MY GERMANY EXPERIENCE

I am sitting in the Hotel Lobby of Seepark, 1hour from Frankfurt, Germany where I am attending the Christian Associates conference.

This is my first time to Germany and it is such a blessing for me to be here. I arrived here on Sunday afternoon having travelled for almost 20 hours from Entebbe via Dubai. Germany is a great and beautiful country with lots of green forested hillsides. The roads are superb especially when you think of our roads in Uganda.

The conference I am attending is in a little village known as Kirchheim very deep in the country side and amazingly beautiful.

CAI is a church planting organization with a special emphasis in reaching Europe with the Gospel. They currently have about 50 church planting projects in Europe with teams who mainly come from USA but a few from other European countries.

My desire to come over was to learn from these people how they do it. As many of you may know Europe is a post-christian continent with less than 5 percent of the people having no experience of church let alone a belief in the salvation knowledge of God. We have heard lots of success stories of God’s work in these countries and I am really encouraged. I sat with a person during dinner last night who is working in France and he shared with me his encounter with an evangelical catholic priest who is having a lot of success in reaching the catholics, this reminded me of Elijah’s time where he thought he is the only prophet left and God said to him that he has a remnant of 7000 prophets.

The churches here are either small fellowships in homes or some congregations who meet in rented facilities, you never hear of talk about church buildings you only hear of talk about reaching people for Christ.

I am seeing ordinary people some of whom are bi-vocational missionaries having a job on the side to support them while using all the other spare time to preach teach and disciple. I was impressed to see a video of another team reaching southern Europe and have great success in reaching the Moslem immigrants who came in from Morocco and Algeria. Another great testimony is a couple that is in one of the Arab countries, the wife is professional working with a large International company she supports the family while the husband is doing ministry work.

This evening i sat with a great guy Andre a Dutch man from Holland who shared with me his excitement of having come to know Jesus 21/2 years ago. He lost a job a few months ago and I asked whether he is worried and he said no way. He is busy everyday helping people on the streets of Amsterdam touching the poor and loving them with Jesus’ love. He has applied to CA to allow him to go and do missionary work in Portugal.

I am now thinking of how best to transfer what I have learned to our situation in Uganda. I am also praying as to how we as the African church can reach Europe. Two things that come to my mind now are our unique experience in prayer and our being so unique in culture which is so good in that we bring our richness to this needy continent.

I love you all and I am continuing to learn. Conference will be ending this Saturday morning and I will travel by train from Frankfurt to Stuttgart.

GOD IS GOOD ALL THE TIME.