Lets Go To Uganda

Hey, this is Jim Graham from the Masculine Journey Podcast, where we explore relationship instead of religion every week. Your chosen Truth Network Podcast is starting in just a few seconds. Enjoy it, share it, but most of all, thank you for listening and for choosing the Truth Podcast Network. This is the Truth Network. Welcome to Truth Talk Live. All right, let's talk. A daily program powered by the Truth Network. This is kind of a great thing, and I'll tell you why. Where pop culture, current events, and theology all come together.

Speak your mind. And now, here's today's Truth Talk Live host. It's a beautiful country with hills, with values, with gorillas, with all kinds of wildlife, with 48 million people who need Jesus. And we are going to Uganda today with a man who never thought he'd be there full time. He was an educator. He was a professor. He raised the IQ level when he walked into the Truth Talk studios.

He's my longtime friend, Mark Guthrie with Renew Uganda. Mark, it's good to have you in the hot seat here on Truth Talk. Thank you, Stu.

It's such a pleasure to be here, such a pleasure to see you again. It's crazy how we kind of grew up together. We kind of have a little history. Our parents were involved in a great Christian university in Greenville, South Carolina. A lot of folks listening from the Bob Jones community to the new 96.9 FM in Greenville and the new 88.3 FM in Spartanburg, covering all over the place.

We're going to go to Greenville and Spring, Shelby, Spartanburg, that whole corridor. But Mark, God's done something special in your life. And you and I have a similar testimony, because we kind of grew up with it all on the outside, but it took something to happen on the inside, right? Well, what happened when the light came on for you for Jesus, man? Let's start there, and then we're going to go to Uganda.

We're going to go on a safari today on the show. We may have a few folks that want to call in and ask you about that. But let's talk about a supernatural movement of God to reach the massive, swelling amount of young people in Uganda. Like, tell us that number real quick. How many people are under the age of 15? So the average age is now 15 in Uganda and dropping, and so there's 24 million people under 15 years of age. So we have 24 million kids. Literally, when you show up in Uganda, the Pearl of Africa, as Winston Churchill called it, it is completely a country of children. So the average woman has about six children now, and so the population explosion is really uncontrolled. So by 2050, Uganda will be the 21st most populous country in the world, and it's the size of Oregon. So you can just imagine, and it's all children.

It's literally a country of kids. Wow. So tell us how you found the Lord. I mean, you were hearing the sword of the Lord, you were hearing preaching, you were hearing the preacher boys, you were hearing the best of the best get up and bail the hay there from the pulpit all over Bob Jones University and Christian colleges, and you were in that world.

But tell us how you found Christ. Yeah, so I'm thankful for that. Obviously, great heritage with my family, great heritage with my growing up at that school for 22 years. But a lot of what I also got from that is I performed. I'd really become a performer, wanting the pats on the back, hey, if you do this, you're good, you're successful, you're great, those kind of things. And so I really grew up and became a performer. And that was to the detriment, I would say, even of my family, because you wanted to look the part, right?

And for some way, I kind of viewed God often as this eye that was slightly disappointed, always watching, never winking at me. And I could never quite earn enough. I knew the gospel in my head, but it took forever to get it 18 inches down into my heart. And so it really took, and I don't have time to go into it. You know what it took?

Brokenness. It took life getting messy and breaking apart completely for me, really, literally only 15 years ago, not even 20. That really showed me who Jesus Christ is and the power of the gospel, and especially the power of the gospel in a mess. And the fact that Jesus Christ doesn't leave in a mess, he actually runs to you. And so that, to me, changed everything inside of me. And that is now a privilege to be able to tell anybody in Uganda that I get to speak to the schools that I get to go to all the time every day.

Oh, my goodness. Let me tell you the hope that's in me, because even me, even me, that gospel can reach and Jesus Christ is, you know, is in the middle of of that mess. And so that, to me, really radiates every day. His new mercies every morning, that's incredible. What knocked Martin Luther off his horse, knocked me off mine, and that is the imputed righteousness of Jesus Christ given to you in spite of yourself.

What a blessing to hear that. And help us understand the shift from living a life doing for God, which effectively is religion. Earning from God, performing, achieving.

You know, the Olympics, you got to work hard all your life, you get that medal, then the next day you're bummed, because like, okay, I thought this would fill me up, it didn't. So talk about that shift from earning, behaving, to believing, and to coming into the reality of what God has done for you. Yeah, and I would say, Stu, again, that shift for me wasn't that long ago. The shift is from doing to being, and that's a hard one. When you're driven, a Type A personality, go, go, go, feeling like you just need to push forward and God somehow is pleased by that, versus abiding. What work does it take to abide? What work does it take to surrender?

Those are words that are hard sometimes when you're a performer, wanting to earn something and realizing, oh, maybe somebody already earned that for you. You know, I've heard somebody say, Christianity is the only religion that starts with the verdict, not guilty, because Christ has already been in the courtroom. So you start with that, and then you build off the not guilty verdict. So every time you're down, you can stand back up because you know why?

The judge has already declared you not guilty. And so when that really caught hold to me, it changed radically everything about me. Yeah, and now you're in the middle of Africa, in Uganda. How you got there, what a story that is.

You started this ministry, Renew Uganda. You were a North American educator. You were at Ohio State, you were teaching, you were at school. After advanced degrees, you got the D, the doctor, and then you're at this classical school academy, and then all of a sudden, you find yourself in Uganda. What in the world?

How do you make that leap start, but then we're going to take a break in a second and we'll finish after the break? Yeah, just cut me off. But yeah, I was very happy. I was the head of school at Caldwell Academy in Greensboro, North Carolina, classical Christian K-12 school.

Shout out to it. It was a great, great school there for 10 years. And about six years in, one of our principals left and moved to Uganda to take over the educational wing of an orphanage. And he called me, this is 2010, and said, hey, Mark, I think we have two Guthries here at the orphanage. And I was saying, well, we already have two Guthries here, so I'm pretty sure you don't there. And he said, would you pray about it? Because I think we have two sons here of yours. And you know, that'll pray about it.

You ought to be careful with that. Might take you to Africa. And so we prayed about it, and in 2010, in December, we went to Uganda and we adopted Pius and Brian, who are now men, adult men.

That's right, college sports. We'll come back to that, how he got to Uganda, what God is doing with these 24 million people, 15 and under, in this country, coming up on Truth Talk Live. Don't touch that dial. More on Uganda after this.

An all-expense-paid trip to Uganda. Could it be one way? Well, it depends on what happens.

Ask me that question in about a half hour, 45 minutes from now. I'm Stu Everson, this is Truth Talk Live. We're talking to a man of God who is really a hero of mine inasmuch as here he left the comfort of America. I mean, you're going and you literally are eating rice and beans.

You literally are dealing with a flat tire 200 miles from any kind of civilization or infrastructure. Mark Guthrie, you have this ministry, Renew Uganda, and you were telling us a little bit about how you went from being basically a Christian school educator here in North America, in North Carolina, to being a part of something that is so big. I mean, we were just in my office before we walked down the hall to do the show, and you were telling us we were all blown away, like some thousands of schools. Tell us a little bit about, well, keep telling us how you got there. Then we want to hear about how many and all these things that are happening, and our listeners want to get involved, too. I know they do. I'd love that.

That would be such a privilege. Let me do a quick story of how I got there. As I said, in 2010, we adopted two of the best guys in the world, Pius and Brian, my two youngest sons that are now 19 and 17.

They're both 6'3'' and big athletes, but better than that, they love the Lord with all their heart. They've taught me way more than I've taught them as their dad. In 2014, I was still running the Caldwell Academy in Greensboro, a great, great school, and I found out that there was an organization looking to build a school in Uganda, right in the area where we had adopted. I contacted them and just said, hey, we have more than enough here in Greensboro and at Caldwell.

What could we send you? Curriculum, philosophy, policies, procedures, what do you need? They said, we need consulting. I said, well, we'll do that for free. I talked to my wonderful board, and they said, go, just don't take a job.

That's what they said, go, but just don't take a job. So I went over, spent a couple of days there. Believe it or not, we went and I consulted in the exact orphanage where I had adopted Pius and Brian four years earlier, just an act of God. That's where the construction company happened to be that we were going to talk to. And so anyway, came back and then they called me and said, would you come be the guy and lead the effort and build a classical Christian really boarding school for the least of these in the most vulnerable in and around J&J Uganda. And so I got to do that. I moved over there in 2014 and stayed there at that school until the end of 2019.

And that's something. So you went and did that in when people hear of a school in Uganda. And we'll get to the scope of where it is now. But before we go there, the challenges that a young girl coming to school might face are a little different from in America. Talk about that, like what they're going through over there.

Yeah, well, for one, again, when I when I got there, you would stand up in front of people and say you try to say that basically because of Christ, the ground in front of the cross is always level. Right. Black is not better than white.

Men are not better than women. But these things are often taught from their very infancy there in Uganda. That idea it's in the culture regardless. And so I still remember running the school every Monday. We would have assembly and they all were ready for it. We had hundreds of students at that point. I'd be going through like the mission of the school is always bring that up.

The profile of a graduate we're trying to get you to. And then I'd always spin around in the middle. And I would say, because, ladies, you are and all the girls would stand up and scream priceless, priceless. And I would bring me to tears every Monday and say, image bearers of God.

Nobody can buy you because there you may sell your body for maybe 30 cents, 40 cents because you have nothing else to offer. And so so the girls are pushed down there often even because of their their times of the month and things like that. They have to sit out of school after covid. There were some districts that over 50 percent of the girls did not come back because of their child brides, because they they're the workers, the water carriers and stuff like that. There's no value on their education, the generation of women.

There's a shame culture kind of thing going on there. And so it's very hard, especially for the young ladies, to be able to be educated well and then to be able to take that next step of a good job and things like that. And then again, it's starting around 14, 15. You're having babies. And so you're really a target as a young lady in the in the village. And and so at that point, again, pregnancy is a very normal thing, unfortunately. And you can imagine I just met recently a 15 year old that had already had three children. And so you can just imagine where that's leading to with this population explosion.

And so and then you can't go back to school. You're pregnant, you know, so automatically you're out of you're out of that. And so right there, again, the cool part about what we do is the gospel changes everything. It brings order. It brings value.

It brings dignity. It redeems. It restores.

It renews. Right. It changes everything. And so what we're doing with our initiative, which we'll talk about in a minute, is really going after the hearts and minds of those that have the front are at the front line with those kids.

That's beautiful. And so they come to this school and they're learning basic grammar, speech, all these things, mathematics, literature, all these things in science. And you are also teaching them the beauty of Christ and the glory of God and creation. And you're building into them Christ's esteem to boost their whole life. And it's a whole transformation. But you started with one school.

Little did you know that you'd have how many now? Yeah, that's a God thing. Well, and even that, I would say, when you're in school and you're doing that, everything should point to Christ regardless.

Right? Math. I'm a mathematician. Science. History.

Everything. If you teach it with the biblical integration, again, which usually means you're biblically integrated. That's the best way to teach through your own understanding of the word of God and what he's done in your life. Then students start seeing who Christ is in every area. Right? So it's not separate. Here's Bible class. Right? Here's chapel.

Here's Sunday morning, whatever. It is through every subject you are being discipled into Christ. And it is showing you the more you know the subject, the more you know the creator. And so that really the model was truly a discipleship, 24 seven inside and outside, everything pointing you to who God is, his creation, his mankind, his purpose, all of those things. So that was the model behind the school.

And then after that, that model really caught fire. Now, if you haven't heard the story, he started with one school, and then suddenly it took off. Like, I can't believe you're going to have time to come into our studios. You might be the busiest man in the world. You're all over the place. You're sending me WhatsApp. You're sending me voice memos.

You're in different time zones. You know, you've got kids in college, but you're running, and someone says, Hey, you're pretty much like the Christian educations are of a whole nation in Africa now, Mark Guthrie. What's going on with that? Well, that's scary.

That's not true. I'm not the Christian educations are in Uganda. But the harvest is plentiful, Stu.

And everybody listening, wherever you are, the harvest is plentiful. Sub-Saharan Africa is, God has lit a spark there that is a true revival spark. Again, Uganda, it's only the size of Oregon, and it has 30,000 schools, secondary and below, 30,000 schools. And it's one of the last countries you can go into every one of those schools, secular, Muslim, Catholic, Church of Uganda, every one of those schools. And you can clearly preach the gospel. And so every time we go into school, that's the start, because their souls hang in the balance first. And so even though we're Renew Uganda Initiative, God is at work renewing minds, but redeeming hearts through that.

Okay, I want to flesh that out on the other side of this break. I want everyone listening to know you can get this whole entire broadcast as a podcast at our Truth Network podcast page. So just go, you'll find it, Truth Network podcast, look under Stu Epperson, Truth Talk Live, it's all there. And we'll also play this for our national, big national audience, even bigger national audience on our big Saturday show, which goes everywhere too. We're so grateful for all of our listeners in Dayton, Ohio on 106.5 FM. Thank you to our friends at VineTastic. I gave you your bottle, right? It's very good. It's almost done now.

No carbs, no sugar, and no calories. Our friends at MightyMuscadine.com have provided this underwriting partner, VineTastic, this refreshing beverage that I shared with my friend Mark. We've got to give this to Uganda, right? Thank you MightyMuscadine.com. Mention promo code TRUTH if you go there and thank them for being underwriting partners with us. We'll be back with more with Mark Guthrie after this.

Don't touch that dial. You're listening to the Truth Network and TruthNetwork.com. 30,000 schools across a nation whose population is 48 million. Uganda, we've got a man of God who grew up in America. Never thought he'd be over there doing this, but he's doing it now. He's got a ministry called Renew Uganda, and we're so glad Mark Guthrie is here with us. Mark, effectively, what is the mission of Renew Uganda? To break it down quickly, we focus on three what we call cooking stones, because there we use the term cooking stones for pillars, because we cook through the fire, so you have the three stones, and it doesn't work unless all three are balanced.

So we have our three cooking stones. One is uniting, then empowering, and then educating. And so it works this way. Uniting is truly bringing the main voices of Christian education all throughout Uganda together with the ministry of education. And so it's the idea, again, if you have 30,000 schools and you have 24 million kids, you have no chance unless we get together and figure out what to do as a common strategy. And so we don't do this around nothing. We start, even we just had our forum last week, or about a couple weeks ago, and we start always with repentance and worship with that group, that key group.

They may or may not be believers. That doesn't matter to us. We start with, we are the issue. We're the issue.

We're the ones that are the problem. And so until we are broken and we're confessing, then we go from there. And then we go through networking, advocacy with the ministry of education, direction, purpose, all of that. So under-uniting is conferences, forums, things like that of bringing Uganda together, again, around a solid statement of faith, around a mission, around a vision. Our vision is the complete biblical transformation of Uganda through Christian education. That's the vision. That's beautiful.

I love that. And then the two others, empowering, that's going after the current crop of teachers and administrators. Again, there's 30,000 schools. Wow, that's almost a million teachers.

So what do you do with those that are the influencers, right? Luke 6.40 says, eventually a student looks like their teacher. They become like their teachers. So if the teacher is transformed, boy, again, they have almost 80 kids in a classroom.

And so you can imagine what that does to the students. If the administrator's students formed, our motto is transform people, transform people. Normally, the gospel comes to you on the way to somebody else. And so the empowering is systematically going around to groups.

I was up just in Msindi about a month and a half ago, working with 64 Church of Uganda schools there with their administrators. And again, starting with the gospel and then going through best practices and things like that. We don't come on top of and say, hey, here's how you do it. We come underneath and say, who do you want to be?

And allow us to help you get there. So it's a humble ministry. It is not a top-down ministry. And then the last one's educating. That's going after the hearts and minds of the future educators, starting in secondary school and then working with the major universities there and their programs with their curriculum, with doing modules to really make them biblically integrated, biblical foundations, discipling the heart and not just going after the body, things like that. And so it's, again, three tiers. You have the uniting, you have the empowering the current educators and administrators, and then you have educating the future crop coming up to go after those 24 million hearts. That is something. What a beautiful vision. Renew Uganda is his ministry. Mark Guthrie is his name. He's the executive director. And you've been kind of giving, I guess, carte blanche access to all these 30,000 schools to go support them and love them and encourage them and train them.

Is that right? Yeah, which is amazing in itself. Again, so far, again, the Lord provides favor, so we don't take that for granted at all.

It's something that you can't do on your own. And so the Lord has opened the doors. We're a registered entity in Uganda.

We have incredible people on our board. I'm the only Muslim who they call us their westerner. And so, you know, everybody there is Ugandan. And so we don't need we don't need white saviors.

We had a Jewish when they did a great job. And so we want to promote Christ and and we want to do it in a country, you know, again, where again, we want to understand the culture and make sure that we we do it in a respectful manner. And so but those schools are open.

They are open. We just had at our forum the director of education for the Church of Uganda, which is he oversees 8000 schools and six universities. And he came and spoke at our forum and he talked about what God had done to his heart and that God has just broken it.

And now, again, he's partnering with the Renew Uganda Initiative to to enable this to happen. And so, again, those kind of stories are just happening over and over and over as God does the work. As we as we talked about before, the privilege is God's doing the work and we get to be have close. You know, we get to be right on the sideline, cheering as loudly as we can. And that's the privilege of being there. So where's your office, your home base?

Like, are you like is there a school where you have an office that you're at your base and then you got to go from there? Tell us. Take us there very practically.

What does it look like? Mark Guthrie, if we followed you to work one day to ministry, what would we see? Well, a lot of travel. And so there's not really I'm on the road a lot all around Uganda because of the type of ministry this is.

This is truly a uniting and empowering and bringing it all together. But I am based out of Word of Life International School, which is word of life out of New York. Yes, true and late. That's it.

Yeah, that's it. And so they have graciously shout out to them if they're listening there in Uganda. They're based in Chitende, which is between the airport and the capital, which is a strategic location. And they've graciously kind of made an arrangement where I have the wonderful opportunity to invest in a incredible administration.

There are teachers and students, a parent body. And in return, when I'm around, which sometimes is less than others, they allow me to stay there for free. So my food, electricity, things like that are there. And so that's your kind of home base, kind of my home base. And because it's near the capital of Kampala, I can be in downtown Kampala in 40 minutes and you can fly anywhere in the world.

And then you can you can you can fly anywhere in the world. Now, do you see ever see like wildlife, elephants, giraffes, gorillas, leopards? Not daily, fortunately. Lions, tigers, bears. I don't get attacked by the lions.

Yeah, they're on the game parks for the most part and reserves. Now, obviously we have you got to look out for certain things like snakes and things like that. We have the mambas, the black mamba, the green mambas, the cobras, the long cobras, the big snakes that look like trees. And Lake Victoria has its share of hippos and other things. Yeah, hippos are the most dangerous animal probably in Uganda.

Hippos, because they their tempers are fiery. Crocodiles, we have those. And so when we go swimming, I tell everybody I'm safe because I always have the kids jump in first.

And so, yeah, so if they're worried about my safety, I appreciate that. You don't have to shoot out of the crocodile, just shoot out of the youngster. I watch for a while. Hey, go pet that crocodile, Junior. I'm going to run up here.

I'm the very last guy on the rope swing. Unbelievable. But it's real. It's a different kind of thought. You know, when you hop in a lake here in North America, you're not thinking about that so much.

Yeah, what's underneath that surface. Maybe our Florida friends are more or other places. Right. But, you know, but you live on that Word of Life thing. You know, the founder of Word of Life, Jack Wertzen, his granddaughter, Tammy, is married to our ambassador and our Truth Network manager in Utah.

Oh, really? And they're probably listening to this right now. So the impact, the legacy of their family with Word of Life, there's a Ugandan missionary benefiting from the incredible vision that the Wertzen family had.

And so Russ and Tammy, God bless you and your awesome kids and grandkids. And this ministry goes on. Speaking of which, we've got to get Christian Radio out over there.

We do. It's ripe. I just was asked for that.

I was up in Siroti, first time I'd ever been in that area, which is a little bit toward Kenya. And they're desperate. One thing they brought up immediately, they're trying to build a school. We went and prayed, begged God for his mercy over 25 acres, because that's going to be full of children very soon that need the transforming work of Jesus Christ.

So we were literally in tears just begging God. But they want truth radio. They want radio that's going out that is actually proclaiming the real gospel of Jesus Christ. Solid truth, not the prosperity fluff, not the nonsense. And in a truth talk, this show is heard on a lot of affiliates, but most of our affiliates, some of them carry music and whatnot, but most of them do carry great Bible teaching and great content. And that's what we're talking about, trying to export that to Uganda. We need that to be a daily diet.

That's just not in most of the churches. And there's this big FM and AM stations over there. So we've just got to find a signal. We can literally shoot them the whole thing. We'll do the legal IDs. We'll do the breaks. We'll do some local promotions or whatever. Well, it was sponsored by this hour of Truth Network Uganda sponsored by Renew Uganda.

Mark Guthrie. We're all in. What do you think?

Well, it's a unique medium, right? We're going after the hearts and minds of kids in schools. But a lot of kids aren't in schools.

And so that's something that we're trying to work to. How do we address them? But their families, their teachers, their administrators, all of them listen to radio.

All of them are listening to radio. And so that is one, again, a great medium to get the gospel out, especially if it can be a consistent diet of godly truth. And people, again, they have ears to hear.

It is ripe right now. When they hear something like that, it is unique to them, because it's just not happening in their churches, and it's not happening in their schools. But the foundation of that, because here you are preaching and proclaiming and training leaders to train other leaders.

If you have radio like as air support. Like, I run into pastors all the time who say thank you, Stu. I got a letter from a pastor. I got a letter somewhere in this stack here who said, I listen to your network, and God used it in confirming my call to preach God's word, just hearing the sermons. And I thought that just blessed my soul. I met a pastor whose nickname is Hacksaw, who preached at the family country church over the weekend. And he said early in my days, before I even was really following the Lord, your station, AMA 30, drove me and encouraged me to follow Jesus. That and mama's prayers, and mama beat me over the head with her Bible. And I thought, what a blessing.

I had no idea. So we want to do this in Uganda. We're going to talk more about that. We're going to talk about the biggest challenges they face, and some of this will shock you folks. So stay tuned. More Truth Talk Live, right after this.

Hang on. How have you seen the Lord renew minds without that transformation of mind? Without a Holy Spirit regenerative, renewing, refreshing, recalibrating transformation? Where are we? What do we have? The natural mind, 2 Corinthians 14, does not understand the things of God.

They're foolishness to Him. But God has given us a new mind, and He has given my brother in Christ, longtime friend, lifelong friend, our parents were friends. Scary.

He has given him a ministry called Renew Uganda. And it's just, wow, I've watched how, you know, the AMAZMA, I probably mispronounced that. AMAZMA, that's right. Yeah, we reunited when you were at Colorado.

I'm like, no way. What are you doing there? And we caught up, we have all these mutual dear friends going past from Greenville. And you listened recently to 96.9, the new 96.9 FM in Greenville. And we are welcoming, for the first time, St. Nick is going to be excited about this, three new affiliates as of this week in northern Florida. All the way from the beautiful area, I've got it right here on my phone, we've got northern Florida, Jacksonville, Florida area. Check this out, my friends, we are on in Folkston, Georgia, Brunswick, that whole area, Sea Island, on 91.3 FM. We are on in Jacksonville, Florida, hello Jacksonville, 91.7 FM. And we are on in St. Augustine, the first city established in our fine nation, by the way, by the Spanish, on 91.9 FM. So hello, friends, say hello to everybody there. Hey, hello, northern Florida, southern Georgia. I was in Atlanta for eight years in education, and so that's a special place down there.

Well, I'm going to tell you something. We'll get you down there to Jacksonville and see a lot of people down there want to hear more about and want to support you. And we're working on helping you create some content, some radio features, maybe some podcasts and some shows so you can, on a retail level, tell everyone about what God's doing and get our listeners to support. I mean, imagine the power of being able to say, I send my kids to Christian school.

What a beautiful thing. They go, they have Christian educators. I had lunch today with a mutual friend who's a Christian educator, and just the fact that this guy has poured his life into raising up leaders who have changed the world. So you're a product of a Christian education.

Now, that stuff didn't quite stick until a little later, but when it did, right? And so, Mark Guthrie, the opportunity, I've just never heard such a big opportunity. And people in America need to get behind this, because this is like 30,000 schools?

That's right. And how many million? Tell everyone that just joined us, your ministry, Renew Uganda. Tell many people the statistical numbers of the youth in Uganda.

This is remarkable. There's 48 million people in Uganda, but tell everyone the numbers. And 24 million of them are under 15 years old. 24 million! What a mission field.

And again, it's going to become the 21st most populous country in the world by 2050. This is an opportunity that's really unprecedented. And the cool part about this is, God is a re-God.

He renews, he remakes, he restores, he redeems, he reconciles. And we're seeing all of these things happening through this ministry without having to build buildings. When we were doing the Amazama school and things like that, you have to raise a million dollars for a building, or 500,000, or whatever else. That's before you pay for the first kid.

Yeah. For us, this ministry, we are trying to raise funding to go after people. And these are the transformers, the change agents, to go after those 24 million people, those kids. And so, to me, it's such a value, because again, and we have churches, we have one church that has opened their doors, they have 17 campuses, and said, any time, any time, all around Uganda, you're welcome to use our campuses for this work of training those administrators and educators to go after the hearts of those kids. That is so cool. So you're pouring in these kids, these are the future leaders. And it's not like there are soldiers with guns saying, don't come in here, don't talk about Jesus, or we're going to kill you. It's wide open!

So that means that people listening right now are awesome studio artists, one of our ambassadors is in here, Baller Nation. People listening, he can go, he's got a passport, he can go get an airplane and go with you! And share the gospel!

Publicly! Yeah, the harvest, again, I've said it, let me say it one more time, it's plentiful. And the laborers are few.

It's wide open right now. And God is on the move. And what we're seeing happening in the hearts and minds of these administrators and educators, and again, some of the administrators are overseeing hundreds of schools, just one administrator. And again, when God gets their heart, then they, again, he works and gets those administrators that work in those schools. And then it goes on to the teachers, and then it goes on to those kids, which go on to the families, which goes into the villages, which you start seeing just the differences that makes men stay with women. People start serving others instead of being concerned, just completely about themselves. You know, it becomes a selfless mentality.

You start saving money instead of spending money. The gospel, really, it's practical, it changes every part of your life once it grabs ahold of you. Wow, so God's tasked you with Renew Uganda to really make the gospel a priority, and to unleash it into these 30,000 schools that are, some are Muslim-run, Catholic-run, Protestant-run, but they're letting you come in carte blanche to speak, to teach, to preach, to train the teachers in this, to develop these kids, and to give them dignity.

Real quick, we want to wrap up the show. Biggest challenges, biggest opportunities. Start with biggest challenges. Like, get real here with our listeners. They need to know what's going on. What's a kid face?

What's a 12-year-old girl face in Uganda? These kids you're trying to encourage and raise up in the gospel and educate. Well, the ones that are fortunate enough to go to school are going to schools, and we are having to take them out of schools all the time and move them to shift schools because of sexual issues. Again, if you can imagine 24 million children, they're unprotected. And so they are targets for everybody.

All kinds of predators, sex slavery, trafficking. And they work in the schools. They're the administrators. They're the heads. They're the teachers.

They're the ones that are supposed to be protecting. They don't have parents necessarily, many of them. They might have a jaja, a grandma or a grandpa.

They might have an uncle somewhere. We had 10-year-olds that are heads of household there, and so they're running their households. And so you can imagine the problems there that we face with just trying to protect these kids.

And so that's huge. And this is a place that Satan has had his way. It's been a dark continent, and there's a lot of witchcraft.

There's a lot of black magic. There's a lot, again, of sexual exploitation and things like that. And so we are fighting a generational battle there, but we are fighting it generationally through this ministry, through the Uganda Initiative. So you're targeting these young people. They're the future, but you've got to go in and protect them. Like you're going to say, hey, this 12-year-old little girl, there's an educator here trying to take advantage of her. We've got to get her out of there.

Always. And it's so hard. Get them out and put them where? And so always people are constantly looking for a certain type of person to come in and work with their children and teach in these schools, and there's not many out there. And so, again, the challenge is now producing transformed people that have a heart for Christ, and they see children as image bearers of God, and they try to get them to be the people they're created to be. A church listening could adopt a village. I mean, how hard is that? They say, hey, we want to adopt.

What do you need? You'll tell them. It goes a long way. And when you're dealing with a guy like Mark Guthrie, if I give you a pair of shoes right now, I know they're going to be on the feet of a Ugandan. That's probably not the most practical way to do it. There's ways to buy stuff over there cheaper.

Getting them Bibles, getting all these things, the needs, building into them, getting them the gospel is critical, isn't it? And everything opens the door like that. Somebody threw out a pair of cleats yesterday, and I picked them up, and I'm taking them back to Uganda. No kidding. Because that opens the door.

They love soccer. Those kind of things. Anything that is an open door for the gospel.

For me, it's education, because that's been my passion. And I see the doorways. It opens through that. So there's no separation of church and state with the schools there. Oh my goodness, no.

They have an outlawed prayer in schools in the Ugandan schools. Welcome it. They're begging you to come. Muslim schools are begging Christians to come teach them about Christ. You are welcome to come in.

Unbelievable. Because you're bringing Christ, you're bringing love, you're bringing hygiene. That's right. You know, little common, basic things. It changes everything.

The protection of these kids who are vulnerable, and there's all kinds of evil. So those are some of the challenges. Really quick, some of the big opportunities, the biggest way we can pray for you guys moving forward. Yeah, prayer is key to everything, as you know. We have a website, renderuganda.org.

It's really easy. But please, please help support it. We're about half funded right now because things have blown up so fast.

And so, again, the Ministry of Education, the Church of Uganda, these wonderful partners have come on board. And we know it's not a lot. It's only about $200,000 our entire annual budget to do all of this. I mean, it's not millions. It's not building buildings.

It's building people. And so we're literally trying to get people to just realize, hey, there's different ways. If you can't go, give, because every time something happens, every time somebody's transformed, your account is credited in Heaven for that. And so we want to make sure that partnership, the prayer, the investment, the coming around and helping, that's huge.

Mark, I can't help but think that the American Church, and I'm saying us and we here, I'm not saying they and them, okay? I'm saying we are so blessed, we are so fat and wealthy, and there's so many needs over there, so surely we can help. And how can we help practically?

People listening, churches, initiatives, that sort of thing, how can they help practically really help you transform a whole generation of these youth in Uganda? Yeah, so of course prayer is everything for us. And we just came off 21 Days of Prayer and Fasting, and God blew the doors off at a forum. It was just unbelievable what he did in uniting the hearts and minds of people there. Giving, please, jump in.

Don't stand on the sideline. Again, God credits you. Everything that happens there, you're part of. And so it's renewuganda.org, and just whatever you can do to partner with us. And then come! We are able to host. Short-term trips, long-term trips.

Educators, especially. He's already invited our studio audience, our basketball nation, to go with you. This guy's going. As long as there's a basketball court, he can dunk you. Where I stay is a great basketball court, so he'll be dunking you, and I'll be watching him.

Oh no, now I want to go too. I can alley-oop, I can throw it up to him. We can bring a team over, bring Randy Shepard, Crossfire. We can play a team, share the Gospel. Tour! Now again, getting churches involved, getting partners involved, in different ways, because again, we're reaching out to 30,000 schools. There's a lot. I took a soccer ball to one school, and they had not had a ball on their campus like that for five years.

Come on! So they canceled school, and they all came out, and talk about an audience, a captive audience, just because you have a soccer ball, holding the soccer ball, you had the entire school for the afternoon. And you got to talk to them about goals, right?

The other kind of goals. Yeah, that's right. And did you play? Did you get in there? Of course. Are you kidding me? You can still hit it.

You can still get out there and kick it. Mark Guthrie, renewuganda.org, friends, learn more. And we're going to take this all over Africa, too, what God's doing, right? Yeah, again, we're Kenya, Rwanda, already starting to extend in there. Another program powered by the Truth Network.