Author Archive: admin@covenant
A Bar Becomes a Church
The story of Joe, a jeepney (taxi) owner and driver in the Philippines, provides a vivid illustration of the way the Kingdom of God, the Church and the marketplace can interact to transform individuals and touch a city.
As Joe was driving his jeepney shortly after his conversion to Christianity, he heard God tell him to serve right where he was. Since he was a new believer and the marketplace was what he knew best, he focused on a bar called Sweet Moments. He decided to apply the principles of prayer evangelism as listed in Luke 10 to make peace with the lost, fellowship with them, take care of them and eventually announce that the Kingdom of God has come near them (see Luke 10: 1-8).
Everyday he would go into the bar, order a soft drink and pray peace over the place, its employees and the customers. After a few days of doing this, he befriended the manager, Brian, who was a homosexual, a gambler, a drug user, a drug dealer and a pimp to 35 prostitutes. This pedigree left no doubt that Brian was a certified, full- strength sinner.
The friendship grew. After just a few days Joe was able to lead Brian to the Lord and baptize him at a nearby beach. As Brian emerged from the water, the power of God came upon him and he experienced an instant transformation. All of his homosexual drives disappeared. He was also freed from gambling and drug addiction. He was delivered from all of the vices and stopped being a pimp, which had supported his sinful lifestyle.
Brian’s transformation became evident to those around him, and in a very short time all 35 prostitutes also became Christians. Joe and his wife decided to move into a neighborhood near the bar so that they could minister to this unusual congregation. His wife baked rice cakes, prayed over them and distributed them among their neighbors, using food as way of introduction. One of those neighbors was Teddy, a lawyer, who was also the owner of the bar. He later testified that when he ate one of those cakes something happened to him. He became interested in what Joe had been teaching his employees, joined the Bible study and soon became a Christian. As he grew in the Lord, he realized that his line of business was not pleasing to God and turned the bar into a Church. In less than a year Joe, the pastor of the bar – turned- church, established 12 cell groups in the area, and the Kingdom of God has come to significant portion of the marketplace.
The Key? Joe saw the church as the means to take the Kingdom of God to people in the marketplace. When sinners discovered that the Kingdom had come near them, they came into it, and once they did, he simply taught them how to have church in the marketplace!
The Kingdom of Heaven is also Like a Factory
I worked for an engineering company in Sheffield England, which made clutches, overdrives for cars, and certain garage equipment. The company had about 1,200 employees. My job at the company was a ‘setter’ and what I used to do was ‘set’ machines up or operations on machines for operators to command the machines and do a good job. At that particular time, the company was very union oriented (as were a lot of companies at that time). The union had an iron grip on the company and everybody that worked there had to pay subs to the union every week. The union did some silly things, because they had too much power.
Where I was based in the factory, there were two Christians. One was a very keen Christian and the other was a fairly keen Christian, but not quite as keen as the other one. This was because he kept on witnessing to his wife and tried to get her to go to church. She told him to cool it or she would go back to her mother’s. And so, from then on, he had stopped going to church. He played a big part in my becoming a Christian even so. The other lad was a more regular churchgoer. Lunchtimes were great times. We used to play cards or dominoes. These two Christians used to sit and read the Bible and discuss it. I became very curious about what they were doing. I’d had a church background, in that I had always been in
Sunday school, the Cubs, Boy’s Brigade, the scouts and the youth club, so I didn’t feel embarrassed to talk to them. I spent some time talking to them about the Bible and I came up with some very good arguments, because I knew my Bible stories. There was one thing that they shared more than once that I couldn’t get my head around and that was their own personal testimonies of how they had become Christians. I didn’t have an argument for that because it was their own personal experience.
God began to speak to me around the time my girlfriend’s father died. We used to spend a lot of time together working on our cars and I used to get along with him well. I had not been touched by any death on my side of the family so it hit me a big way. God started to speak to me more and more through that. At that time, God seemed to be in everything I did or said. I would look at the stars, and the wonder of creation made me think about God. I went to the coast for a day or so and seeing the sea made me think about God. I went to the country and God spoke to me, and I got to a point where there was nowhere to turn, everywhere God was prompting me to make a decision. I felt the Lord say, ‘Jimmy, it’s time to make a decision. You’re at the point of no return: repent and ask me into your life.’
One day when I got up early for work, I felt a bit weird. It felt as if it was going to be a ‘different’ day that day. It was while I was at work setting up a machine and operating it that God started to speak to me very strongly and I knew I had to make a decision – I couldn’t hold out any longer. So I stopped the machine right there, and
on the spot I prayed, repented and asked God into my life.
I went around immediately telling everyone on the shop floor. I was so excited, and although some people didn’t agree with what I was saying or didn’t understand what I was saying, they could see my excitement. People were saying, ‘Look we don’t know what’s happened to Jim but something has happened to him’. Within a few days or so, a dozen of my friends and colleagues had become Christians and, from then on, there was someone saved every single day. It didn’t just stay in the factory, but spilled out outside, because our girlfriends, wives, parents, brothers, sisters and cousins all started to become Christians. My wife became a Christian, and so did her sister. Since then, my wife has probably helped lead thousands of people who came from the factory to Christ.
All we had to share with people was our testimony, because we didn’t really know the Bible. We didn’t know anything about the Holy Spirit, the ‘Second Blessing’, renewal, revival. All we knew or had heard of was God. A friend of mine at the time said, Jim, I don’t understand this – it’s like a massive wave of God over which we have no control, no control at all’.
We felt it was quite important to learn a bit more about the Bible, and found out about something that was called the ‘Topical Memory System’, from which you would get Bible verses through the post on little cards to memorize. So, each day we would get our memory verse and stick it on our machine, on the workbench or drawing-board, and we would learn the scripture. Then at lunchtime we would test each other and discuss what we had learnt that day, what we had learnt that week and what we had learnt over the past few weeks and months. So we learnt a lot of the Bible and it did help us in our witnessing.
Each person discipled another person. I had someone disciple me and I would disciple another, so that everybody was discipled by somebody else. There was much to do in the evenings because that’s when we would do the discipling. We were happy to be so busy, because we were doing what God wanted us to do.
It was getting very exciting at work. I can’t explain the experience of work – it was absolutely incredible. There were a lot of us by now, so the company gave us the boardroom to meet in to have prayer in the mornings and Bible study in the evening. Actually, we had our Bible study as soon as work finished at 4:30p.m., so we didn’t go home until after it had finished.
We started to print our own magazine and put testimonies in that magazine. These were very relevant, because they were read by guys who were working next to the guys who had their testimonies in there. We used to put in tips on things like gardening, fishing and cooking, which people found really useful. The company bosses gave us permission to be at the gate five minutes before everybody else, so that we could go outside with big cardboard boxes full of newsletters to give out. Everybody used to take one, because the topics in there were the topics of discussion on the shop floor for the rest of the week. We never found any on the floor
– that’s incredible isn’t it – everybody used to take them.
We prayed every morning. I used to get up at about quarter to five. All sorts of people were saved – from labourers to managers – no grade was excluded. All the ‘girly’ calendars came down and the company let us put Christian posters up. Also the toilets were repainted to cover up all the rude jokes and pictures. Christians took over all the positions of shop stewards, because there were so many of us now. So, as all the shop stewards were Christians, there were no more strikes.
About half of the workers at the company became Christians. Production levels went up by 60 per cent, because we were working harder, and scrap levels came right down. The ceiling was taken off the bonus earnings and our bosses doubled our wages overnight without us even asking, because we were doing so well.
The company began to supply free overalls and free safety wear. They built us a sports club, tennis courts, bowling green and children’s area. This was the new environment God had created for us to work in. The company started a fishing club, cricket club, arts teams, cycling teams, bowling club, archery and football club and probably others that I can’t remember as well. They even organized and paid for trips to the coast for all the families. We began to get sent work from other factories within the group, because we were so efficient. The company built the finest training center for apprentices in the country and, in fact, the finest in Europe (although I must be modest). The company took over our magazine: produced it, paid for it and it went with our wages. You couldn’t get your wages without getting one of our magazines.
We decided to send people out to churches because there were so many of us and thought we should get them to church. I suppose we were already a church in our own right, but because the church had no influence in
what God was doing we started to get people into churches in the area, in the city where they lived. Unfortunately, the church didn’t seem to appreciate what God had done and told us that they should have been saved at church and not at work. But we carried on trying to get people integrated into churches. This caused many problems but that’s another story.
Reflections…
Jim’s testimony above is a powerful and classic witness of the transforming power of the gospel of Christ Jesus. It shows how the transforming work of the gospel of Christ Jesus in not limited to just changing individuals, but has power to transform businesses and even an entire industry.
Another key thing we observe from Jim’s testimony is the power of mission-driven disciple- making friendships. Jim’s life, his colleagues, their families, their company and eventually their entire community were all impacted by the gospel of Christ because a friend of Jim took the effort to disciple Jim, and Jim in turn caught the vision to engage in disciple-making friendships.
If we were to feature your life and your friendships as a Christian today, how would it compare with Jim’s life and friendships? Are you regularly engaging the Word of God? Are you passionately sharing your faith? Is your life a witness to those around you of the transforming work of Christ?
What about your friendships: Is the kingdom of God being advanced through your friendships? Are your friends engaging the Scriptures more as a result of their association with you? What vision have your friends caught as a result of spending time and sharing life with you? Has the life-transforming power of Christ spread to your friends’ lives, their families and their communities by any measure as a result of your friendship with them?
One way to ensure that you progressively answer YES! to the above questions is by prayerfully deciding to become a CWM Associate. A CWM Associate is a believer who, out of recognition and obedience to the witness of the Holy Spirit, has chosen to enter and engage in a ministry partnership with CWM for the purpose of nurturing faith and casting vision in the life of one or more of his/her Christian friends. These friends constitute his/her Mission Cluster – his/her set of Mission-driven disciple-making friendships.
For more information about starting your own Mission Cluster and the benefits of a partnership with CWM, visit us online at articles.covenantwords.org
Light from Dawn
The bright February sun was spreading fingers of light across the Ugandan sky when a beautiful baby boy, Mugerwa David was born. He spent most of his afternoons running and playing in the barracks with the little boys in Kibaale district in Uganda. As David grew older he started to notice tension that was at home. After playing with his friends on his way home, loud screams and shouts would fill the air. At the sound of this he knew that once again, his mother and father were in a heated argument. “This went on for a long time”, David recalls. David’s mother could no longer yield to the ill treatment. She separated from her husband. Shortly after his mother’s departure, David’s father was transferred to Luwero district. David, and his younger brother Joel, moved to stay with him. while there, their father found another wife.
David’s situation was yet to worsen. Life with his step mother was hard. One of the events David vividly recalls is when he sat on a chair at Nalongo’s house, his neighbour (Nalongo, a name given to mother of twins in Uganda). Scratching his chapped sore skin and licking his pale lips with his eye lids were red and swollen, he could feel the rumbling of his stomach with hunger from 2 days of starvation. He had slept outside all night after succumbing to serious beating from his drunken step mother. “How can one be so spiteful and inhuman to me?” David thought to himself. He had taken solace at his friends place in the morning to take a cup of porridge and warm his shivery body. He wondered where his brother Joel might have gone.
Joel had run away from home for 3 days and there was no word of his whereabout. Joel could not stand maltreatment any more. Prior to his disappearance, he had a thumping headache for a month yet could not see any specialist. He also had excruciating pain because of sores on his body from frequent beatings. His hands were stiff because of digging and carrying lots of heavy Jerry cans of water.
“Will there ever be an end to all this trouble?” David wondered. He sat thinking about all the times in Kibaale District when his mother still lived with his Dad, and there was plenty to eat. The bitterness towards his step mother was great. What he did not know was that, soon things were about to change.
One day David’s mother visited them. The children quickly mentioned their grievances, and their mother agreed to go with them to Mubende District in Uganda where she was eventually married to a christian man. A new phase had dawned on them. They were taken to a new school, one of the best in Mubende. However, though they had moved to a new location David was broken by the pain of the past trauma which greatly affected his performance in school.
By the time he was in Senior 5, he did not want to continue with school because of his poor performance. It was at this point that his new family decided to reach out for help. David’s Step Dad was a great friend to Joseph1. He had been involved with Covenant Word Ministries (CWM) while serving time in Kigo prison in Wakiso District. He desired wanted his children to be a part of CWM’s discipleship program. under its Mission Apprenticeship Covenant Institute (MACI). His sons were eventually registered under the MACI Centre.
“Joel, we are going to Kampala”, David said. With great anticipation and excitement, they packed their bags, and off they went to the nation’s capital city. David was given a place to stay and began going to a new school in Kampala. Through the MACI Centre, David was encouraged to become economically independent. He learnt how to be enterprising, a skill which has been beneficial. For many years David had thought wealth was only for a few individuals. He came to realize he had believed a lie. He was baffled that he was earning an income. He stared at the money he had earned from a popcorn business, farming, and retaining matooke (bananas). The money was enough to pay part of his college tuition.
After completing secondary school, He enrolled into nursing at Nsambya School of Nursing. CWM helped meet half of his tuition. He was able to pay the other half using the money he earned from his micro enterprises. College was interesting for him. He told everybody he had an opportunity to get close to, about Jesus. He let them know that there is hope if only they dared to believe in God. “All my teachers were fond of me”, David explained. They loved the way I expressed myself. While at College David attended discipleship meetings with Joseph every fort night. These meetings were so enthralling to David. He was discovering new truths in the Word of God. David muttered to himself: “how could I be blind to the truth for this long?” He came to understand his position in the Kingdom of God. He knew he had been given all things and there was no more reason for him to fail in life. He began leading his life with great confidence. David gained boldness and eventually took up leadership positions at his Nursing school.His two years in medical school went by quickly. He soon thereafter got a job at a Medical Center and continued his micro enterprises. During this period, he financially supported both his step mother and step brothers with school fees. “Forgiving his step mother took time,” David explained.
At the time of this interview, David was partly working as a Service Trainee with the Leadership for Inspirational Farm Enterprises (LIFE) Program on the grounds of the MACI Centre in Kasanje, Wakiso District. As a service trainee he is over seeing a 4-acre cassava garden which he has intercropped with Egg Plants. “I am now a responsible man,’’ David explains. To his delight, his labour was rewarded with green and fragile looking seedlings gaining strength day by day. David is always excited over the weekends as this is when he travels to the farm. He spends time sharing Jesus with the gardener and other workers on the farm. They take time to discuss financial stewardship as they grow together relationally. David believes that despite the challenges, failures and struggles one faces, there is always hope for a better tomorrow. In a world where people are filled with questions that need answers, David sees himself as a light that points them to Jesus, the hope of the world.
Joseph Enyimu is a teacher by calling and gifting. As founder and principal of covenantwords.org, he has been teaching scripture, service and stewardship since 2001. Before then, he served as an intern with the students’ ministry of the navigators.org at Makerere University Kampala in Uganda; and was involved in a range of part-time jobs and enterprises over the course of his student life.
The Power Of One – A Tribute To John Ed Robertson
One-to-one ministry is in part the “bread and butter” of the Navigators. This type of ministry involves a commitment of two individuals coming together regularly with a view toward building and encouraging one another in the Lord and equipping one another for personal ministry.
Paul told the Romans in Romans 1:11-12 that he longed to visit with them so that he could help make them strong spiritually and be mutually encouraged by each other’s faith. One-to-one ministry involves not only passing on knowledge and skill, but also values, heart, and passion. Its objective is not information, but transformation – living, looking, and leading more and more like Jesus.
My former supervisor, John Ed Robertson, gave his life to the mentoring process. One of the last papers John Ed wrote was entitled “The Along-Sider.” He says, “We come alongside laborers and leaders to help them in their context. As I have thought about it, that pretty well summarizes a big part of what I have tried to do for the last 34 years.” There are hundreds of laborers and leaders in France, the United States, and around the world, in part because John Ed was committed to this person-to-person ministry. I am one of the beneficiaries, and, like John Ed, I am committed to giving my life and God’s truth away one person at a time.
John Ed passed on to be with the Lord on […], following a bicycling accident. I attended his memorial service together with 800 other individuals who gathered to celebrate God’s faithfulness and John Ed’s commitment to serving Him.
One of my fellow Navigator staff mentioned to me that of the 800 in attendance at least 250 of them would consider John Ed one of their closest friends. You may ask yourself, “How can that be?” The answer is that John Ed was a man who loved God, depended on Him, and gave his life and the Gospel away to people, one person at a time.