Gulu, we had a few interesting conversations with some fellow Americans in Uganda who were there for verrrryyy different reasons.

We came across a group of people around our age, all dressed in matching “MegaFest” t-shirts, at the one place in Gulu with good ice cream. When we asked what MegaFest was and why they were here, a girl with glittery eyelids said, “It’s just some singing and dancing and praying and praising’ God, you know. You should come!”

She told us they were a youth group from an American church that had started a church here in Gulu, though she didn’t know where it was. She was from California, and she had given up a chance to spend the semester in France to come here for a month – “God wins this one!” Apparently the trips, somehow, would have cost the same? I commend her for her choice; not many people would chose Uganda over Paris. She and her group left us, reminding us that the party would be really fun and we should definitely come… oops, none of us did.

The next night a few of us went to a little café for dinner, and we had an interesting encounter with a family of missionaries. A man, his wife, and their three kids sat at the table next to us, speaking in obvious American accents, so one of us asked why they were in Uganda. The father, a wiry sort of man with a gentle smile, answered that God had called them there to tell the people about Him and how they can all be saved. I asked if they were with the group that put on MegaFest, and they said no, actually, they were ready to beat those people for being so loud the night before.

They had gone on mission trips before, short-term stints in America and Latin America, and they had come to Gulu once to pour concrete for huts. Within two weeks, they saw “the great need” of the people in Gulu: Christianity. Oh wait, but not Christianity – that’s just another religion. Ugandans already have that (the country is around three-fourths Christian). But they just say they’re Christians; they don’t really know what it means. They don’t have Jesus in their hearts, he said.

So after their concrete-pouring adventure, they returned to Waco, Texas and started praying that God would send someone who really knows God to Uganda. They didn’t expect it, and they didn’t really want it, but God called them to move here for five years and bring the people to Christ. So they’re here, living in a house with a stove, oven, hot showers, a washing machine, and one-acre front yard with a garden. (Not that I blame them; I’d probably do the same, but it makes it a hell of a lot easier to ignore some other great needs in the community.) They try to cook American food, and they occasionally go back to the States, but not too often. “It makes it a lot harder to come back to the living conditions here,” he said. Their living conditions sure sounded rough…

The man, the only one who has spoken to us thus far, asked us why we were here and what our faith backgrounds were. We said we were students interested in the conflict and post-conflict situation in the region, and we came to learn before we went into some career trying to address situations like it. He responded, “you know, I see a million NGO’s around here” but not a lot of impact. I wonder, why does he think his mission is any different than those trying to help Ugandans in another way; why will he have better results? Freesia said she was Jewish; I was raised Christian; Ashley wasn’t really religious. Before Rachel spoke, the preacher asked Freesia about Judaism.

“I’m curious: what do Jews do with Jesus? My generation of Jewish people had a lot of resentment toward Jesus, but I haven’t really spoken to Jews in my generation. I’ve met some Messianic Jews, and they have so much understading – understanding I don’t have!” Freesia said they pretty much didn’t address the issue, but there was no resentment at all.

The man then told us his faith background, the perfect conversion testimonial. He was raised in a Christian home, but “no one ever told me about grace, about forgiveness!” He went to church, obeyed all the rules, and by the time he was 17-ish, he was sick of it. He abandoned the rules, drinking “because everyone else was doing it” and eventually getting into drugs. He was a cocaine addict at 20, and then, in a desperate attempt to avoid “total destruction,” he turned to Christ. He started reading the Bible (we should really look into the Bible, see who Jesus really is, in the month that we’re here. Jesus “isn’t good at playing hide-and-seek") and changed his life. He married his wife, who had come out of the womb a true disciple of Christ, and they had their three adorably blonde curly-headed children. Then the mission trips started, culminating in this one.

They eventually want to build a church, they said, but right now they are just building small groups, “discipling them like crazy.” They chose to start a new church instead of working through an already existing one because it saves so much time, effort and money (sounds just like the NGOs and aid he said were doing so little). It’s too hard, if something is going in one direction, to completely turn it around, he said. Preachers are “crawling all over the place,” but they don’t really know God, so they have to start from scratch. Hell, at home in Texas, if you ask what someone is reading, he’ll have a ready response with what Scripture is “working at his heart.” Here, they don’t even know they’re supposed to read the Bible!... Nevermind that the vast majority of the population can’t read, and they have more immediate concerns – most people don’t have electricity or running water, much less ovens and washing machines. But anyway, they are building up these small groups to eventually have a congregation for their church.

“Jesus said some crazy things,” he was telling us, now abandoning any pretense of NOT trying to evangelize. He used the lying-crazy-or-telling-the-truth argument, saying we should find out for ourselves: “Ask, ‘Who are you, Jesus?’” He was one of the literal interpreters of the Bible, and he reminded us that “the wages of sin is death” and the only way to be with God when we die, “in a place we call Heaven,” is by believing in Jesus. Because none of us know what Heaven is, of course!

Rachel and I had to walk home, so we left around that time. After we left, they gathered around Ashley, placing their hands on her shoulders, praying for God to heal her stomach problems so she could know God’s work. There are no coincidences, they said, so if she got better it was surely the Hand of God. If she didn’t get better, well, even Jesus had to pray twice sometimes, so it wouldn’t mean God doesn’t exist. They just had to try again!

Then Ashley left. They turned to Freesia and told her what they had discussed during our whole dinner – she was the one, out of all of us, whom God had “chosen” to reach… they knew a lot about what God was thinking, apparently.

I wonder, with all the divine wisdom they imparting to the people of Gulu, what they’ve learned from those who “don’t know what they’re talking about.”

I know I sound resentful of that family; I am. It frustrates me to see these people come in, thinking they have the right and the duty to help these people by bringing them to their family's way of thinking, the only right way of thinking. But it's not only religion that does this - so much of our "help" to Africa is just imposing Western values and ideas on different cultures. That arrogance, whether on the part of religion or anything else, is what bothers me most.

Sidenote: On Good Friday, we were visiting a former slave-trading center in Uganda… and when we drove up, someone stopped us and said, “You can’t park here, we’re trying to crucify Jesus.” They were all dressed up in costumes, beating a man with a wig carrying a cross, filming a Passion-esque movie. I’m pretty sure we were in the background of their shots the whole day… we’re movie stars!