Rebuild. Renew. Redeem.

A friend and I recently took a drive around urban KC. If you haven’t done that in awhile, you might be surprised by the number of boarded up buildings. The buildings will continue to sit and rot, reminders of times past, unless someone comes in to either level them and start over or restore what’s there. So what’s next?

Today I saw the Church’s answer to this question, but it wasn’t in KC. It was in Northern Uganda.

Ajulu, started as an Arabic slave trading outpost, became an IDP (Internally Displaced Persons) camp that provided some safety to 100,000 people seeking refuge during the Civil War. The IDP camp was a place gripped with fear and often surrounded by darkness and death. As war subsided, the IDP camp deteriorated into clusters of empty buildings and overgrown brush. It could have stayed that way, a reminder of atrocities past, but the Church had a better vision.

They first built a church with bricks they made, cement they bought, and the work of their hands. They opened a school, and now they are reaching out into the community.

The church has planted a 4-acre farm, and now they are turning two of the empty buildings into Father’s Homes for children who need family.

They are replacing the memories of the past with a vision for the future, fear with faith, dark with light, and despair with hope.  We had the honor of celebrating new beginnings with them today…song, dance, leadership, family, laughter. Rebuild. Renew. Redeem.  That is the work of The Lord Jesus, and therefore, of His Church.

The children at the Father’s House Gulu welcomed GO Africa’s team with traditional song and dance.