Uganda Outpouring Breaking into Baptist Ranks
It took 50 rented buses to transport them all to the meeting. But the flood of new Believers that descended upon Stephen Ibale’s church in Jinja is not directly connected to the revival that swept through Pentecostal ranks in 2018. For these new Believers are coming out of Baptist churches.
In our Sept. 13, 2018 report, (read report here) we related how Brother Stephen Ibale had been contacted by a group of Baptist ministers who had been listening to the radio broadcast. He presented the Message to them, offered an invitation, and about 25 were Baptized. This seed returned a harvest both larger and faster than expected, when over 1000 Baptist believers from these congregations swarmed his church in Jinja, for a combined meeting. Where did they all come from? Following the first introduction, Frederick Kassaja, (see video above) one of the Baptist theologians became instrumental in opening doors to ministers and churches. Brother Ibale continued ministering and baptizing as opportunities arose. The numbers were swelling. The time was right to bring them all together.
Every December, Brother Ibale hosts Brother Andreas Ringen from Germany to preach at his church. This year, he decided to invite the Baptists also. This was not merely a meeting of the curious, for Church Age Books had previously been distributed among the pastors.
The Baptist believers took the study of them seriously, and returned ready to embrace the End-Time Message.
Brother Stephen describes the meeting:
We hired 50 Mini-Buses from the small town of Kaliro to ferry the saints to our meetings. We left the small town stranded as all buses headed our way. In the meeting, over 200 people were baptized and many left with a testimony. These saints certainly have consumed most of the church age books and bibles I have given out. I have many more doors open but then we have needs of the dynamics that run a local church like, bibles, inspirational material like the message books, church buildings and more. It is a blessing that the doors to preach the gospel is still opening.
These Baptist believers are already experiencing some of the same opposition that the Pentecostals had received from their organizations. The new harvest will certainly bring in a flood of new needs for Buildings, Bibles, Church Age books, and Messages.
This glorious harvest of souls creates more needs, in all the areas mentioned above. As Brother Stephen Ibale exclaimed in an interview in August,
“In Uganda right now, the net is very heavy…and it requires some of the elder brothers to really understand what God is doing and rush to the help and support, that together we can pull this fish into the boat.”
If the net was already heavy at the time of his comments in August, it is even heavier now.
These extraordinary events call for an extraordinary response. If you have already contributed to this cause, we sincerely thank you. If not, will you consider it? The harvest is great and the workers are few. The Ugandan Message churches cannot financially handle this situation alone. No one church anywhere in the world has the resources to handle it. It will require the combined effort of Believers around the world to provide even the most basic levels of assistance to these hundreds and thousands of precious new Believers in the poverty stricken country of Uganda.
