God’s work in Uganda
CUNNINGHAM, Ky. (KT) — The Bible describes the word of God as “living and effective and sharper than any double-edged sword, penetrating as far as the separation of soul and spirit, joints and marrow” (Heb. 4:12 HCSB). Steve Ernest, a Kentucky Baptist, saw that firsthand in a remote Ugandan village with the conversion of the chief witch doctor and his wife.
Ernest, a member of Bethlehem Baptist Church and founder and executive director of Raising Hands Ministries International (RHMI), recalls one of the giant crusades that organization held in Uganda, utilizing a speaker system that could be heard within a 10-mile radius.
“You didn’t have to come to the crusade site to hear the gospel,” Ernest recalled. “There was a chief witch doctor who had multiple witch doctors under him. He had grown ill and could no longer walk. He and his wife were at home, night after night, and he heard the gospel. He called for the local pastor and said, ‘I want to know about Jesus.’ The pastor shared the gospel and he and his wife confessed faith in Jesus Christ. He was referred to as the ‘king of dreams’ and she was the ‘queen of demons.’ As a result, he ordered that all the witchcraft charms and elements be gathered and burned, saying ‘I am done with them.’ When asked about baptism, the witch doctor enthusiastically agreed, saying, ‘I want the people to see.’ He and his wife were among 275 people baptized. A few weeks later he was able to walk again. A church was established on his property and the church continues to meet there Sunday after Sunday.”
That account is just one of many that resulted from a desire by Bethlehem Baptist Church to put a name and face on missions.
Five people from Bethlehem Baptist Church went to Uganda in 2015 — a trip that spurred a ministry presence in that country that continues to grow and become more impactful each year.
Senior Pastor Tim Harvey, Ernest and three other church members made that inaugural trip after learning of a connection with Global Theological Seminary (GTS) in Jinja, Uganda, which was founded by the late Harold Cathey, who pastored in Kentucky. He had a connection with Charles Blair and the West Kentucky Baptist Association. “We heard about the connection with our association and decided to work with them,” Harvey said. The West Kentucky Baptist Association includes funds in its budget to help with scholarships to the seminary, said Glen Stewart, associational mission strategist.
“We started with five scholarships, and have expanded that to 20 scholarships,” Harvey said. “God was laying things on Steve Ernest’s heart, and he goes there twice a year and stays two or three months,” Harvey noted.
Today, the missions involvement has expanded from teaching, preaching and counseling at Global Seminary to include pastor training conferences, open air evangelistic crusades, church leadership training, Bible distribution, food and hygiene care, medical care, sports ministries and preaching in village churches and schools — all under the umbrella of RHMI.
“Bethlehem Baptist Church is very much committed to growing our participation in the two annual offerings (Lottie Moon and Annie Armstrong). We are very committed to the Cooperative Program and we have experience phenomenal growth in all three of those areas,” Ernest said. “It was a burden within the church to put a name and face on missions. That trip to Uganda was meant for us to be able to do just that.”
The trip affirmed to the five members that their church wanted to be involved at GTS by providing scholarships for students to get an education that “changes their lives, homes, marriage, churches and whole villages being affected as the result of the opportunity they have to study God’s word,” Ernest noted.
While leaving Uganda with a sense of mission accomplished in 2015, Ernest could not shake the “unexplainable” burden he carried.
He told his wife that the trip had been a huge success, but he came away with a burden. The next year he returned to Uganda where he went into various villages to do ministry, “all in hopes of explaining what I was felling in my heart. I was not able to explain or understand it myself. It was a wonderful opportunity to do ministry — I preached in some village churches, but instead of finding an understanding, I left with uneven greater burden.”
That led the following year to a Uganda trip with a team of national pastors, and their agenda included conducting pastoral training in refugee camps in the north. “I was restless during the night,” Ernest recalls. “I got up in the wee hours of the morning, made notes (for a sermon), but was not feeling comfortable with my notes. I felt a real compulsion to pray and ask the Lord to bring understanding as to what was going on in my life. “God took me to Exodus 17,” he said, where the story of the Amalekites attacking Israel is told. The account of Israel prevailing when Moses held up his hands, and Aaron and Hur on each side of him and holding up Moses’ hands when they grew heavy, inspired Ernest to start Raising Hands Ministries International, a 501c3 entity. “In a moment, God spoke into my heart, saying this is what I want you to do the rest of your life. I want you to go into these rural areas and raise these pastors’ hands who are tired and weak because of the pressures of life i ministry — I want to prevail in their lives and in their ministries. Since 2017 this is what we have been trying to do.”
The pastor training program has extended to include areas in Rwanda, Kenya, the Congo and Mozambique.
“Here is the burden we carry — we are all about evangelism and discipleship,” Ernest said. “There is a huge need in east Africa where 95-98 percent of all pastors are self-taught. That means that on Sunday mornings they get up and open up the Scripture and look at a passage and say ‘I think this is what it means.’ That is what they teach the people. Pastors are ignorant of the word of God but their churches are ignorant as well. That leaves them very vulnerable to false doctrine. Due to lack of formal education, and a lack of being proficient in the English language, these pastors do not qualify for admission top places like GBS and Uganda Baptist Seminary because those two schools are accredited under the Uganda National Council of Education.
“We are finding there is a whole sea of pastors that can’t speak or write or read English and they have very little formal education. There is a hunger for the word of God — to know it and understand it. It is not that they are not interested, but they don’t have the opportunity. That is what we feel is our calling —to go to these rural and remote areas and establish pastor training centers in churches and bring pastors in. We have developed curriculum, and it spans a two-year time period. We have four terms in a year at each site. Each term consists of two weeks of intense study from 7:30 a.m. to 5 p.m.
“This is for pastors and church leaders (including leaders for ministry to children, women and deacons). In September they will have completed their entire course of study, and for the first time of the establishment of the pastor training program, RHMI we will graduate our first students and they will receive a certificate in biblical studies. There are two other training sites now, praying God will provide finances for a fourth site because we have about 70 pastors begging us to come teach them. We were told they had been praying to God that someone would make their way up into the mountains to teach them the word of God. They have been praying consistently for five years. God has privileged RHMI to be His hands and feet among those pastors.”
Ernest said discipleship events are important there. “We have really felt a need to equip pastors and young (in faith) converts with a foundation upon which they can continue to grow. We have had our first discipleship boot camp, and the feedback was eye opening.
“We had pastors said they never had understood the security of the believer, never understood the importance of the Bible and prayer in the life of the believer, never understood the work of the Holy Spirit in the life of the believer. Some 300 people attend. When we taught baptism, we had 16 people who said they had never been baptized, and one was a pastor. At end of the boot camp, we had a baptismal service.
“We do open air crusades on a large scale — we don’t go into the cities. We are true to our calling to go into remote areas.”
The ministry includes going into schools. Alex Messamore, an elder at Grace Point Church in Henderson, “is an evangelist by gifting and passion,” Ernest said. “He goes into trading centers in the village setting and brings a team with him. They sing and preach and show the ‘Jesus’ film and people get saved. Alex also goes into schools with team of people, presents the gospel and uses a visual aid to teach the truth of Scripture like I have never seen before. It involves bleach and iodine — the students are mesmerized as he shares gospel truth, seeing how this iodine-colored water that represents sin in our lives is cleansed and washed away as the bleach additive (blood of Christ) is introduced.
RHMI also has opened a medical center in the Kaliro district — in a small, rural, remote area with no medications and treatment options available. The ministry has served many expectant mothers. “Before we opened the medical center, mother and child mortality was high. We have not lost a mother or a child. We have seen children brought in who are near death’s door because of malaria or parents who were not trying to treat them because they thought the children were demon possessed. In 2023, RHMI had a medical outreach camp that treated 848 people who had never seen a doctor nor received proper medication.”
Ernest also teaches at GTS every trip he takes.