Raed grew up as a Muslim and then decided to dedicate his life to follow Jesus. Raed lived in Arua where our House to House team member, Korwen, met him. They developed a discipling relationship over the last few years and this past year Korwen trained Raed to use an app developed to help guide Bible Sharing groups through scriptures.

Raed has since used the app as a guide to found a bible sharing group at his nursing school. He as also taken the opportunity to reach out to the youth, in his home town, sharing Gods love with them during his school breaks.

Raed has grown in his love of Jesus, developed as a servant-leader and grown in confidence to share his faith with those around him.

In the heart of the ministry of House to House, we ask God to put us in relationship with people who have a desire to reach the people around them, where then we could equip them to become disciple makers in the plentiful harvest.     Sometimes this is harder to find than some would think.   We’ve had many invitations to come and disciple hundreds of people, and where there is discernment in situations, most times it isn’t at all sustainable.   We’ve met with interested individuals, only to find the heart is not to expand God’s kingdom, but rather for their own personal motives.   We’ve definitely had our ups and downs, but God has shown us His faithfulness in prayer and waiting for the connections with those He has prepared for us.  

But what happens when God brings this desired partnership together?  The result is that all He wants to see done, will be completed.   In one heart and vision in the Holy Spirit, we can work to empower these individuals to see God’s plans and purposes move among the people placed around them.  This could be pastors, teachers, mothers, businessmen, young adults, and any non-believer.  The list goes on and on and is limited to no person, but rather a person whose heart is on fire for the Great Commission. 

From there, we can give them the tools they are needing to disciple effectively.  We can help them strategically think about the people they are reaching, how to structure their groups, what tools to use in their discipleship, and how to tackle the challenges that come along the way.  Our desire is that they feel not only prepared to initiate these discipleship groups, but also equip others to become disciple makers.  This is how discipleship movements happen. 

Once the leaders are equipped, they can be sent.  Now this doesn’t mean that our relationship with them is finished, in fact it’s just getting started.   We have the opportunity to have an on-going, supportive relationship with these leaders as they continue to pour into their groups and the later groups that can also emerge.  

This is a discipleship movement.  Not just a one individual person moving.  It’s the body of Christ, moving together with the Holy Spirit, to obey Christ and teach others to do the same.   Leaving space for the Lord to do His work is the best thing we can do as disciple makers.  It’s not about us, it’s about Him.  

It’s June in Uganda, which means that it’s short term team season. There are a lot of visitors in Uganda, especially into northern Uganda coming into northern cities to evangelize and preach the gospel. As someone who participated in several short term teams in my life, I understand the compassion, motivation and excitement for sharing the gospel in a new place. However, Uganda does not need more evangelists. 

Uganda needs disciples and disciple makers. In order to be a disciple maker you need to be committed to the person that you are discipling and be a support on their faith journey as they continue to grow with God. Unfortunately, a two week visit into Northern Uganda with brief encounters with people will not make true disciples of Jesus.

In an effort to become more like Jesus we need to constantly be connecting with Him and to be in a community who asks about our connection with Him and cares about our relationship with Jesus. 

The point in which somebody receives salvation or a “soul is saved” is simply a starting point of a, hopefully, lifelong journey of continuously growing with God. If we stopped growing here we would miss out on all that God has for us. As disciples, we are ever changing to become more like Jesus and aligning ourselves with Him and the things that He believes and the way that He thinks. This takes time and community support.

I recently read ‘Renovated: God, Dallas Willard, and the Church That Transforms’ by Dr. Jim Wilder and he called this type of thinking, “Thinking  with God” instead of just thinking about God. It’s a subtle but profound shift away from trying to obey God’s rules, to thinking the way God thinks. They both have the same initial appearance, but aligning our mind with God’s has transformational impact. When our attention shifts to some other aspect of spiritual life, those learned behaviors won’t stick  unless we’ve learned to think God’s thoughts and been changed on the inside.

Thinking with God is difficult, and not commonly taught, but it is an important to do so that we can move forward in our relationship with Him. We need to understand HOW He thinks and HOW He operates. Then once we have aligned our thought’s with God we have become His mature disciples and we can say, “Imitate me as I imitate Christ.” like Paul did in 1 Corinthians 11:1. 

Also on this journey to become mature disciples of Christ, we need to have the support of a community with other like-minded people who are also trying to align themselves and their relationship with God. This group helps reinforce the things God is speaking to us. By being in this community, we are encouraged to press into Christ more and more. Our community can also call us back to Him when it’s difficult for us to remember why we even started this journey in the first place. 

Uganda needs more disciples, not more evangelists. More people committed to walking day in and day out with those around them furthering them in their faith. Myself and our team have seen it time and time again, that people are evangelized to, make a decision to follow Christ and are left to fend for themselves. 

Evangelism without discipleship is making spiritual orphans. 

It is our belief at House To House, that the best people to both share and walk alongside Ugandans who want to align themselves with Jesus are other Uganda’s who are already doing the same thing. Ugandan believers who have experienced the same culture, the same setbacks, AND have also chosen to follow God and to continuously ask for Him in their lives. 

If you are Ugandan reading this, then I hope that you will be inspired to gather your friends or family together to begin to align your thoughts with His thoughts and deepening your relationship with a God who loves you. 

And if you’re a foreigner who is planning your trip to Uganda, I ask that you would pray about using your time to support the ministry work that is happening here through the Ugandan disciple makers that live in and love this country and it’s people. You may not be the one to save souls here, but your encouragement of and solidarity with other believers here is like a cup of cold water on a hot day. (Also, you should totally go on a safari. It’s worth it)

Beatrice Adong

Beatrice has been a follower of Jesus for many years. She always tries to share his love with the people around her wherever she goes. However, she was becoming frustrated with some of the methods of evangelism and discipleship that were known to her. She was able to share about God’s love, but people were not growing in their relationship with God. 

When we asked Beatrice if she was interested in discipling her neighbors with our methods, she gave a loud YES! 

She grasped our approach to sharing Jesus and discipling and training so quickly. She was able to start a small group of believers in many places in her life, at her work, with other believers at church, and with her neighbors. 

Beatrice and Disciples in Orom, Uganda

With all of the groups she has started she has been able to keep God’s word as the focus, each person is experiencing their own journey with God and obey the things that the Holy Spirit has called to them. No matter if the people in the group have been believers for many years, or if they have not yet committed their life to Jesus, everyone in her groups are able to participate. 

Beatrice has even been able to navigate her work group through time constraints and issues that pop up at work through allowing God to be the true leader of the groups while she remains a supportive facilitator.

Have you ever watched the olympic sprint races? For the 100 meter dash, the whole race is over in about 10 seconds. But what about the work leading up to that race? How much time went into training for that event? 

In a fast paced world, we are tempted to want to see fast paced church growth as well. Especially when we’re trying to start a disciple making movement. Looking at a high view of disciple making movements globally it looks like they grow overnight! We have a friend heading one and we hear new reports every few months about another 100 or more house churches starting. It’s exciting, we want in, we want to see those numbers of people in our own movement out of Northern Uganda…. Yes! Let’s do it! Go! Go! Go! 

But wait…. Let’s zoom in on some of these movements…. 

Many of the people initially trying to start them spend 7-11 years plodding away trying to train, teach, disciple and encourage with little to no fruit. And then, when they do find someone who gets it those people invest in a few…. For a very long time. And then from the few they invest in some of them gather a group of their own to invest in. And on and on it goes. Everyone begins a new group pretty quickly in the movement and from a birds eye view it looks so sudden, so fast growing, so intense. Though the replication of groups happen quickly, the result is many people committing to disciple the people around them for the long haul. People are not just playing a game of telephone “Did you hear about Jesus? Pass it on.” No! People are committing to go deep into the word together. They are in community with people regularly, walking alongside them as everyone grows in their understanding of the word, and relationship with God. 

Slow growth, investment, commitment, regular, walking together…. Sign us up for that. We want to live amongst a group of people who are going to be in it with us, not for a flash in the pan, but for the long haul. This is community, this is church. 

God gave us the free gift of Jesus. All we have to do is recognize that we need him and  believe that he died for us, then we are welcome into the kingdom. Those are the only steps necessary when people are deemed “Christians” or “Born Again.”  All done. You are a Christian.  The end….

Except that’s not the end. We are called to make disciples not just converts. 

People, in Uganda, are hungry for more of God. They are so hungry that we see them repeatedly attending the many tent meetings, conferences, crusades, evangelism outreaches, and prayer meetings that come through our region. They raise their hands to be counted as a “born again.” Sometimes this is for the first time, but often it's for the 10th time. The result is thousands of coverts to Christianity that can be tallied and marked as a job well done, but there are no disciples of Christ made from these moments.

Making disciples is our goal, knowing that after someone accepts the free gift of Jesus, they will then need help learning how to follow his teachings. We help people work through the Bible in a really simple way by focusing on small, attainable obedience steps that people set for themselves (with the help of Holy Spirit). People take small steps, focusing on getting one foot in front of the other. Each time their community meets to seek God together, they encourage each other to continue that slow but important growth in their faith. 

This is accessible discipleship, small incremental changes leading to lifetime growth. 

Up close it doesn’t look like much, but when you zoom out, you see many people who are growing in their faith as directed by the Holy Spirit. In time, these people will be confident disciples of Christ because He matured them through these small steps, week-by-week, through a simple methods anyone can do and fit into an already busy schedule.  

We are all called to disciple people. We at House to House are simply providing tools to help that happen. 

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One of our greatest realizations as we developed our model for House to House, was that when someone became a believer in Jesus they would stop interacting with their friends and grow an entirely new set of friends within the church. We realized that by doing this, people were cutting off their former friends from the opportunity to hear God’s truth through this new believer. So when this happens, one person becomes God’s disciple, but we left behind their entire community! 

We see this often happening with the attraction model of church. If the goal is for people to go and bring new people to the church to hear from a Pastor about God… eventually you are going to need a building big enough to house everyone. And a church attractive enough to keep people there! 

We, at House to House, have different goals. Our goal is to spread God’s word INTO new GROUPS of people! When someone gathers their friends and family to learn about God together, they can do all of the things the bible calls us to do as a church. Church just happens, not in a building, but when people are meeting in houses, under trees, in businesses and anywhere people naturally gather. Then those people will want to share about their experience with other people in other parts of their lives and they will be able to go and replicate this simple model of church with other groups of friends and communities. These new groups of friends and communities will want to share what they are doing and they will want to go and create this simple church with more communities.

So while people are embracing relationships they already have, God’s message is moving IN. 

Uganda is a beautiful country with a difficult history of oppression and tribal division through British Colonization, the horrific reign of President Idi Amin, and the over 20-year terror of the rebel group the Lord’s Resistance Army. Ugandans are resilient, strong, forgiving, and kind people, and they desire to thrive.

This is where we are stepping in, into a people who are finally free of war-time life and are seeking to find themselves, their value, their authority all over again. They are such a strong people but a people who have been oppressed by governments, rebellions, and even aid groups. The repeated message to Ugandans has been, “You are helpless. You cannot do this yourself.” They have been made to feel like victims with no authority. They have been exploited and stereotyped as “poor helpless Africans”.

We want to be different. We want to empower. We don’t want to “fix” Africans, because they are not broken. We take our foreign perspectives out of the picture, as much as possible, to allow space for God to work through Ugandans. Through reading the bible and hearing the Holy Spirit, we know that Ugandans are able to grow in their confidence of discipling one another. We know that God has called each of us (not just Westerners) a chosen people, that all who know God to declare His praises.

But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light. -1 Peter 2:9

We love working with Ugandans, and our calling is to provide them the resources and discipleship they need in their process of becoming more confident leaders and disciplers of others around them. Ugandans have a unique understanding of who God is, that they bring to their conversations with other Ugandans. When they are able to share God’s love in their lives with others, that is the beginning of a ripple effect that can transform all of Africa.