If you’ve been reading this blog, you know that Kingsway has been in crisis for over a year now because their well broke down. Students must haul water from over a mile (2 km) each way every afternoon.
Back in April, Ken Watkins, founder of Genesis Waters in Grand Rapids, Michigan, visited Kingsway and decided to take this project on. More water surveys were done, and a couple of months ago they chose a location to drill. They were able to drill very deep and put in a pipe. But before the water can be used it must first be tested for whether it is safe and pure.
If it is good, then an electrical pump, a solar panel for power and a tank must be installed, along with plumbing and housing too. This all takes time and is not cheap! But Genesis Waters is funding all of this, which is a huge blessing to Kingsway.
Today we decided to get an update about the well that is being installed at Kingsway by Genesis Waters, since Milly is visiting Michigan.
Ken started with great news. The report from testing the water from the new well showed that this was some of the best water Ken has found in all of the wells he’s dug in Eastern Africa! It has very low levels of any impurity, which is really, really great.
Now they just need to source a galvanized steel storage tank which they hope will last for many years, find some local plumbers, then order all the parts and make plans to install everything. Please keep them in your prayers.
We said, the day that we finally turn on the pump for the first time, we should hold a big celebration! This is actually something from the Bible. Finding a well is a huge source of rejoicing for a community and frequently an occasion for song. We find this in Numbers 21:16-18:
And from there they continued to Beer; that is the well of which the LORD said to Moses, “Gather the people together, so that I may give them water.” Then Israel sang this song: “Spring up, O well!—Sing to it!— the well that the princes made, that the nobles of the people dug, with the scepter and with their staffs.”
Our meeting with Ken Watkins at Genesis Waters today.
Over 250 people joined Lois and Rev. Dr. Milly Erema, of Uganda Christian University for a zoom presentation on October 22, 2024. They gave a seminar called “Reading the Bible as an Insider” that shared some insights from her current writing with Dr. Erema.
Rev. Dr. Milly Maturu Erema arrived in Michigan on September 28 to stay with Lois Tverberg once again, and they immediately began working to prepare for the “Reading the Bible as an Insider” seminar they would be leading in Williston, Florida on October 12th.
There they shared insights from Milly’s “insider” view of Bible, because she grew up in a tribal culture not unlike that of the Ancient Near East. (More about the seminar at this link.)
Because Hurricane Milton was expected to barrel through Florida just a couple days before the seminar, it was a nail-biting week as they were preparing. But Williston is in the rural north, it was not much affected so they were able to travel and speak. The town didn’t even cancel school!
Do you wish you could have attended the seminar? You are in luck, because they will be sharing much of their seminar again by zoom on Tuesday, October 22 at 8-9:30 PM Eastern US time.
We ended our seminar by sharing the remarkable story of Kingsway Christian High School. (The video is a bit low res but the sound is fine.)
Florida – Like Uganda, but very Different
Milly enjoyed her first visit to Florida because its tropical climate felt like home. But instead of finding people planting small gardens with crops like peanuts and hand-rearing a few cows for their families, she was amazed to see industrial peanut fields and enormous cattle ranches, vast estates managed through mechanization. It was quite a culture shock.
In Uganda, people have found a clever way to build buildings cheaply, by making the bricks from the soil under their feet.
People fill brick forms with mud and then place the dried bricks into a tower with a hollow space at the bottom to build a fire. After several days of drying over the fire, the bricks are ready to use.
This is a really inexpensive way to build, but there is a catch. Unless the bricks are covered and sealed by a layer of plaster, they will slowly return to mud when it rains, and the building will eventually fall. But plaster is expensive, so this step is often delayed for years.
This was how most of Kingsway’s buildings were built. They are up to 15 years old and none have been plastered yet. (This photo was taken in April 2021.)
On the building below you can see many places where mud is seeping from the bricks. The ladders were there because cracks were already visible in the interior walls. This was causing the US board of Kingsway to lose sleep at night!
So when a generous supporter of Kingsway stepped up with funding, Milly and our board all decided that this critical task was the next thing that needed to be done. (We decided to delay work on the upper stories of the girl’s dorm until after this was completed.)
The building with the ladders on it has now been plastered and painted, and in areas where walls were cracking, they were repaired or reconstructed. So now take a look!
Hooray! The building looks completely new and it now matches the new girl’s dorm. Here’s a photo of the rest of the buildings in the process of plastering and painting:
Over the past few months, we’ve been able to plaster and paint almost all the buildings and it looks like a whole new school! But the change is not just cosmetic, it was very important to do this before the buildings started to fall.
Hooray, hooray, the first level of the girls dorm is now done! Everyone was rejoicing at how beautiful the building is, especially at night.
We had solar panels installed, so the girls will have free, reliable electricity in their new dorm. This will solve two problems. Power outages are frequent and can last for days, so some evenings the students have no light for studying in the evening. Also, electricity is expensive, which is a burden on the school.
Along with the dorm they also built a nice new girls’ toilet/bath house. It will be lit by the nearby dorm lights at nights. No more stumbling to find their way in the dark!
The girls enjoyed cleaning their future home, to make it spic and span.
Then the boys brought over the newly made bunk beds.
They are now putting some final touches on the first level of the girls dorm now (January 2024). They’ve plastered the walls inside and out, finished the floors and finally installed glass in the window and door openings.
Above they are sealing around the windows of the door. The dorm has very high ceilings, windows and doors!
One other thing needs to be done – to build a dedicated latrine and bathroom next to the dorm. This goes pretty quickly.
Here they are constructing the roof for the latrine.
So this is where we are at right now with the new dorm!
They still need to apply an outer coating to the building and will do that soon.
They will also be installing some solar panels for electricity and will need to build beds for the girls too. So there are a few more things to do before the girls move in, in February.
Because of an interesting cultural misunderstanding, I (Lois Tverberg, chair, US Kingsway board) missed a critical detail about Kingsway Christian High School until recently.
Originally I thought that the school’s purpose was to support Rev. Dr. Milly Maturu Erema’s family. When Milly was attending Western Seminary in Holland, Michigan in 2001, four of Milly’s brothers were killed in the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) conflict, and Milly became responsible to educate their 22 orphaned children. Raising school fees for so many would be impossible, and Milly and her husband were both educated, so with the help of churches in our area, they decided to start a boarding school where they could receive income from other students who would attend, and make sure their children had a Christ-centered education.
Remember the Invisible Children?
What I was shocked to learn recently was that Kingsway was actually serving a much bigger purpose, and in a sacrificial way. Shortly after Kingsway began in 2008, Milly and her husband Sam were contacted by other families suffering in the LRA conflict in northern Uganda, where they both come from. They were pleading for their children to attend Kingsway too.
You may remember hearing about the “Invisible Children” who fled from their homes every night to avoid being abducted by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a rebel group that was forcing young boys to become child soldiers and girls into sexual slavery. Many walked long distances each night to sleep in cities like Gulu, where the Ugandan army was on guard. In the morning they’d return home.
There was a huge social media campaign called “Kony 2012” (see below) to call attention to the crisis, and reporters and international aid organizations flocked to Gulu to help children there. But because of the danger of the LRA, none of the visiting agencies set foot outside the city to visit surrounding villages. There, thousands more children had been sleeping in the bush every night for years, unable to attend school or church, and some had lost their families in the LRA’s massacres.
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Kingsway was in southern Uganda, which was safe from the conflict. In spite of the danger, they decided to bring desperate young people from the villages in the north to Kingsway. Of course, none could pay. Yet most of Kingsway’s first 150 students came from the conflict area. Milly and Sam made many trips to get children from their school, which was about 300 miles away.
Milly’s harrowing tales of war zone travel shocked me. Normally they traveled by bus, but the LRA would stop vehicles and set them ablaze with the people still inside. So buses stopped going to the north. Milly and Sam would take the bus as far as they could, then walk the rest of the way. They walked through the bush, often many miles, because roads were dangerous. Sometimes they were stopped by the Ugandan army, who held them at gunpoint until they explained their mission.
One time Sam was bringing four children back with him when he was captured by the Lord’s Resistance Army. When they took him back to their compound, he knew his likely fate – he would be shot and the children taken into bondage. But one of the soldiers recognized him and pled to his commander, “Oh, this man was my teacher! Please spare his life!” So they let him go. It was almost evening and he was exhausted, but he walked through the bush all night long to find safety. The children were lost to the LRA.
When “Our Children” does not mean “Our Children”
I asked Milly, were these relatives or neighbors, that you would risk your life to get them? I wondered this because Milly always spoke of bringing “our children” from the north to Kingsway. I assumed they had to be at least from her own Lugbara tribe, a minority in Uganda.
“Night commuters” hiding from abduction by the LRA
The answer was actually no! They were mostly from other tribes and villages in the north. People who were sheltering “invisible children” had contacted Kingsway. Milly reached out to each one she could help.
Many Kingsway graduates now have attended university and started jobs and found good lives, a fate unthinkable for thousands of youth who gave up hope of going to school past 7th grade because of the war. Milly even spent her own money to send one of the brightest to university, and he works for a United Nations refugee camp today.
What’s ironic is that for years I didn’t grasp the heroic, unselfish nature of Kingsway because of how Milly was using the phrase, “our children.” Local churches saw Kingsway as serving Milly’s nieces and nephews. I assumed the children from the north were extended family. But to Milly, “our children” actually referred to any desperate Ugandan child who she could help.
Social Media and Kony 2012
You may remember the social media campaign called “Kony 2012,” which was the first video to become a viral media sensation on Youtube. Produced by Invisible Children, Inc., the video told the story of the invisible children coming to Gulu, and then it attempted but failed to bring the LRA leader Joseph Kony to justice.
9 21 2012 ONC- Jason Russell
The campaign was promoted by influencers like Oprah Winfrey, Taylor Swift, Bill Gates, George Clooney and George W. Bush, among others. This brought enormous attention to the tragic situation going on in northern Uganda, but it wasn’t able to end the Lord’s Resistance Army conflict. Cynical reporters mocked the efforts of the campaign, calling it “white saviorism” at its utmost.
You know what? It’s actually been the humble, grass-roots ministries of Ugandans themselves, like Kingsway Christian High School, who have begun to bring hope and healing to northern Uganda.
On November 9th, Western Theological Seminary hosted a lovely dinner at Haworth Hotel in Holland, Michigan where Milly and many good friends celebrated her award as the seminary’s Distinguished Graduate of 2023.
After dinner, Lois Tverberg shared some of Milly’s story and accomplishments that she wrote about in the seminary’s Commons magazine. (See this link to read her amazing life story.) Because of teaching at Uganda Christian University and mentoring future pastors, Milly has had enormous influence on future pastors in Uganda. She is one of only two women who have both a Ph.D. and are ordained Anglican priests. And on top of this, she runs Kingsway Christian High School which has given hundreds of children from war-torn areas a chance at a future that is impossible without a high school education.
Then Dr. Felix Theonugraha, the president of Western Theological Seminary, gave her the award.
Everyone wanted their pictures taken with her. 🙂
And the next morning they celebrated again at Western Seminary!
Along with the award, Western Seminary invited her to be a Visiting Scholar for the fall semester, and gave her a lovely office where she did research and worked on presentations that she gave while in the US this fall. It had large windows and was right next to the atrium gathering area, allowing for many good conversations with professors and students there.
When Dr. Milly Erema was in Michigan in October and November 2023, she gave several seminars at area churches about how she reads the Bible from an “insider’s perspective.” She understands ancient rituals and symbolism in the Old Testament that is lost on Western readers because of growing up in an East African culture with traditional practices that resemble the Ancient Near East in many ways. Many puzzling passages make more sense in this context.
She and Lois Tverberg, who writes about the Bible in its cultural context, had a lively conversation about her “ancient” perspective on the Bible.
You can watch one of their talks below!
Paper Given at the Evangelical Theological Society Meeting
Dr. Milly and Lois Tverberg also traveled to San Antonio to attend academic meetings in biblical studies. They attended the conferences of ETS (Evangelical Theological Society), IBR (Institute for Biblical Research) and SBL (Society for Biblical Literature).
At ETS, Dr. Milly gave a paper about how her East African traditional knowledge sheds light on Psalm 82, a puzzling psalm for Christians. Consider the text of Psalm 82:
God has taken his place in the divine council;
in the midst of the gods he holds judgment:
“How long will you judge unjustly
and show partiality to the wicked? Selah
Give justice to the weak and the fatherless;
maintain the right of the afflicted and the destitute.
Rescue the weak and the needy;
deliver them from the hand of the wicked.”
They have neither knowledge nor understanding,
they walk about in darkness;
all the foundations of the earth are shaken.
I said, “You are gods,
sons of the Most High, all of you;
nevertheless, like men you shall die,
and fall like any prince.”
Arise, O God, judge the earth;
for you shall inherit all the nations!
Christians puzzle over how this psalm speaks of God seemingly among other gods. It sounds like some kind of polytheism is being hinted at, which the term “divine council” also suggests. Dr. Milly has an answer for this from her culture, where human leaders are spoken of as “gods” because the assumption was that the spirit of the god was speaking through them. It is as if God gives a bit of his Spirit to each person who has authority to rule or judge on his behalf.
This is actually not unlike what you see in the OT when kings are anointed and are filled with God’s Spirit, (1 Sam 16:13) or when the 70 elders are filled with the Spirit after Moses delegates some of his duties to them. (Numbers 11:25)
Dr. Milly sees Psalm 82 as a rebuke upon human leaders who are corrupt, who neglect the needs of their people. They may think they are gods and can act with impunity, but they will realize their humanity when they face judgment for their misdeeds when they die.
Dr. Milly Erema is currently visiting the USA until November 29. While she is there she will be giving talks in Western Michigan and at the Evangelical Theological Society Meeting in San Antonio.
She has already given a two-week seminar at Pillar Church in Holland, Michigan called, “The Bible from an Insider’s Perspective.” When she studied at Western Seminary (Holland, MI), her professors were amazed at how she seemed to read the Bible from an insider’s perspective, because of growing up in an East African culture with traditional practices that resemble the Ancient Near East in many ways. Many puzzling passages make more sense in this context. She and Lois Tverberg, an author on Biblical cultural context, had a lively conversation about her “ancient” perspective on the Bible.
The pair will be giving two more seminars on the same topic at area churches that are open for anyone to attend. Please join us!
Sunday, November 5, 11:45 AM – Second Reformed Church, 225 E Central St, Zeeland, MI 49464 (Enter in the new “A” entrance in the back, off the lot on the corner of Cherry & Church streets.)
Wednesday, November 8, 6 PM –First Reformed Church, 630 State Street in Holland, MI 49423.
Hope you can join us! (We’ll try to put a video link online later.)
At the Evangelical Theological Society meeting
In San Antonio, Texas on Tuesday, November 14 at 4:30 PM, Dr. Erema will be giving an academic paper entitled,
Reading Psalm 82 from a Ugandan Cultural Perspective
Psalm 82 has been of recent interest because of Michael Heiser’s theory regarding divine council imagery. He sees the bene elohim (“sons of gods”) as divine beings that polytheist peoples worshiped as gods. Dr. Erema will share a contrasting interpretation based on how East African readers understand this imagery. The “sons of gods” are seen as human leaders who are called “gods” because their authority is seen as God-derived. This interpretation accords with the many times when foreign kings claim divine status throughout the Bible. Psalm 82 rebukes these “gods” for neglecting to bring justice to the widow and orphan, which is the universally-assumed responsibility of kings throughout the biblical text and in the Ancient Near East.
If you are going to the Evangelical Theological Society meeting, we hope you will attend.
If it is good, then an electrical pump, a solar panel for power and a tank must be installed, along with plumbing and housing too. This all takes time and is not cheap! But Genesis Waters is funding all of this, which is a huge blessing to Kingsway.
Kingsway was in southern Uganda, which was safe from the conflict. In spite of the danger, they decided to bring desperate young people from the villages in the north to Kingsway. Of course, none could pay. Yet most of Kingsway’s first 150 students came from the conflict area. Milly and Sam made many trips to get children from their school, which was about 300 miles away.
This is actually not unlike what you see in the OT when kings are anointed and are filled with God’s Spirit, (1 Sam 16:13) or when the 70 elders are filled with the Spirit after Moses delegates some of his duties to them. (Numbers 11:25)
