Spring Mission 2023

Thursday May 4, 2023
While my team has been ministering in Kenya, Jay McBee, our Director of Biblical Counseling has been in Uganda with his team, Pastor Reuben Luvanga and Moses Biketi.  I just received a report from Jay and thought I'd post it for you all.

"On Friday April 20 I met with the leadership of Karura Community Chapel in Nairobi and the students that participated in the zoom counseling training for the last year. Karura with the support of API will now open a local counseling center as part of the church’s ministry to the community. API will help expand this work by conducting an expedited training for an additional group of pastors. What normally takes two years will be compressed into one year to be able to equip more counselors for the counseling ministry.

On Sunday, Moses Biketi and I traveled to Matete to meet with the students that Moses and Luvanga Reuben trained for the last year and a half. Moses and I taught the parenting material of the training over two days which enabled these students to officially complete their second module of training on marriage and parenting."

On Wednesday and Thursday, the Biblical Counseling team of Jay, Reuben and Moses traveled to Kampala, Uganda to travel to the Kyaka 2 refugee camp in western Uganda. Kyaka is home to 100,000 refugees and is one of the largest in Uganda. The team just finished four days in the Kyaka camp and are now traveling to Mbarara and Nakivale which is the largest camp in Uganda. The pastors were very grateful for the team coming to minister to the pastors and to better equip them for the work in the camp. Many are going to join our API weekly WhatsApp audio training calls to further their training.

The API Counseling team will be adding two new training calls to accommodate this growth. One will be in English and in a first for API, we are adding a Swahili only weekly class. This will be done to accommodate a new development. At the Kyaka camp, someone approached us to express their appreciation for the work we are doing on behalf of pastors and offered to make introductions to pastors in the other refugee camps. Our current trip is focusing on doing conferences in Kyaka 2, Mbarara, Nakivale and the refugees in the slums of Kampala. We have pastors from three other Ugandan camps, Rwamwanja, Kyangwali, and Oruchinga that are part of our weekly WhatsApp groups.

These additional introductions may enable API to do outreach to pastors in all 12 of the camps in Uganda and include them in our new classes. Please join us in praying for this endeavor and that no camp would be left out. Many speak of the suffering and hardship of leaving everything that they once had behind in their home countries. Some have said that they never expect to be able to go back because of the factional fighting. They are attempting to make a new way in a new country even though they are in or on the outskirts of the refugee camps.

Thank you also to the children at Tree of Life Christian Church and Northridge Community School who made homemade cards for the children in the refugee camps. The first group of cards were handed out to the children in the Kyaka 2 camp."