A Week In Pokot

This is Truman here.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, last Monday, Peter and I headed off with the 1st year "Youth Ablaze" students (Uganda) to a small town named Lomut in the region of Pokot, Kenya for a week long outreach. We took two days traveling, spending the night at the home of a pastor who recently planted a church in Lomut. 

Arriving in Lomut, we found that although they were a tribal people and many were unreached, they generally wore normal clothes and drank Coca-cola. : ) The town is planted in a valley with a river running through it surrounded by beautiful and towering mountains. Nestled in the mountains were crops of maize, mango trees, and huts dotting the hillside. Many of the people wore traditional Pokot attire which was brightly colored.

I honestly believe the grace of the Lord was upon us through your prayers. There was a wide open door for the Word of Christ to go forth in this town and in the hill country surrounding it. It felt as though we literally stepped into a ripe harvest field.

Our time consisted of door to door evangelism in the mornings, a loudspeaker marketplace crusade in the afternoons, and a revival service in the evenings. The last evening we showed the Jesus film in the Pokot language. I thought it was amazing to see the Pokot people excitedly watch the story of Jesus in their own tongue.

The most impacting part of this trip for me was the door to door evangelism. We split up into about four teams and went out to find lost people. The first morning each team led at least 10 people to the Lord. Nearly everyone we talked to were eager to accept the message of Jesus and most of them had never been to a church. 

The next day we desired to go further up into the hills that surrounded Lomut and reach those who may have never heard of Jesus. Peter and I joined up with one of the Youth Ablaze leaders, Rev. Paul, and a few of the Youth Ablaze students and headed out for the hills on boda-boda taxis (motorcycles). As we arrived at the point too rocky for the bikes, amazingly, one of our boda-boda drivers asked if he could hike with us into the hills and hear more about Jesus. We took him with us and preached the word to him and he accepted the message, confessed, repented and believed in Jesus. 

We hiked for over an hour and found huts but no people (at work somewhere). Continuing on, we found a gathering of about 11 men in the woods resting from their morning work. Rev. Paul preached the gospel to them and all of them accepted the message and made prayers of confession and repentance. We told them about baptism and then went down to the nearby river and baptized over half of them, including the boda-boda driver. I personally got to baptize three of them after asking them to count the cost. "Will you endure for the sake of Christ? Will you die with Him that you may be live and reign with Him at His return?" (2 Tim. 2:11-13). This aquatic picture of being buried with Christ is such a witness to the day when our dead bodies will rise in glory conformed to the body of His glory.

After this we asked, "What do we do next?" This was a significant moment for me. Here we led 11 men to the Lord, but that was the easy part. What do we leave these men with? For all we knew, there was no church in any close proximity to where these men lived. They wanted one of us to stay back and be their pastor. They even had a plot of land where we could build a church. Umm… pause. What do we do? How do we ground these believers in the faith? We didn't have the answers and had to go, but these questions pounded at me. At that moment, I committed my life to seek the answer to this simple question, "What does it mean to make disciples?" 

The next day Rev. Paul went back to the hills with some other students and a local pastor to plant a church for these men and the many others we led to the Lord the day before. Peter and I went to the flatlands and preached with the rest of the students there. During the entire trip, we led over 200 people to the Lord (nearly all were during the door to door outreaches). 

On our way back to Uganda, we stopped in Kitale, Kenya and visited the Kenya ACTS team who are here. Peter and I decided to be dropped off and spend the day with our ACTS friends as the rest of our Uganda caravan continued back to Uganda. We are currently spending the day with the Kenya ACTS team before Peter and I jump on a bus for Uganda tomorrow.

We praise God for all that He is doing in Pokot. We want to see worship arise from all over the region and burning lamps set on lamp-stands, giving light to all men (Mt. 5:14-16, 1 Thess. 1:8-10).