Tombstones and Banana Trees (14 page)

One time my introductory speech was cut short as the lady on the other side slammed the door hard in my face. She must have felt convicted, as she opened it again a few moments later.

“Why are you here? I have heard so many people talk about you. What is it about?”

I told her my testimony—the short version! I told her about grace, forgiveness, and the ability to start again.

She started to weep. She had separated from her husband many years earlier, and he was now in the hospital, dying. She asked me, “Do you think my husband would forgive me?”

“Why not?” I said. “The moment you accept Christ and ask forgiveness, ask Him for His hand of peace; your husband will forgive you.”

Some days later her son drove her the four hours up to Manchester to visit her estranged husband in the hospital. That very night she called me and told me how she had cried in his arms for an hour. And she told me that before she could ask for his forgiveness, he apologized to her for mistreating her and asked her to forgive him.

I was able to attend his funeral a few weeks later. He had died at peace with his wife, who spoke words of powerful grace and healing in front of the mourners.

During my two years living in the West I never overcame the sense of shock at the way people dressed, especially on the odd occasion that I visited a beach. They were—by African standards—naked and did not appear to be ashamed at all. I talked to my friends and they said it was normal, but I was still shocked. The divorce rate was equally worrying, as was the number of children who wandered around the streets, doing nothing in the day and embracing trouble at night. I would talk to them, too, and I developed a pub ministry as a result, talking to young people and bringing them to the church.

I made the mistake of thinking that a Bible college was a place where students would dedicate themselves to the pursuit of a more godly way of living, where they would sacrifice the appeal of the world in favor of getting closer to God. But the way they behaved was just like those who attended a secular university. I saw people drinking and behaving in inappropriate ways with their boyfriends and girlfriends. But I made many friends. I knew from my own experience that God calls His people to deal in grace far more than judgment. As the principal told me, God does not call the qualified, but He qualifies the called.

Living in England with my wife and children was good in many ways, but, despite being offered a job as a youth pastor, I felt strongly that I had a role to play here in my own country. And I wanted my children to grow up in Africa. Children in the West are given too much freedom, in my opinion, and there is little sense of right and wrong. They have too much freedom with too little framework for their behavior. Connie and I talked about it for four months, and we decided to come back to Uganda. And so I began work for the diocese.

This was made possible because in England I had met the new bishop of Kigezi, Bishop George. He and I had got on well, or at least that is what I thought at the time. He had offered to ordain me when I returned to Uganda, and having felt as though I had been through a period of revival within my soul while abroad, I was excited to see what was in store for me once I was back home in Uganda. Surely there were even more exciting things ahead.

In 1998 my family and I returned once more to Kabale, ahead of my proposed ordination. I was funded by clergy back in England and took on what I thought would be the interim role of diocesan education secretary. Within a few months I would become the Reverend Medad Birungi and could set about taking on some fresh challenges. While I was settling into my new job, I presented my thesis on charismatic renewal to the bishop and his staff; soon afterward things started to go wrong. They did not like what they read and called me a heretic. I kept preaching the gospel, healing the sick, and casting out demons, but my hopes for ordination were dashed. The bishop refused to ordain me.

The same thing happened the next year. And the next. For three years I was told that I would be ordained along with the next batch, but each time the plans were put on hold. I felt rejected, abandoned, and useless, now that the church had also rejected me. Bitterness and unforgiveness were rekindled, and it made me depressed again and again. But I kept repenting and forgiving. My relationship with the bishop deteriorated, particularly as the teacher and orphan sponsorship programs that my department was running were attracting increasing overseas support. There was also greater jealousy and envy from the clergy. I became increasingly stressed, until I got a scholarship for a PhD and asked the bishop to release me. I left the diocese but kept lecturing at Uganda Christian University, Kabale Campus, part-time to pay for my wife's education, as she was working toward a degree there. Until I was fired. They told me that since I had left the diocese, I should not teach in a church-founded institution.

For a long time I had wanted to start an evangelistic association, to work alongside the increasing number of people from the West who wanted to visit Uganda to help preach and teach. Eventually Swallow Evangelistic Revival Ministries was born. It was a non-denominational organization, though we did ask the bishop to be our patron. He agreed on the condition that the diocese would oversee it. We knew we could not limit it that way, and more trouble followed as the relationship between us suffered further.

I started to exercise spiritual gifts, particularly healings and deliverance, but the more these areas of my life seemed to grow, the greater the tensions between the bishop and me became. When I resigned my post as diocesan education secretary, my wife's job with Kigezi High School was also terminated. In 2002 the bishop called a synod to ask people whether they thought I was forming a heretical cultic movement, and he advised the synod not to have anything to do with me or Swallow Ministries. The majority said yes, I was a heretic. They thought I was going to follow in the footsteps of a Ugandan Catholic cult called the Restoration of the Ten Commandments. In 2000 they had burned 1,500 people alive in a church. The diocese claimed I was just as dangerous as the priest who had started the cult and suggested that they should not associate with our ministry or me. They stopped me from preaching; almost overnight I found myself in exile in Kampala. For the sake of peace the organization was disbanded. But the root of bitterness started to grow again.

Life was difficult once more. My wife and children had to leave our beautiful home in Kabale because some of the local Christians had taken to intimidating them, whispering accusations, and blackening their names. All the rejections from the past lined up and added their force to this latest blow from my spiritual father figure, the bishop, together with the clergy and Christians who followed his lead. I suffered from the poison of malicious, unjustified accusations, and the rejection did not stop when we left the diocese. I had a scholarship for further study, but it was canceled. I went to work at Kampala International University but was sacked after one term. I was invited to attend an interview at Kyambogo University, but they canceled the appointment without explanation. I managed to get another job, one that came with accommodation that had been provided by a kind
muzungu
who knew me, but the employer ended up taking the accommodation away from us when the contract was terminated.

We were financially crippled and had to live on charity. We had four children and no job. We were living in people's houses, sleeping on the floors of whatever friends we could find. It was difficult and served only to increase the sense of bitterness and anger within me. Eventually we were saved by a kind church that paid for our accommodation and by some faithful overseas believers who supported us for two years.

But what happened next was what really destroyed and shattered me.

The archbishop of Uganda at the time—a man called His Grace Livingstone Nkoyoyo—was supportive of me. And I liked him. He took me on and sent me on a short course at Uganda Christian University so that he could ordain me. At last my dream of being ordained was about to be realized. I approached September 2003 with my confidence high; if the head of the entire Anglican Church in Uganda was behind me, what could possibly go wrong? I invited people from all over to attend the ceremony. There were guests from back in Kabale, Rwanda, Burundi, Kenya, and even the United Kingdom—two hundred in all.

On the night before our Sunday service ordination, I gathered along with the other ordinands to make our vows. Suddenly the archbishop was called out. I was suspicious, even more so when a friend from Kabale in the room warned me that something was happening.

I was called into a meeting with Connie. All the big men from the church in Uganda were there. They told me that the bishop had objected to my ordination. He had repeated his accusations of heresy and had threatened to resign if they went ahead and ordained me. Their verdict was as sharp as that knife my uncle had used to slash my foot as I grazed on bananas at the top of the tree: “We are canceling your ordination until you sort things out with Bishop George.”

Connie screamed and fell to the ground. She was having trouble breathing, and my own sense of being crushed was momentarily lifted as together with a friend I struggled to carry her out to a car.

But the feelings could not be buried forever. The sense of devastation was immense, as potent as any poison I had ever feared. All the old bitterness returned: from my father, from my uncles, from my aunts, from my mother-in-law, from the Bible Society. All the anger, humiliation, and shame returned. What would I tell people? How could I explain this to them? I wept all night. Connie recovered after thirty minutes as we were driven home, where two hundred visitors were waiting for us in a preordination night vigil. We were all exhausted, overcome by stress, humiliation, fear, anger, bitterness, and depression. Connie was so weak that four men had to carry her to her bed. When the cheering crowd of visitors, friends, and relatives were told what had happened, they wailed and cried; others screamed, and my sister fainted. Hearing the cries of all those people sank me into bitterness again.

I cried all night. It was only in the morning that I was saved by a phone call from Bishop Henry Orombi, the archbishop-elect. He told me to meet him right away, and when we met I cried in his loving arms. After twenty minutes I stopped. He encouraged me, prayed for me, and asked me to attend the ordination service anyway.

I turned up at the next day's ceremony. The archbishop stood up and explained the situation to the assembled congregation, who knew nothing of the previous evening's events. “We were going to ordain Medad Birungi, but there are problems with his bishop that need to get sorted out. Pray for him. Pray for them both. But we are going to commission him as a lay evangelist.”

Months passed, and eventually I received a job offer from the vice chancellor of Kyambogo University, the place that had canceled my appointment. The fuss at the ordination ceremony had set him straight, and he offered me a job.

Perhaps it might seem an odd thing to spend so much time and energy pursuing ordination, but for me it offered the potential to work much more effectively within the country I so dearly love. Perhaps it is a system that will not last for much longer, but for now the Anglican Church in Uganda—as well as in much of Africa—is a powerful force with the potential to serve and support millions. To work outside of its power structures would have been to turn my back on my spiritual forefathers and my spiritual heritage.

Mercifully it took only another year for me to finally be ordained. In 2004 His Grace Henry Orombi, now the archbishop of the province of the Church of Uganda and bishop of the diocese of Kampala, a long-standing friend and mentor, made it possible. I had worked with him in evangelistic missions and conventions and in the healing and deliverance ministry, and I used to translate for him whenever he came to preach in western Uganda. On my ordination he declared to me and to Connie, “The time of tears and humiliation is over. The time of joy and glory has come!”