Real Talk: Would you risk your life for the gospel?
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Opening
For most Christians, foreign mission is something that we support from a distance. We pray, we give, and we hear stories from around the world. But what does it actually mean to leave the familiar and take the gospel to those who have never heard? In this episode, we're joined by Pastor James Folkerts, whose missionary journey has taken him through challenges few of us will ever face. His story is remarkable, and what God taught him through it is even more compelling. Together, we explore what foreign mission is, why it still matters in a world where the nations have come to us, and the reality of suffering for the gospel, and who should consider God's call to the mission field. Whether you're called to go, send, or simply want to better understand God's heart for the nations. This is a conversation you won't want to miss.
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Intro
The world's changing fast, but what questions should we really be asking? You're listening to Real Talk, a podcast presented by Reform Perspective, where we take God's Word and apply it to the nitty-gritty of life. Buckle up for real questions, real answers, and real direction. This is Real Talk.
Tyler Vanderwoude
Appreciate you joining us. That's it's gracious of you to come on and talk to us about world missions today. So yeah, thanks for
Pastor James Folkerts
Yeah, thanks having us. For having me, I always think of my wife being with me on this.
TV
I'm sure that's a strong partnership with some of the things you've gone through.
JF
Yeah, we've grown together through it, and it's a joy to serve Christ together in missions and in marriage together, so yeah, it's been a journey, that's for sure.
TV
Yeah, why don't you why don't you introduce yourself? I guess to the listeners a little bit. I guess to me a little bit. I don't know you well at all. So yeah, I guess how did you get here? And I kind of want to. I don't usually do this with guests, but I'm curious about your childhood and like how you got into having a love for the ministry and for mission work.
JF
Well, I was born and raised in Alberta in the Christian Reformed Church in Brooks, Alberta, and I remember one of the great things about being raised in the Christian Reformed Church back in the 70s and 80s, early 80s, was CRWRC, which was the Christian Reformed missions organization of that church, of that denomination. And I remember as a kid, you know, this was back in the day when you're trying to watch a hockey game and you're moving the bunny ears and the screen was so fuzzy, you could hardly see what was the puck and what was the, you know, the static, you know? So, I remember, and we never went to the movies, so we had these missionaries come to our church and they put on a big screen in color, a slideshow, and it was from Nigeria, and I remember seeing – I can still see in my mind like the lights are off, and as a kid, it's magical. You know, it was a magical experience of getting to hear about people serving Christ in Nigeria, and you know, people coming to believe in him and Christian education. So I think, like at a young age, those seeds were planted in my heart, and I started reading as a kid reading books about missionaries, John Patton, and even those Wambu books-I don't know if you remember those.
TV
Oh yeah!
JF
Just thinking about different cultures, and yeah, I had an interest in in that and hearing about people who were missionaries. And later on, my dad became a pastor, and we were in the United Reformed Church in Winnipeg, and I really just kept growing and wanting to do ministry, wanting to reach, bring Christ to the lost, and I had thought a lot about... I really, I really have a heart for the Middle East, and I studied at in my college, my undergrad. I had a Middle Eastern focus to some of my studies, and then after college, I did some framing construction work. I was a history major pre-seminary, and then I went to Israel to study at a school in Jerusalem, Jerusalem University College it was known as in early 2000, and there I was really struggling with what to do with my life and was thinking more an academic track and maybe teaching you know at a college level or something like that, but I saw students there who are like working on Ugaritic and working on a PhD that might take 10 years, and I thought, you know what, I want to work with people. And so after that, I quit that program, and then that fall went to Mid America and studied, started my DMIN or MDiv program, and my second summer assignment I went back to the Middle East and worked for Middle East Reform Fellowship, and that was a real blessing. I loved it. We got to meet Christians from all over the Middle East. This was before Syria went kaboom, and so I got to meet Christians from all over Syria, church leaders from the Presbyterian Church up there, and from Lebanon, and a lot of Christians from Egypt. And then after that first summer assignment, after or second summer assignment after graduation, then Mid America is really big on you know getting in the field and getting experience, and so after graduation, then I had half a year before my candidacy exam, so I was asked by that organization to come out again to the Middle East. So I went back out there. We were based in Cyprus, and I got, you know, a lot more experience during that time. And after my candidacy exam, then my home church in Winnipeg decided to send me out as a missionary. So I was ordained as a missionary in the United Reformed Churches and sent to go work in the Middle East again, and then I did a lot of time, a lot of my time there. In total, it was only two years, but I did a lot of time in northern Kenya on the border of South Sudan right after South Sudan had independence, and but it was still – South Sudan went through a you know a war of independence, and then they went through a civil war. You know, like the Americans had that, and those wars were kind of a little bit apart by a number of years, number of decades, but South Sudan had them basically back to back, and so we got to, I got to teach in Locachogyo on the border, church leaders, young people, and during that time, I'd met my wife-to-be in Canada, and I was on a one-year contract with MERF. At the end of that time, I thought, you know what? I need to, I was fresh out of seminary, I need to like just get into a quote normal church, and just learn, you know, my basic minister skills like writing sermons, working with people, figuring out who I am, as a pastor, and yeah, just because the mission field is, if you're a plant and you're planted in a weird pot that's the walls are really high and the dirt's only an inch deep, that plant's gonna grow, you know, five inches tall. It's gonna be all spindly and stuff. And you know, if you go to seminary and you go straight to the mission field, you can have some weird stuff can happen to you, will happen to you. And so I was seeing some of that too, and just recognizing if I'm going to get married and I have all this mission environment that I have to deal with, and I'm also really growing as a young pastor, I should come back and just be in a group in a consistory with elders who can also continue to shape and mold me where I can grow. And so that was one of the main reasons for not renewing out there, and then I came to Telkwa in the United Reformed Churches out there, in northern British Columbia, and that's where I served for a dozen or so years. And yeah, we have seven of our children out there, yeah, very fruitful time. We love the place. Very isolated. Had its challenges. Probably prepared us for the challenges that we'd have on the field later on. And then after, yeah, about after 12 years or so, then I was contacted by the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. About whether I'd consider doing foreign missions in East Africa, and since I'd already been out there almost 20 years ago as a single guy, you know, I had some idea of what it was like. I, in many ways, I left the mission field the first time with a lot of grief, wishing because that was my dream to be a missionary, so to speak. But I accepted God's call, and you felt like it was the right thing to come off the field at the time. But now to get to go back again was exciting. But yeah, it's a whole different thing when you're going with a family. And the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, they had been working with the same tribe that I had briefly worked with when I was in Kenya. Uganda's the country right to the west of Kenya, and yeah, in Uganda we were working with the Karamajung, and in in Kenya was with the Turkana tribe. And those are two different names, but it's the same tribal group of people. So essentially, when the OPC said you want to work with these people, I'm like, “well, describe them to me”, and they're telling me about them. I'm like, this sounds like the same group. I didn't know, and I said, "How do they say the name God? I said, "Do they say Akuj? And they're like, "Yeah.” I'm like, "This is the same group. Like I, I know these, I know this”, you know. So in the providence of God, my wife and I we went to check it out, and I felt uniquely called to that work. And really, I told the OPC, "Well, put us on the list. Just put us on the bottom of the list because you're looking at someone outside your denomination, and you have seven, and we have seven kids. So, like, obviously, like we're not your top pick. Little did I know, the bottom was also their top, you know. So it had, yeah. It was a was really really special work that that had been doing for over 20 years in this one place called Karamoja, and we were in the little village of Nakale, and it is when the mission when the OPC missionaries went up there years before they were working in a town called Embali, and they went up to this different tribal group that really had never been civilized under the British Empire, if you want to use that term, and they still lived their semi-nomadic life with polygamy, high levels of violence, drunkenness. When you, in order to get a wife, you have to basically steal someone else's cattle to pay the dowry to your father-in-law's family, and cattle raiding for that reason resulted in a lot of people getting murdered, and just a very violent, impoverished way of life. There's nothing really pristine about it, and in essence, when we got there, we got to really live in in an ancient anthropology, like living in the Old Testament. So I would say it's like living with Jacob and Esau with cell phones. So
TV
Was your wife on board with this? Like, was your wife excited to do this with all the kids?
JF
She was not too excited. No, she was kind of nervous, and obviously, you know, she was should. That was a good instinct, you know.
TV
Sounds like it.
JF
She had also grown up on the mission field. Her dad is a Canadian Reformed pastor, and they had served in Indonesia on the island of Sumba for a number of years. She grew up there, learning the Indonesian language and you know running around almost like a native tribal kid in a way, without electricity and all of that, so she knew that experientially what that meant-not just to live there, but also to come back to a Western lifestyle and what that mean for your kids, and what that mean for our kids. But yeah, we did feel the Lord calling us there. It was a process that we had to work through. One of the things that we saw when we went over there was that we were going to work with a team in Uganda that could really care for us and make this work. So we had people that would help with the education of our kids, homeschooling, and so it wasn't like we were just doing a bare pioneer work, moving into a village all by ourselves, and you know that it wasn't going to be safe.
TV
Right, so that helps a lot. Yeah, wow, that's quite the journey. Like you started, it sounds like you've almost never not been thinking about mission. Like it's, it just has been part of your life since you were a kid. Is that is that fairly common with people who do mission work; those who are called to be missionaries?
JF
I think God puts it on our hearts. It's one of my reasons for. I always talk to kids about missions. I think that's if you want to promote it, you have to start there, and it's a great place to start. I think of my other missionary friends. It's something that was planted in their hearts too at a young age, often.
TV
What did the time as a pastor? I guess 12 years is a long time to be a pastor, be away from the field, and then go back. Like, what did that teach you in the end? Like, was that was that a good idea? Was that something you would recommend others?
JF
Well, I guess everyone has their own path to the mission field, or and their own growth journey in ministry. But yeah, part of when you become a minister, you're learning about, it's not just getting your education at seminary and now you're good to go. I mean, maybe it is, but there is a real growth curve in just learning how to communicate well, learning how to teach well, how to teach all the Bible doctrines in a clear way, in a simple way, like just teaching catechism to young people is really important. If you can't really teach catechism, teach the basic doctrines to your own people and your own culture, how are you going to be able to simply do that into another culture? So that is a really big, that's a big need. Like I got to see people come over from Canada to Africa, guest pastors or something, and you listen to them teach or preach, and you see they're saying all the right things, but nothing's going into the, nothing's going into the audience because they're not speaking simply. They're not. You look at their audience, and they're all looking outside the fence at the cows that are going by. They're not able to hold their attention. So if you can't hold 12th graders' attention in catechism, if you get really frustrated with that and you can't work get through that, you're gonna have a really hard time on the mission field, right? Just saying the words doesn't mean that you're actually communicating well to the locals, so to really understand the… yeah, understanding how to communicate well is vitally important on the field, you know. And then you have many of cultural issues, language issues, and it’s really, really challenging, right? It's really challenging, and I can't say I'm, I did it well, but I could see like having. I'm thankful I had a dozen years under my belt, you know.
TV
Yeah. Did you get any formal training for that? Like for how to communicate in those settings, or is it basically was it kind of like, hey, you've done this, you know, you kind of go there here and there on internships or whatever, and then they just throw you at it?
JF
Yeah, I think ministry – it's like a good teacher, you know, in a Christian school, like the ones that have been doing for 25 years, like they know what they're doing by and large, right? And I think that's what experience does. And yeah, there's no better way than experience, not just reading a book or… So that that's I think, and some people are more gifted than others on that, but I think that's one of the qualifications. Like when you think about sending someone to the field, you know, are they able to teach? Are they able to teach in their own church? You know, when back here, you know? Do they do a really good job at it, or do they kind of, you know… Is it a gift? Is it their gift? Because you're spending that money to send this guy to the other side of the world, and if they don't have that gift, then you know maybe you need to look for someone else, right?
TV
Right. If someone has that, is that really the, I guess the biggest thing that makes a missionary successful? Like you were thrown from, from like the Middle East to, I guess, a similar belief system, maybe, but into Africa. Like you're spanning different cultures and different contexts, like, do you find that that's a big barrier, or having that kind of grounding of being able to teach sort of translates once you get past the language barrier or understanding the culture a little bit?
JF
Yeah, I just think like if to explain things simply into a culture, like in Karamoja, you have to be able to understand their own cultural context, their agrarian way of thinking. That's yeah, it's just entirely different worldviews. So once you get into that, you can't just take out your seminary notes and start explaining. You know, can't do that. You have to… even their own way of learning things in their own schools is often just rote memorization. So, you want to like try to think about how can we get you know them to do critical thinking, but at the same time, telling stories is teaching through stories is a very important way of, just like the Lord Jesus, it's a very important way of communicating and having things in a conversational tone rather than just here is a logical treatise on what whatever doctrine you're trying to explain, they won't get that right.
TV
Right, yeah, that makes sense. Was a lot of that work done for you when you got there? Like, did they understand and help you?
JF
Yeah, I was blessed to have, you know, three or four other missionaries who'd gone before us and had and their families and had really laid down a really good groundwork and had done a lot of translating of Westminster standards, the Shorter Catechism, and so for me, like even I didn't, I was trying to learn the language there, but. Since in Uganda English is the national language, the I could work with translators right off the bat. So that was, you know, that was really helpful. So yeah, I was by no means some big pioneer missionary or something like this. I got to kind of actually reap what other people had sowed.
TV
So did you did you already know the language then?
JF
No, I did not. And it’s an extremely difficult language. So, my wife is a language person. I'm not. I don't even speak English good.
TV
Like, what is that like? Because that to me is one of those things that's in my mind even as a kid like sitting through these presentations that was always a thing that I was like I'm not really a… I don't really even…. we had… I was in Ontario we had to learn French I wasn't good at that like you're already thinking like the barrier for me to be comfortable in that I mean, I don't even know if comfortable is the right word to be honest, but to be able to be effective, I guess in that environment, I just felt like for myself personally, I may have dismissed this as a thing in life because I think that barrier was just too big for me to grasp. Like, so what is that like to get over? Like, you make a decision after 12 years of being here, and I guess not comfortable, I guess, but you're making a big life move for your family, for everything, and then you still have this barrier of I'm not even going to be able to communicate when I get there.
JF
Well, because in Uganda English is the national language, I knew… and I would probably say the same thing as you. Because I'm not a big language person. I've studied a lot of language. I've studied my biblical languages and Dutch and now Karamazong and a little bit of Arabic. And my comfort in going over there was English is a national language. I can find translators, and I will be able to, through translators and through my rednecking of trying to like just learn this language, I'm gonna be a blessing, and I'm gonna trust God with it. And so, you know, learning a language is a very humble thing. You become, you have to become like a child, and that's the best thing. When you when you just put yourself in a child way of thinking mentality, then you can go over there and try to babble your way through the language, and you're in a humble position before these people, and they actually enjoy it, right? And so that's what we did. So I, when I got there, I started working on the language right away. Not my forte, but…
TV
I guess you go over humble and you find a translator, and then like they enjoy it? They actually sit with you through that?
JF
Yeah, so I can tell you the story of how some of those things work because when we got there in 2019, in November, we went out there with our family of seven kids. We landed. Little did we know, we heard like in China, there's this thing called COVID that's happening, right? We shipped a container. We shipped one storage container to Africa from BC with our some of our belongings in there, and tools, generators, a welder, couches, parts of my library, that kind of stuff, and we got into Uganda, and by I think within three months, February or something that would have been of 2020, our container arrived, and that was a surreal thing just to see this metal box that you shipped off in BC, and now you see it arrive in the middle of East Africa. We're living in a rural savanna land. You know there used to be elephants running around. They've all been you know eliminated and stuff, but there's still giraffe and this and that, and here arrives your container, and your belongings come out of it, and you begin life there.
TV
You’re like these don’t really belong here, to be honest
JF
Yeah, within a within a couple weeks of our container arriving, we go into lockdown.
TV
Oh wow!
JF
Had that container been a few weeks late, we probably never would have seen our stuff. So we go into lockdown, and now what happened was the other missionary I was working with, he had he and his wife had done a really intensive good work, discipling a number of young men in the community, young boys, homeschooling them sort of and giving them a good discipleship program was called the Timothy Discipleship Program, and they they were going off the field on furlough that summer, and with they're actually going to go earlier, but then COVID happened, and they were asking, "What are you going to do with these boys? Like, are you going to take them, James? Or and I said, well, I didn't come to Africa to homeschool a dozen or more boys. I got to deal with my own kids, and we've never done that before. And we're just trying. I got to try and learn this language. I got a church to take care of. We're running a helping to run a clinic. We're doing discipleship. We're doing funerals. We're doing all kinds of stuff. So I said we can't take care of these, we can't homeschool these kids, which was fine. So all these kids went off to their boarding schools. But within three weeks of the lockdown happening, all schools in Uganda were closed, and they remained closed for two years. I think people tell me it's one of the longest lockdowns in the whole world. Well, because we had we're living in the middle of nowhere, all these young people who would have been in a boarding school down country somewhere, an hour or so away, they all came home back up to the bush where we were living.
TV
Oh wow!
JF
And so you have 1000s of kids doing nothing, and so I took those guys, and I, I thought, what we're going to do is I have to learn language, I have to learn the culture, I have to preach a sermon every Sunday. We're trying to do evangelism in the community – reach, bring Christ. So how am I going to do all of this? So I said, “I'm going to just take these dozen guys, and they're just going to go with me and do whatever I do. They're coming with.” So we're going to write sermons together, and I'm going to teach hermeneutics and homiletics and exegesis and history and geography, and I'm gonna explain the text to them. But at the same time, I'm gonna be learning from them because we're gonna be doing this in Karamazong, in their language. So I had a big white, I had a pavilion outside my house, an open air area with a big whiteboard, and we worked on things together. So we were all learning, and it was really neat because I got to actually understand what they understood and what they didn't understand. So I wasn't just standing up front on Sunday and grabbing my old sermons that I had preached years ago and not really knowing how this was going to be received. And the beautiful thing was, is they actually really helped me to write sermons. And then at the end, you know, they also had a message, and when they were translating for me on Sunday, they knew where this sermon was going, right?
TV
Oh, that's cool. That probably helps a lot.
JF
And they also were able to take these messages out into their own villages that they were coming from under the other acacia mango trees, and there they would bring God's word. So we reached, you know, many many people during that during that time, and these guys were really – they were trained, they were, you know, raised up in their communities that they came from as, you know, leaders. And so that was just a kind of a summary statement of how we kind of try to do a lot of things by just working together every day.
TV
Wow. So does that did that help expedite your language learning and cultural learning?
JF
It did, yeah. And I'm not a lot of that stuff hasn't stuck anymore, but I could still, you know, sing some of the songs. My wife and I are like, what was the word for this again?
TV
Did you ever become fluent in it?
JF
Oh no, no. The thing is, like, when you only have four years and you're going straight to work, you really need like a year that's totally dedicated to language. And I wasn't given that, and I was fine with that because we knew, like, when we signed up for this, we said our oldest is, you know, around 12 years old, 13 years old at the time. So we know we're going to sign up for a four-year term, so that by the time we get off the field, they can finish up with high school, and we need to be able to bring our kids back and acclimatize them back to North American lifestyle. So we signed up as of on a four-year term, and we did say like, well, maybe at four years we'll stop and reconsider and do another term. But we, you know, we're really thankful for the decision we made.
TV
Is that a pretty healthy way to do that? Like to commit? I mean, not not that four years is short by any means. It's an entire entire high school career, but is that pretty typical?
JF
That’s a good question. Like, I think you with the OPC, what they do is they have they have a view of long-term missions, but missionaries don't always have to be long-term. Ordinarily, it's a four-year term, and then that's up for review within your own team that you're in. So the mission team that we were part of on the field, there's a number of different families working there. One helping to run a clinic, the other pastor, and then maybe a couple discipleship or a diaconal people there, and then you know some singles that are helping with families, helping with you know medical things. Every four years, you're kind of like up for review within your own team, and they evaluate whether it's good that you're still there. If you need to have a break, or for yes, for the team for you to move on. So, yeah.
TV
Is that like is the work mostly – were you doing most of it, or your was your wife pretty heavily involved?
JF
Yeah, my wife was focused on keeping our seven kids alive, which is not an exaggeration. But yeah, she was focused on homeschooling and just daily running the home, which was more than a full time job. For example, we had two women that would come to our house every day just to wash our laundry by hand. And then and those two women they each had a number of kids, so we were supporting two families just by having her clothes washed, so my wife actually learned Karamazong better than I did. She was working with those Karamazong ladies who spoke zero English, so she did an amazing job just getting to know them and ministering to them, and then when we got when we got to Karamoja, the needs are so great there. There's so much hunger, akaro as they would call it, that we could have, you know, many people just standing in front of our gate in the morning, begging. So you know, like the Bible story, the rich man and Lazarus. Well, we were the rich man, and we had Lazarus at the gate. And the question was, how do we handle that, right? How do you, how do you deal with that? And our team, we had like half a dozen different, or four or five different families there, and everyone had a bit of a different idea of how to handle, how to live in a real, in a culture of serious needs and a lot, and a very begging culture too. And so my wife would have a lot of requests while I was out for help, you know. people needing food, kids with ear infections, kids with malaria begging for money so that they can go to the clinic for this and that, and that became very that's a very stressful thing because you don't know what the truth is, and many of the locals are looking at you. You're being tested to see what you will do. So if you have a kind and generous heart, you'll just feed that, and you'll have more people at the gate the next day. So what do you do?
TV
Did that did that create unsafety there? Like, was were they dangerous ever?
JF
No, no, they weren't. They weren't very. They weren't dangerous. They could be really rude, and with their begging, but like there were times we helped for a while in different ways, and you know we'd have there'd be some a mother who's had like a sick child, or you're very impoverished, so you maybe give them some food, and you're thinking you're doing a good thing, right? And then you find out through other missionaries, or maybe through your laundry ladies who know what's going on in the community, that this person is actually just selling the food at the corner and buying alcohol, buying booze, and getting drunk, and her kids are still malnourished. So you just realize like we don't really know. We think we're doing good, but we don't always know what's really going on. So that was a big challenge, and we had a lot of different ideas on our team about how to handle that question, and that was part of our wrestling. You know, for a good part of our time, they're like, "What should we be doing this?” And at a certain point, what we realized was that we were not helping the situation and what we were doing, and what we needed to do was we all as missionaries needed to get on the same page and not give. Now that might seem really weird, but not give at our gate. And so you can imagine our mission. It's like a chain link fence compound of five acres or something with half a dozen homes on it, and people are coming to your gate every day playing trick or treat. And some people give, some people don't, and it's an exhausting thing. And what we realized is we had to get on the same page and try to give to the local church that we were trying to plant, Nakalay Presbyterian Church, and give to what we called the Mercy Committee, and that was a group of volunteers from within the Church of Karamajung, and they managed that. And so when people came to us, we said, "You have to go to the church. They meet on Fridays at right after lunch, and you can go make your request to them.” And when that happened, it shut down so much of the begging, and it also put power into the local church and into the local diaconate to give. And those are the people who knew what was happening on the ground and knew, you know, where mercy was needed and where you know other actions were needed instead of mercy, you know. So, and what happened from that was we actually built up, you know, a functioning diaconate within the local church.
TV
Right. Yeah, I guess that's so hard to know from your standpoint. And then it's also like all the funds you're giving and all the all the resources you have are all donated, or they're all they're coming from somewhere.
JF
Yeah, and we would be giving like just out of our own personal, you know, you know, my 20 bucks or whatever that I have, I'll go help this person, you know, and that, but yeah, it is very challenging. But we realize that we're often getting in the way of, you know, by our own generosity and our own the mercy of our own heart. But it's really important to think about your methodology and how, you know, that mission had been doing this for 20 years, but until we got there, there was no real functional diaconate in the church because everyone was the missionaries were kind of doing what was right in their own eyes, right?\
TV
What did your work look like after you had that initial time, or were you basically on lockdown for the majority of your tenure?
JF
Yeah, those two years it was under lockdowns that would change. My wife would tell you that there was a point during lockdown where she hadn't been off our compound. She didn't go out for six months. We when we knew lockdown was happening, we went down to the city and I bought a huge gunny sack full of brown beans and another huge gunny sack of rice. I'm like, okay, this will keep my family alive, right? And we stocked up on food. And then during another point of the lockdown, we weren't allowed to drive our vehicles. You could only have one person. Only certain people could even be on the road…
TV
Really?
JF
…and it wasn't us. So that was that was really stressful. It didn't last long, but you didn't know how long it was going to last. Of course, you weren't allowed in some points like travel between various counties or districts. So that was really those were kind of if you thought about it too much, kind of scary, really scary. But we trusted in the Lord for that, and just kept working, kept serving in the community, and we had enough work to do there. We'd go up the mountain. There's a big volcanic mountain, Mount Kadam, by us, over 10,000 feet up, and we go up on the plateaus below it and camp up there, and you know, tell people about the Lord Jesus and take our ministry discipleship team up there. And yeah, it was a it was a very actually a very beautiful time. Could be stressful, but we got to see people growing in Christ, and yeah, I look back at it with a lot of, I miss it, you know.
TV
Yeah, was most of the work done in the in the town in the communities, or was it a lot of that like nomadic villages?
JF
So when you think of you know when you think of rural, when you think in in North America, when you think rural, you think low density a low density population, more depending on the area, but in an ancient anthropology, rural could be quite densely populated because everyone's living off their land, a few acres that they have, and so there's a lot of there can be a lot of people, you know, 1000s and 1000s of people in all these villages spread out because they all have their animals like Jacob and Esau and Lot and Abraham, and so you have your animals, and you move them out during the day onto the grasslands where there's grass, and then at night you bring them in. So you can because of that you have people that are spread out all over with their animals to the grazing lands that they're in, and also they need to have water. So you know it's often the towns are built around the water sources because that's what they need for themselves, but also for their livestock.
TV
But then not no infrastructure, I guess, or no like there's nothing there.
JF
Not a lot, no, not a good job with mud huts and our mission. Years ago, I drilled many, many wells all through the area. So that, of course, like creates more stability and people don't have to move around as much because there's you know water all the time in this one spot, right? Like these semi-nomadic people had largely stopped being nomadic. They were no longer moving like this tribe at one point, hundreds of years ago, come from Ethiopia and moved through Kenya and South Sudan and found their way into Uganda. They're an ilotic tribe, so yeah, basically they had stopped moving, and now it's like, what do we do? This is the struggle now, like with modernization and you know land titles and stuff. What are you going to do with your life?
TV
Is there still like leadership and stuff then?
JF
Oh yeah, like there's tribal elders and all that, but they're thinking the old way, right? They're thinking the old way, like Jacob and Esau yet, and on the move cattle rating, and people are realizing we need to modernize. We need to. Our kids need to get education. You know, we need to figure out how we can survive and just live on this plot of land. Now, how are we going to do that?
TV
Do they have technology?
JF
There are. There's a power line that runs through in this in the local towns in the market centers. You know they'll have, you know they have their electricity, and you can buy your cell phones there. They're cell phone tower towers, so you know the internet's coming in, and movies and everything from the West is coming in. So that's it's a changing like every few every few years, you can just tell like things are changing there. The young people are changing, and the old ways are going away. And that's a real opportunity right now. Is we really need to get in there with the word, with the gospel, and because this is a tribe that never, that always resisted change, and now this next generation is changing, right? And if we can be there with the gospel and really warn them, like you know, the what the Western way of life is not the gospel, you know, we have to bring Christ to these people.
TV
Yeah, right. Well, that's true, eh? Because it feels as if you're doing them a favor by modernizing or bringing technology or bringing what we have in the Western world. Because it seems on the surface so much better, but there's so much weakness to that too. Like if you just if you gave them everything that we have in terms of technology and affluence, it's not like you're giving them any hope.
JF
That’s not our hope, right? That's what we have to teach them.
TV
Is that hard for them to grasp? Like, do they? I guess on any more foreign mission field, like, do they feel like when you show up, you're coming with an agenda for a certain culture or a certain way?
JF
I mean, yeah, for them, often when they see missionaries come, and they've seen them come for hundreds of years or 100 years, let's say, depending on the place, they've seen it all before, right? Often, we're not actually the first ones there, you know. Other groups have been through there. All different denominations have gone through, and often short term, like someone's here for a month, someone teaches them how to farm or whatever it is, someone drills a well, then the well breaks, you know, and so the, you know, when they see us, often they look at us as a short term, a short term visitor, who they need to try to push the ATM buttons on to get the money or get something out of.
TV
They're sort of looking to exploit you a bit.
JF
Yeah. So you'll see, you'll see like groups go in, build, build a school, and they can show that back home. You know, we built a school over here, and then you find out, well, it's not really a school. You know, someone took all the iron sheets off the roof, and it went to the guy's brother-in-law, and or someone else is living there, and it's not really, it's not really functional, right? So, yeah, there is a lot of, I don't know how to put it, but a lot of wasted work that's done on the field, and a lot of, a lot of times where like we had, we had like the World Food Program, Save the Children, these organizations, and some other ones. I don't remember all the names, but they'd often like give food right outside our mission in our church at our church compound, and so you'd see lineups of 100 or more people, you know, hundreds of people lined up in front of our church under the big acacia trees, and you know the trucks would be there and they'd be handing out, you know, these granola bar type things for nutrition bars with peanut butter and whatever it is…. and our clinic used to do that too in a various ways. But then once you're in the community, once you live there for 20 years, you begin to know these people, and so when these NGOs come out and do this, you find out in the community that they're testing, these NGOs come out and say you have to qualify as malnourished to get this this food. So these moms will stop feeding their kids for a week.
TV
Oh man.
JF
Pin them right down, and so and then they'll check them and go yeah they're malnourished, and then they'll qualify to get a jug of oil or whatever it is, right?
TV
Oh wow!
JF
So you see some of these things, and you're it can just leave you really discouraged, you know, jaded, and realizing like we really have to know what's going on the ground, right? We do short term things. It feels good, but what is this really doing? So at one point early on, I went up to the main government district town, and there I met with the president of Uganda has a man in every county that speaks directly to him. It's like the king's man, basically. And so I went up to that man, and he was from a different tribe. And they always put what I'm told is they always take that guy who's in that position – he's never of that tribe. Uganda has many, many tribes, so they don't put the same guy of that tribe in there. They always have someone else from another tribe speaking to the president for this local. So I went to this guy, and I don't know anything. So I said, "Like, how can we be working here? How do we help these people, the Karamazon?” And they said, “These people are beggars. Don't give them anything. They're already ruined by all the people that have come through here to try to help them.”
TV
Really?
JF
Now, I just heard that, and I'm like, well, I don't know what to do with that. That seems extreme, but, but a lot of people who've served there for a long time really can get really jaded, and this man who wasn't Ugandan himself said that.
TV
Wow!
JF
So our challenge is our challenge was how do we reach these people with Christ and love them and seek to do justice but love mercy and walk humbly with God and the big thing is when you're in these places, you're really, really tested. Your heart is tested because you get used, you get lied to, your stuff gets stolen. Right? People treat you as an ATM machine. It's like I didn't come here just to like be your ATM machine or to be the World Food Program with 20 people lined up at my gate every day. That's not sustainable. We wanted to bring more than just some stuff to you guys. That's what we're kind of sick of in the West is stuff. But how do we do that? And so, to walk humbly with God through all these times, like to realize we have received mercy from Christ, and that we cannot be proud, and we cannot become calloused or jaded, and sometimes we naturally do. So we have to keep going back to the Lord, and it's easy not to love mercy after a while too, because you can get so frustrated. These people, and yeah, it's easy. It's easy to despair. It's very easy to get, to despair over there at just the impossible task of changing people, and then you realize, well, that's not my job, actually. I have to go back to the Lord, and what these people need most of all is Jesus. He's the bread of life, and one of my teammates said to me, “James, before you came here, these people lived here for hundreds and hundreds of years, and they lived here without you, and God somehow took care of them, the poor you will always have, and we're here to bring the living water that won't stop flowing and the bread of life that will truly nourish, and that's what's going to change”, and so that's what we really tried to, to focus on and not get distracted by just becoming an aid organization, you know.
TV
Right. Yeah. Has that changed the way you look at your ministry now? Like I'm trying to think of I'm trying to trying to put myself in your shoes, I guess in in that spot, and eventually you just yeah you're kind of standing on the shoulders of the people before you in a way, but you're also inheriting all the unintentional issues they created.
JF
Yeah, like for example, like last week I preached on the Beatitude blessing. are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy. And one of the things we learned, we had when we're when you're bringing Christ to people, they're receiving the mercy of Christ, and they have to learn to understand what their identity is in Jesus. So that means, I mean, we all get that, but I always say they would say to me, “Pastor, we're poor, we have nothing”, and I would tend to agree with that, but that's wrong, right? It's true, but it's also wrong because in Christ, I would say to them, "What do you have?”
“Well, we have no money, we have no food, we have no education, we have no work.”
I said, "Yes, that's true, but you have, you have one another? You have Jesus. You're forgiven and the Christian life.” This is one of the big things that I learned is experientially that Christian discipleship. Christian discipleship often when I you disciple someone, you say I led this person to the Lord by God's grace, and that's fine. But Christian discipleship is never just an individualistic thing. Christian discipleship is always onto a team. What that means is, an example of that is, if I teach someone to dribble and shoot a basketball, I haven't made them a basketball player. I have to coach them onto a team, and we have to, I had to think about with the guys that I was training, I can't just teach them the Bible and what marriage is, and you know, get rid of the polygamy thing and don't steal anymore and don't get drunk. I had to teach them how to be on the team in the body of Christ, because the body of Christ is an active thing as well. It's not just well, we're in the body of Christ, we just go to church. But how do we disciple people onto a team? And because the reality is, the Christian life is against a team, the world of flesh and the devil. So if you just disciple someone and they're just an individualist Christian who has no function in the church, they're going to get on the basketball court, right? And they're going to face the opposition, and they've never learned how to run a defense or an offense or play together or defend one another or protect each other or encourage one another, and they're going to get destroyed. So what we want to do, going back to my guys saying, "Well, we have nothing, Pastor.” I'd say “No, don't believe that. That's a lie. That's a lie from the devil that you have nothing. You have Christ, right? You have a team. You have one another in the whole community.” Everyone stealing each other's cows, chickens, food, emptying their granaries, murdering one another. It's horrible, dads who are totally delinquent, just impregnating women, and it's a complete disaster, right? And I said, “You guys, you love one another. You might not have anything physically, but you can go to the neighbor. You can help. O her garden, you can watch each other's property so stuff doesn't get stolen. And when we come to church, we're looking out for each other, we're praying for one another, we're caring for each other, and that's the body of Christ.” And that's part of our great witness. Our witness isn't just our individual thing, but it's also the team, just like you didn't win the playoffs, but you got the sportsmanship award. You know, like our churches, our missions should get the sportsmanship award, so to speak. And going back to that idea of blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy. I say, you know, every kingdom has its own currency. Every you imagine if you're serving the kingdom of self, your kingdom has its own dollar bill, and it's your face on it; depending if you're doing great, your nose is up in the air, and you flip the backside over, and there's all your works, and they're amazing what you did. Or if your kingdom of self is depressed and lousy, you look terrible on the front of it, and you have you have no value, and you can live out of the currency of your kingdom, and that's either your pride or your despair. And I said to our guys, like, “are you living out of that, or are you going to live under out of the currency of the kingdom of King Jesus?” And that that is grace, that is forgiveness, that is love, that is considering others better than yourselves, that is laying down your life for one another, all of those things, and that's our riches in Christ. And so, even if you're an impoverished situation, you're rich in Christ. And actually, when you when you work together as a team, and you're rich in Christ, often you get somehow your material well being often improves as well as you care for one another and walk in God's commandments, right? So that was kind of if we can work at that ground level, spiritual level, seeking first the kingdom of God. What does Jesus say? “Seek first the kingdom, and all these other things will be added unto you.” And so that is that heart central place where we have to work, and when they can get that vision, you know that's the road to spiritual prosperity, and by God's grace, you know material prosperity as well.
TV
Wow. Yeah, I mean that hits here too, like you said for that sermon. I mean, thinking of ourselves as a community, I mean, definitely is different than thinking about ourselves individually.
JF
Yeah, and the other thing with that too is like, if you have your two bills, one from the kingdom of self, so to speak, and one from Jesus' kingdom, what do you use when you, which bill do you use when you give mercy to people? Right? Do you give it out of the kingdom of self, out of your works, which often then is manipulative or based on, I'll give this to you, but you give back, or this inflates my ego, my kingdom, right? Or maybe in your life you've really messed up, you're really depressed with your life because it's you've just screwed up so much, and you say I have nothing to give, right? And then you don't give, you don't give of – not talking financially even – like you just give your whole life. And when we're living out of our life in Christ, out of His riches, that's where true mercy flows. And it's not legalistic mercy. It's not conditional. It's a beautiful thing, and that's part of our witness, you know. And that's what the world needs. That's what Karamoja needs. They need it. They need to taste and see that God is good, and that comes through his people, often comes through his church, and the church is you know we call it all the time the body of Christ and that's true, and it it's through the hands and feet of the body of Christ that the world gets to taste Jesus in a way, you know.
TV
Yeah, man. So that, I guess, too though that point, like the hands and feet: how do you think about that? Like, obviously, you went out and did it, and you've had this on your heart since you were a kid. How do you encourage younger people, or even ministers that you talk to now, to consider the world, the world mission, like to go abroad? Who do you encourage? I guess, and then how do you encourage them? How do you think about that? Is it just a blanket everyone should think about this, or do you think about it a little bit, you know, more nuanced than that? I guess.
JF
Yeah, it's a good question. I'm still, I still, now that I'm on this side of it in the West, I think about foreign missions, and I think about exactly that question. How do we go about doing that? Promoting foreign missions, doing foreign missions, and well, it's one word my congregation always hears now is we have to do it as a team because we're a team on this side, and our missionaries have to be a team on the field, so just to back up, like sometimes in you know missionaries they can go to they can go wherever they are wherever they go and they want to teach like a Presbyterian Reformed Church government – elders ruling the church and all of that, so they go over there and they want to set up that church government, but the practical way in practice, what they do is they teach one thing and then embody another by being a little hope over there. They've been serving right. It's their mission. They've been doing this for 30 years. It's their gig. It's their school. It's their church. They're the boss. They've helped everybody. They've saved everybody's lives, and that's you know that can be very dangerous and very intoxicating. And one of the things I learned, I'll get back to your question, but we helped build a, we built a soccer field in where we were living, and the locals we play soccer with them, and they'd have big tournaments at Christmas, and they would jokingly call me, they'd say it in this way, “Pastor, Pasta, you are Ronaldo, you are Ronaldo,” and so we would joke with that. I am not Ronaldo, but I didn't want to play with them because they played, they were very dangerous players, get injured very easily. But it was all we all had name soccer names for each other, football names as they called it. And I said, "Okay, what happens if I on the ministry team am Rinaldo? When you get the ball, who will you pass it to? You give it to me, then I score, and I'm your hero, right? So what happens often with our missionaries is they become Ronaldo. Now, when Ronaldo leaves, what team do you have left, right? Ronaldo hasn't built a team; it's just about him”, and I we use that illustration with our guys, and they got it. And I said, I'm leaving in a year, and I can't be Ronaldo. I don't want to be Ronaldo. And when I am, I need to repent of being the star guy. It's not about me, right? It's about Jesus. And so, because we have to build, we have to build Christ's church, and that means we have to be able to get out of the way. And you think about Paul saying, like some are saying, "I'm of Paul, I'm of Cephas, I'm of this guy,” and that is really, really destructive to missions. And I think, and that's one of the dangers, actually, of long-term missions. So people talk about long-term missionary. That's a good thing, but we have to be really, really careful. We don't build our missions around one guy out on the field, right?
TV
Interesting.
JF
Be careful with that. We have to, and what that means is, in our sending churches, to go back to like, how do we send missionaries? Well, we have to send as a team as well, right? We have to have a long term vision for a particular field, and we got to care for the ones that we send over there. Sometimes pastors in the West have our time where they feel like they're not even being cared by their own church well, you know. And they're the people around them; they see them every Sunday. So you can imagine if a pastor's experienced that in a local church here in North America, and it's hard to be known and loved and cared for and understood. You know what's going on, this and that. Now you take that person and you move them to the other side of the world. How are you going to care for that person?
TV
Yeah.
JF
Right? It's really challenging to. Do it well, and it goes back to the very beginning of our talk. When you, when you live in a on the foreign field, under intense pressures like a war zone, right, with huge stresses for both you, for the husband and the wife and kids, you can grow really weird, like the plant growing in the pot, right? It's huge pressures, right? So how do you, how do our sending churches really understand what's happening on the field and care for that to do it well?
TV
Yeah, like we, how do you keep tabs on? Because I mean, I guess the typical way is like you read the newsletter, and it's like, well, you'll you don't get a lot of, yeah, you don't know if your missionary is becoming a Rinaldo out there based on a newsletter.
JF
No, and the thing is, like, newsletters, even in the Bible, they don't tell us everything. Paul's missionary journeys, they don't tell us like what happened with his team, Paul had a team, but we don't know the details. So, but it's really important to try to think about the person or the family that you're sending. How are you going to care for them? Well, right. And I really appreciated the Orthodox Presbyterian Church because they put around us, we were a part of a local team on the field that cared for us well, and we try to care for each other. We're all sinners, and we're all stressed out and go bonkers sometimes, and you have to work with one another. Really, really challenging. But and then they also had a committee of people who understood missions, understood the stresses, and really cared for and loved us well. And that was why when they first called us to go out there, and I saw the infrastructure that was there for care, I thought, “okay. I think by God's grace, we can do this as a family and survive”, so to speak. You know, and do well. You know, not without challenges, not without stress, not without danger, but so yeah, I think your question is like, how do we send now? I think we really have to work together on the North American side or wherever we're coming from, and we have to also talk to other churches that are working in that area, so we're not duplicating work, and we need to think about in our in the foreign settings that we're working we have to really under do good leg work on the ground, know what's know the history, know what's been done, know the scoundrels in the area who've like used the mission, other missionaries that have come through. Like, really, don't go in there naive because you'll be taken out.
TV
Yeah. How do you think about that? Because, like, I guess, like, when we say the words like foreign mission or world mission, like, we think go to all nations, so that all nations hear about Christ. Like, I guess right away in the West, you think, well, the West has heard. Let's go to somewhere they don't have never, you know. It used to be, I guess, in the 60, 70, 50, 60, 70’s, maybe it was like they've never seen a white man before, like that kind of idea. But now it's maybe they've been touched. But I mean, there's a bit of a difference there in our minds. I think between people who have never heard or people who are part of this, part of a culture that has experienced missionaries over the last say 50, 60, 70 years. So how do you pick a mission field, and then do you, I guess, as a Reformed missionary, would you enter a field that's been dominated by Roman Catholics historically, or even you mentioned like setting up a certain type of church governance? Like, how specifically should we be targeting these areas, or should we be like, well, they have something that's, you know, good enough, I guess, or like close enough to what we would hope for? And then, how much, I guess, in the field, even when you get there, how much crossover is there working with other denominations or people who have been there before, other organizations like NGOs even are sometimes religious-esque.
JF
Yeah. So like there's plenty of people working in these foreign fields who used to be you know missionaries of sorts, and now are just working for NGOs, doing wells, healthcare, farming things. But very few people are trying to plant churches.
TV
Really.
JF
When I think about missions, when I think about the call of Christ, we can think about three aspects to the missionary work. One is, first of all, discipleship, working with people, bringing Christ to them so that they are saved, right? But if that's all you do, there's plenty of people who said, you know, I led you know these five kids to the Lord, right? But that's not far enough because we want to bring them onto the team, which is the body of Christ, and so we need to get the church functioning. So Paul tells Timothy to put elders in every town, you know. So that's church formation, and then out of from church formation, and you need church government to have that because you don't really have a church without church government because we're planting local churches and this is how people are discipled in the church and then from that point, so the first one discipleship, second forming churches with government in decency and good order right, and then third is what I would say is church nurturing. So part of what we can do, you know, maybe once we in a given area, there's enough indigenous people who know the Lord. They can do the first one. They can go out up the mountain. They know the language. They know the people. You know, we’re not Hudson Taylor. They are the guys who are hitting that spot, And once we've once people have been trained in leadership, you can have churches that learn good governance and the means of grace, preaching the word of sacrament. But part of our mission work can also be helping to nurture or train up churches or denominations or presbyteries, and that that I think is that's a good thing that we can be a part of. Like to look at areas, how can we promote building up that that knowledge base? Stuff like Christian counseling, just having a stronger biblical theology on all the doctrines of grace. You know, those kinds of things are, I think, are really needed. Often the church is an inch deep and a mile wide, or people have people have no real vision of the local church, they just have, you know, a walk with the Lord, but they don't have a walk with His people, right?
TV
That's a really good way to put it – an inch deep and a mile wide. Because how does that, like, that's the kind of feeling I get when I'm when I'm talking about world mission. It's like the inclination is to go that inch deep and mile wide, like you're like let's just reach everybody, because like, but I guess that's not, yeah. Do you think that that's not necessarily the way we should do it?
JF
Oh, we need to plant, we need to plant churches, which is not the invisible church. Paul didn’t plant invisible churches. He said to the church in Ephesus, or the church in Colossae, or to the Corinthian church. He planted local churches with real people on the ground with real names. They weren't invisible people, and they had you know visible manifestations of the fruit of the spirit, and they had visible manifestations of the fruit of evil as well, right? So we need to. that that's our calling, and that's that's a hard calling to focus there. That's a long term, a long term vision that's needed. So, but it's exciting, you know, really, really exciting.
TV
Yeah, and dangerous. And I guess in some ways, un not unfruitful, but un- Yeah, not a lot of thankfulness in that, or if you don't see fruit right away, it can be really unrewarding, or you know, just tough to work through.
JF
You know it is one of the most rewarding things to see people come to Christ and begin to love their brothers and sisters who they hated, and begin to forgive their enemies, and have them sitting in church, the wind is blowing through. The cows are walking by, and then you have Lord's Supper with them. And I remember one lady, her name was Joyce. She came to the Lord. I think she had like 13 or more kids. One of her boys was probably murdered, and just a horrible, challenging life. And she came to faith. And the way she said what happened, how she described being a Christian, is like “God has put, God has changed my face. God has put joy on my face. He's changed, changed me. He's given me a smile”, and I thought that is actually so true. Like when we walk through the village, often we can see who the Christians are by their face.
TV
Wow.
JF
And to see people loving and forgiving one another – that's the body of Christ, right? That, um, that is an incredible, um, it's an incredible witness, and it's so rewarding, and just experiencing love in the body of Christ in a context of so much hate and violence, I like the stark contrast between light and darkness is, was so strong there. Yeah, there's hard things, but you get to see beautiful things. So that that is so rewarding, and yeah, I love those people. I still pray for my old church over there.
TV
Yeah, that's amazing. Yeah, you could definitely feel that, you know, yeah. I guess I gotta, we should probably wrap this up at some point, but I could talk to you all day about these. You can, I love to hear your stories, like Mark Penninga got to walk with you often, you said so it's you know he probably you know excited about all the stories got to hear from you when you were up in BC. But yeah I guess it's kind of a two part question. Like one would be the nations have in many ways kind of come to us in the West. Like there's been tons, especially in Canada, there's been tons of immigration. In a lot of ways, we're not even really living in a, I wouldn't say we're not living in a Western culture. We're living, but the culture is even changing. You can feel even here in in Alberta, which is you know pretty strong native culture to begin with, pretty strong redneck culture, so you can already feel that there's a real disconnect between us as you know Reformed people and the people who are living around us. There's this strong contingence of Middle Eastern, yeah, all sorts of Asian cultures. Like, how do you think about going to those people? And do you think like we should be spending more time in our backyard? Is that a world mission in the same sense, or is it more important to reach out to those who don't have local churches, at least around who are also active in that work? Yeah, I guess that's the first part of my question. But let's just hit that first.
JF
You know when I came back here, you go to a church, and that your church has a whole bunch of elders and deacons, and you have you know ladies fellowship or whatever your church is doing and youth group, and you realize how stacked your church is, how blessed you have it. You have so many people who are believers who have gifts, and then you have other churches around you. You know you might not totally agree with everything, but they're gospel churches, and all of our churches here in all of our communities can be reaching those people. But when you go to other parts of the world, there's actually no church there, right? That's where we were. There was no one there, and these people were going to die without knowing Christ. We went to places where no one even knew the name of Jesus, so an actual, basically an unreached people group in many ways. So those places we need to work, and in those places, there's also many places there's a spiritual hunger that, like we often don't know here. Here we have a lot of indifference to the word. There's places where people are so hungry for the word. We would go up on this one mountain, and they would say, “Why haven't you been here for a number of months? Where have you been? We need to hear the word of God”, you know, and so that, yeah, I think we need to like really think about reaching the unreached. Now that might be in our own community, and we can do that as churches, but we also have to have a vision for the world around us, and we are uniquely equipped with our resources to do that. And we have to kind of organize ourselves for it too. I think of during COVID when COVID ended in Uganda, we had been, we went to the schools that were opening up, and these are public government schools. And we went to the teach, and the people are largely from those various tribes that teach up there. They have, they have a respect for the church, and so we went up, we went to these schools, and there could be like a couple 1000 kids out of school, and we would go there and we would say, "Can we come and come on Tuesdays? Let's say and bring God's word?” And they'd say, "Hey, yeah, you come, but you be serious. You come at 10 o'clock. I'm telling you, don't be late.” Like okay, and you have like half an hour. So okay, yeah, they've totally bossed you around, and okay, well we'll do that. So we show up at not at 10 o'clock. We'll show up at like at 8:30 in the morning, drive up there with the Land Cruiser, and this is like a building out on the prairie. There's a couple big trees, just grasslands. You'd expect an elephant or a lion to come out of the grass, you know nothing else around, but there's kids everywhere, and they're in this you know concrete type building, and there's like one well at the borehole or whatever they call it, and you show up, and the teacher comes out. “Hey, you are here, you wait, let me bring the children. You go by the tree.” So they all come out at 8:30 and they'll let you teach the whole day, the whole morning. Wow! All these kids. So we got to do that, and the guys that we trained after COVID, they went to these schools, and we were reaching 1000s of kids for Christ. And the guys that I got to train – they are now, you know, bringing the word to these places. So the story of the OPC's mission work, it's still ongoing, but these kids first heard the gospel as young children, and the women who went to the woman missionaries who went into the village who knew the language, taught the basic Bible stories. They were raised up under the Word, and then they were later discipled. And now they're, 20 years later, one is being ordained as a pastor, and others are leaders in the church, bringing God's Word, and they're seeking to reach the next generation. It that has been like a 25 year process, with many people involved in it. And yeah, we praise the Lord that we got to be a part of that wonderful little story, and we, of God's redemption in Karamoja and the building up of his of his church, and we're seeing now this new generation really seeking to take leadership. And now we're in this place where we're now trying to more – well, I'm no longer there anymore – but those who are remaining in this more nurturing stage, not first time reaching the lost or church establishment that's still being worked on, but now we're trying to get into a more church nurturing stage as a mission, and actually looking for more opportunities. And there's many more opportunities throughout that whole area for missionaries to go, you know.
TV
Wow, it's cool. Do they readily those young guys who are now church leaders? Do they readily adopt that mission mindset of reaching out and pushing the gospel?
JF
They’re like a lot of us, there's some that really are seeking to do it, and then there's others who are lukewarm, and then there's some that have fallen away, right? So some of the guys that have fallen away… Actually, two Sundays ago, I got a letter from Africa, and I was off my pulpit that day, and the visiting pastor, who was a member in my church back in Telkwa, became a pastor, and he preached in my church, which was really special. He preached on the prodigal son in Panoka here, and that next day I got a letter from Africa. Sunday at Nakale Presbyterian Church, and one of the boys, now a man, came home from a life of being a prodigal son. The very next day, I got up, and he stood up in church at the end, and he said, "I am Judas. I am Jonah. I am the prodigal son. I, Pastor James, and all these guys – they taught me, and I stole from the mission. I stole the mission bicycles. I lied. I cheated. I forsook Christ”, and he went to the far country, quite literally. Went down country and lived a life apart from Christ, and he repented and he came back two Sundays ago. His name is Chegem Mark, and I pray for Chegem. You can pray for him. Anyone listening, I'd love it, but yeah, we part of nurturing the church is yeah, pray that the church can keep growing. And so some of these guys, they've been wayward and they're coming back and they've tasted the world, and the world is ultimately poverty. Might taste, be rich. Might be have a rich taste, but in the end, it leaves what is bitter and empty. And he came back to our church impoverished, but coming to Christ. And the pastor, Pastor Julius, on Sunday of Nakale Presbyterian Church, he asked Chagam, "Do you know how the prodigal son ends?” And Chagam couldn't remember. I'm like, "Why don't you know that?” But anyways, he couldn't remember. And the pastor, the people in the church, and the pastor-they reminded him. They said he got a ring on his finger, a new coat, and everyone said, "The father said, 'Rejoice with me, for my son that was lost has been found”, and that's the gospel. And so our guys over there, they're still learning. They're still struggling. They're tempted by the world. They're tempted by prosperity with poverty, and poverty's really hard. It's really discouraging. Takes the life out of you and it tests you. But my one of my spiritual sons last week that was lost came home, so my heart's still over there.
TV
That's amazing.
JF
You don't you don't leave that, and I think of Paul too. You read the New Testament letters in his heart for all the churches, and I have a little taste of that. And I really, yeah. I want them, I want that church to be strong for Christ.
TV
Is that difficult for you now? With this was this was kind of my last question I had for you. Like, do you feel like we get caught up here in our Western world with things that, for you personally, that feel less meaningful? Like we all get spun up with the media and you know the culture wars in the West, and obviously those are, I mean, we have podcasts on about issues like this all the time, and they're obviously important problems. But does that feel to you like at times just a little less important because you have seen what these other parts of the world are going through, like your heart is still over there a little bit, and you feel for these people in a different way than you know... Does some of these arguments and things in the West seem a little more trivial to you?
JF
Yeah, I think in the West we've lost. I don’t want to be overly judgmental, but…
TV
No, do it. That's what we're here for.
JF
We, um, we don't want to do missions because we don't want to suffer. We want to be comfortable and we want to be safe, and that's really bad. The Apostle Paul didn't do missions because it was safe. He did it to make people safe in Christ, and we have lost in the West largely our theology of suffering for Christ. We have lots of position papers in our denominations, on justification and all these things, whatever it is, it's all good. But to say, do we have a biblical theology of suffering, and are we embracing that for Christ? Right. When we came back from Africa here, everyone says, “We're so glad your home's safe”, and I understood that. We went through a pretty massive... we were attacked in Africa at one point, and we were ambushed, I was beaten with hammers all over my body and went through like a very significant PTSD trauma episode through that.
TV
Wow.
JF
I had one of those Pauline beatings, which I don't recommend anyone to have, but that was a really significant part of our time there, about halfway through. We got to, in many different ways, what Paul says to the Colossians: fill up the sufferings of Christ for His church. And I didn't choose that. My wife didn't choose it. My kids didn't. But it was part of our journey there, and the Lord used it to really show to the rest of the body there that church in Nakale a lot of different things, and also to teach us a lot of different things. But we were there to bring Christ to His people, and we're willing to suffer for Christ for His people. At one point, we nearly lost one of our kids out there through sickness, and I mean, this is all like huge topics.
TV
I was gonna say, we could talk for another five hours on this. Yeah, but it
JF
Yeah, but it was, you know, after we came back up to Karamoja, I was really, really struggling. It's in the middle of COVID, so under lockdowns in Canada, everything's crazy over here. Trucker convoys and everyone's in their world here, right? But we came up to Karamoja, and this had happened down country, close to the airport. And the people up in Karamoja, they saw that we didn't hightail it out, and we ministered in weakness to these people, and we entered into their poverty, so to speak, and that was a very rich experience. And to not, and just to be really depending on Jesus for health, for strength, for mental health, for courage. Our prayers were different. Some ways I wish I still could pray like I prayed back then. You know, and we come back here, and we're caught up in our own world. We're caught up in our own stuff, in our own busyness, and the world needs Christ, and we gotta, we gotta have a passion for him, you know, passion to pursue him, to be willing to suffer for him, you know, and to count it all joy. Like I think I got a little bit of a taste of that, to see God using our sufferings for Him and getting to grow through it, you know, growing in in perseverance and character and hope and yeah, it's hard to put in, it's hard to put into words all of that.
TV
I could just feel it in you that it's like, I just don't know. It's strange because it feels as if I can't relate. But you, like we just completed a few.. in our in our men's Bible study here in Calgary, we we've did we've studied Acts, then we studied Romans. Now we did First, and we're in middle of Second Corinthians. There's a lot of that, Paul's endurance through these things comes out, and yet you look at it as someone from the Western world a lot of times, and you don't know what to do with it because the suffering isn't the same, so we say things like, "Well, we're not persecuted in the same way, but you know, we have our own things, and the devil's working here in different ways.” And that's all true, but it's also like we don't… Do you feel like we even know here what that's what suffering is? What does suffering for the gospel mean? I guess it just doesn't mean the same thing.
JF
Yeah, it's here. I mean, and we have suffering with diseases and cancer, and you know, losses and challenges in our families. You know, at work, it's here.
TV
Like we suffer, we suffer because of the broken world, but for the gospel? A lot of times I feel like we're very, very comfortable, and…
JF
Yeah.
TV
I know personally, there's like a hesitation to, you know, when I was a kid, especially like when you see a presentation from a missionary and you say, "Is that going to be me one day?” And there's a big part of you that says, "That's just a yeah, that doesn't fit into the white picket fence life that everyone's sold here.”
JF
No, you know, Paul… I think it's in the chapter when he gets to Corinth is that Acts 18? I forget, but he gets there and he's gone through all these beatings, and then the Lord gives him a vision and says, "You won't get beaten in this town. I have many people here.” I don't know how long he was there, off the top of my head, he was there for a couple of years or something, but it's always that passage – pardon the pun – struck me because here Paul has, he's been beaten, you know. He's been left for dead. And I wasn't quite left for dead, but it was bad, you know. And then Paul gets to Corinth, and God says, "No more beatings while you're here.” And I thought, “I would love to have that. God, just tell me for the next while you're safe. You're not going to get beaten.” Right? And Paul got that, and I think that might have been a very special grace to him in that time, as he healed of his wounds, physical wounds. I think for me, it probably took like a year before my pain was gone and my knees and stuff, and psychological things. But guess what happened when Paul left Corinth? He crossed that boundary line, and he knew that promise was now over because he had left Corinth.
TV
You think Paul would have made that a 25 year ministry?
JF
Yeah, be a long-term missionary here in Corinth. But he stepped out, and it was for, you know, he was willing. He loved Christ. He wanted to make Christ known, and he wanted to see the church built up, right? He wanted to go to Rome. He wanted to go to Spain. And I think that forward thrust of you know wanting the kingdom of God to abound everywhere has to be that's Christ's mission, and that has to be our mission, our passion. And I think we have to really consider how can we organize ascending churches. How can we raise up our young people for this vision? And even if we're not going, how can we be good senders? How can we pray for churches? How can we, you know, pray for our missionaries? And missionaries aren't just, you know, the pastor, but you can have mission aid people going to support them, young people going, short-term stuff to equip to learn, and the beauty of it is, is you come back here, you can come back to North America, and you see these other people that have moved here, and you get an idea for their world, right? So what I'm discovering now is, you know, I meet Africans in the grocery store, wherever I am, and I can start talking to them about where they're from, and they immediately identify. And you realize, for me now, I realize that what's it like for them to see our world, right? What's it like for all these immigrants in Canada. How are they really looking at Canada? You know, and you ask them that question, like, so how is how is it like here? When you come from like Lagos, Lagos in Nigeria or Abuja or Nairobi or you know, what's it like here? Don't you think it's crazy? And what's Costco? And you start talking, and um, you can throw a little bit of Kiswahili at them or something, and they're like, "Hey, where are you from?” You know. And yeah, I'm finding now like it's really interesting to talk to immigrants here and just to get into their worldview, how they see our Canadian culture, and yeah, it's super interesting.
TV
Yeah, I guess it helps you mission to them too. Like even here. Man, James, really appreciate this. It's been eye opening.
JF
For what it’s worth.
TV
Yeah, all your struggles and everything. Yeah, it's amazing to hear what you went through, and I mean, just the encouragement of to the listeners and everybody to like be intentional about how we send and to consider going to experience the suffering for the name of Christ.
JF
The yeah, our mission field is right here, though, so we can learn learn here before you go over there. So
TV
Yeah, well, really appreciate it. Thank you so much for…
JF
yeah, you're welcome
TV
…for doing this with us. I have a newfound appreciation and just yeah, it's almost overwhelming to think about. Like you just have to really, really sit with it and ponder what happens overseas. And you know, like you said, we get so busy with our lives here, but don't let that be a reason to not look abroad and to spread the word.
JF
You know, a year ago, my church here in Panoka allowed me to go back to one guy that I got to teach that had graduated from seminary. His name is Timo, and I went back. I'd gone. I hadn't been there in two years, and I walked into our old house that we lived in, and it was like walking into kind of a haunted house. Our furniture, some of it was still there. Our bed was still there. It was like the body without the soul, without the spirit.
TV
Oh, wow.
JF
And, and that team that we left had to rebuild, it kind of collapsed a little bit, and they’re reforming which is good – Rinaldo’s not there anymore, you have to figure it out.
TV
I was gonna say, you might run into that in Edmonton with McDavid, so…
JF
Yeah, we won’t go there. But what I want to end with is, I walked through there and I thought it was almost like being in a dream. It was almost a dream. Had we really been here? Did we really do this? How did we do this? Like I looked at the place. I walked into the bedroom where we almost lost our daughter, right? And where she was so sick, and you know, so many memories come back, and so many challenges, and also so many joys, so much laughter. And I asked myself, like, how did we do this? I don't think I could do this again. I don't feel called here, and I realized – it was a special moment – I realized God did this. This wasn't me, right? This was God. God called me. God called our family for that time, and He called us. He called us to where we are now, and it's good. And we're serving Him now, here, we're happily here. We're God's blessing our work. We're building a team, working on the team. But it's the Spirit of God that equips us in our callings wherever we are. And that, to me, was just going back there and seeing that and being reminded of that, it's like God gave us strength for that during that time, and we have to trust Him. My wife, she said, when we went to Uganda, the thing she had to learn to give up was the – not control – she had to learn to give up the illusion of control because we can believe that we've got it, and that's a lie. And coming back here too, we can think we can take that illusion of control back into our hands. We're safe here in Canada. It's like you know. But we're in God's hands. Let's serve Him here with everything that we have, and trust Him, just the same we did over there. And the Spirit will, the Holy Spirit will lead us. And you know, we're obedient. You know, He can really bless that work as we depend on him.
TV
Yeah, yeah, that's lots to think about and ponder.
JF
Sorry I gave you too much.
TV
No, that's a that's a great place to leave it. Thanks everyone for listening. James, again, really appreciate that's gonna give me things to think about for weeks. Yeah, no, that's I'm sure many will. That's an amazing story, and yeah, all the all the best in Panoka and with your work now, and you know God's continued blessing there and in everything that you do. Again, appreciate it.
JF
Thanks for having us, and thank you for being willing to spread the work of Christ's mission, absolutely.
TV
Absolutely. From the from the basic comforts of my home, that's the, you know, the challenge here. So, thanks everybody.
Outro
Thanks for tuning into Real Talk. If this episode inspired you, please share it with a friend so you can continue this conversation in your own life. We encourage you to send us your feedback or let us know who you would like to hear on the podcast. You can email us at real [email protected] This episode is produced by Tyler Vanderwoude, Lucas Holtvluwer, and Mariah Tamminga in partnership with Reformed Perspective. Until next time, keep having real talk....
