What we’re doing in Uganda

We are focusing on two key areas in Uganda:

1. Cherish Uganda (www.cherishuganda.org) is one of the few village communities of it’s kind offering family unit homes specifically for HIV/AIDS orphans in Uganda. Africa has 23 million orphans with 2.6 million of those orphans living in Uganda. Cherish focuses on the least of the least of these, taking in only the most vulnerable of HIV/AIDS orphans. Our role at Cherish will be a spiritual one. We are part of  the Cherish team as the village pastor/director, with our family living onsite, shepherding the children and staff of Cherish. Leah will be focusing on loving and discipling the house moms as well as hosting teams that come to serve at Cherish from other countries.

2. Children’s Ministry is a massively untapped resource in Uganda. The median age in Uganda is 15, the lowest of any country in the world (The US median age is 36.4). Uganda is full of children and the problem lies in that few churches understand how to effectively lead children in what it looks like to passionately follow Jesus. We are coming alongside local churches and training the local leadership on what it looks like to serve the children of their country. We are taking proven strategies from 20+ years of children’s ministry here in the States and, along with Uganda leadership, contextualizing our ideas in their individual communities. We have seen, all over the world, that you can transform a community through transforming families and you can transform families through the transformation of children, and this is what hope to do.

It seems that so much of life has been pointing to such a time as this. We feel God has been preparing, training, disciplining and transforming us for what He is doing in Africa. And the really beautiful thing? There is much more that He will do in us as we continue on in this story.