Claire, the children and I send you greetings from Mityana Uganda. We hope that you and your family have had a wonderful Christmas celebrating the birth of our Dear Lord Jusus Christ.

As a family we are doing well except for Claire that was recently diagnosed with chronic fatigue which continues to bother her. She is getting rest to see that her body regains good health. All of our children are doing well. We are thankful for having spent a lot of time with them this year than usual more especially for the three [Edith, Sarah and David] who spend most of their time at school.

We are first and foremost thankful to God for His faithfulness in all the wonderful things that He has done in our lives and ministry in the year 2020. We are with great joy and thankfulness appreciating your love, prayers and giving to our ministry and family this year, without your obedience in partnering with us, this could have been a little difficult but with partners like you we have been able to reach many people in our community witht the gospel and discipling those who have come to the faith.

This has been a different year as you already know, with the coming of COVID-19 most of our ministry fields have been closed for more than a half of the year. We haven’t been able to do a lot medical missions, kids community camps (VBS) and the Christian school. Though things have been difficult and different, God has allowed us many other opportunities through which we have been able to reach the community with the gospel of our Lord and many of our church members have been able to grow in God’s word and develop personal convictions as related to what they believe.

ESUUBI BAPTIST COMMUNITY CHURCH.

As some of you may already know, this year we were able to change the name of our local church fellowship from ESUUBI COMMUNITY CHURCH (ECC) to ESUUBI BAPTIST COMMUNITY CHURCH (EBCC). This came as a result of our registration with the Baptist Union of Uganda.

We started off this year by openning our new church building in March, however, shortly after the openning of the new church building, the Ugandan government declared a national lockdown on schools, churches and all public places where people from different places gather.

As a church these are some of the things the Lord has allowed us to accomplish in His grace this year.

1. Grand openning of our new church building.
2. sharing the gospel through the community radio station reaching close to 3000 people with the gospel our Lord during the COVID-19 lockdown.

3. Teaching and encouraging our church members to focus on the area of family worship and family discipleship as this fits the Biblical mode of a home and raising godly children.

4. We have been able to train young people the reason why and how to share the gospel with their friends and anyone; God has overwhelmingly worked and working in the hearts of these young people, majority of them are zealous in sharing the gospel with their friends and strangers.

5. Just like the past years, even this year we had a Christmas party for the children under our care and their friends. We gave out new clothes, shoes, had a good meal and celebrated a group birthday for the kids who never celebretrated this year.

6. This Christmas we have been able for the first time to organise a Christmas play explaining the significancy of celebrating the birth of Christ. We invited just a few people there are still restrictions on the number of people can attend a single church gathering at a time. The play was well received and the gospel message was clearly shared in the play and by the Pastor after the play. We are thankful to God for the seeds of the gospel that have been planted this seasson of the year and the entire year, we are praying that He will germinate them.

Fountain of Life Christian School.

This year due to Covid we only had school for one and half months, since mid March we haven’t been able to open school due to the national lockdown on schools.

Though schools have been locked most of the year, we decided to do homeschooling for most of our kids in the community. This was challenging because of our parents or caregivers were the children come from, do not know how to read or to write therefore, we decided to send some of our teachers to go and teach the children who could gather in a group [kids from neighboring homes could gather in a group to study together]. Home school is now in the break as we wait on when the government of Uganda will lift the lockdown.

Due to your faithfulness in praying and giving to our ministry, this year despite the financial constraints we have been able to raise funds and build a three classroom block for our bigger kids. We are grateful to God for this amazingly strong and beautiful building. Thank you for being faithful in your partnership with us in furthering the gospel.

We are also thankful to God for providing us with the funds to buy a family/ministry van [Regius 4×4 Diesel]. We bought a used one but in very good condition vehicle which is already proving to be very useful in helping to cut transportation costs of hiring a car and allowing the convenience to travel whenever we have to.

Medical missions.

This year we haven’t a lot of open opportunities to do medical missions since the government issued a decree that no gatherings are to take place during this time of the pandemic. This put a limit on how many people we reach with free medical care in our community and other communities since our medical camps often gather 100s people with massive medical needs. Though gatherings haven’t been able to work, we have been able to continue seeing patients who manage to come to our home and those who have chronic illnesses that are on medical care list. We have not lost any single patient under our care this year; for that reason we give the glory back to God.

Prayers and needs for 2021.

As we trust God for life and looking forward to 2021, we are praying to build dormitories for the school children;

• Who travel long distances to come and access the school, this affects their grades since they reach school when they are already tired and most them are between 6-9 years who walk close to 8KM to and fro school. This also means that some kids start walking as ealry as 6am in order to reach school on time; this could expose the selfish men who could rape them.
• Some of our kids are living grand parents and care takers who are involved in very ungodly activies like drunkness, alcohol selling and other kids are neglected since caretaker or grandparent is taking child care as a priority.
• If we able to build the dormitory, we will be able to bring the children who live far from the school to stay in the dormitory on the school property which will save them the distance, dangers of being raped which would improve their livelihood and grades at school.
• Building the school dormitory will enable those kids who are from families where they are neglected to have an opportunity of being cared for in a better way.
• Above all, building the dormitory will allow us more time with the kids increasing our opportunities of teaching them God’s word than it would be if they are in their homes where there is no one to teach and live out the gospel before them.
• For us to be able to build dormitories [separate for the boys and for the girls], we need to raise $ 55,000.00. We do not have to build it at a single time, we may build the first fisrt block and then build another in the next couple of years. For us to build the first block we need to raise $ 25,000.00. We are fully dependent on God to be able to raise these funds; praying that the Lord will lead in praying and possibly help us financially in meeting this need.
• With the building of the new classes, we are more likely to recruit new students in our school, our school is heavily dependent on sponsorhsips of individual friends like you and others, we kindly ask you to pray about sponsoring a child or a couple of children in our school. Our school year in Uganda has three semesters. For you to be able to provide tuition, school uniform, medical care and a meal at school for one child per year, it costs $360.00 which is $90.00 per semester. We currently have a total of 34 sponsored childen out of 120 young people we had as per this year, we are anticipating the number of unsponsored kids to increase in 2021. For us it’s not just academics, for every child that joins our school, gets an opportunity of hearing the true biblical gospel preached every week through out the year through our chapels. As of last of the beginning of this year, out of the 120 young people we have in school, about 80 of them had trusted Christ as their Savior. Help us to reach more children with the gospel for they are the future leaders of our country and world; and we need godly leaders to advance the Kingdom of God. [for details look for the 2019 fourth Quarter and 2020 first quarter newsletter here on the esuubi website.]
• As EBCC, we are focusing on training young leaders that will inturn train others. The majority of our parishoners are young people, by God’s grace they are growing in the knowledge and grace of our Lord; they are passionate about sharing it, as of now as i write a group of my young people [12-14 years] went on their own to the neighborhood and gathered a group of six younger people [6-9 years] and they are sharing the gospel and playing games with them. Nothing warms my heart like seeing these young people learning to be disciples that make disciples.

In case you are led to giving towards our goal, kindly click on this link and follw the simple instruction. https://www.paypal.com/payme/hopeforuganda1

Thank you for reading our ministry report and partnering with us in furthering the gospel in the community where God has called us to serve; many blessings to you and your loved ones.

May He find us faithful,

Kenny and Claire.