A ministry to the East African nation of Uganda
The Master’s Institute for Education
What if you could help fully redeem a long-broken culture in Christ?
For over 30 years, New Hope Uganda (NHU) has taken the fatherhood of God to orphans and others (Ps 68:5-6). They build relationships through building real families and through full-orbed, effective education in Biblical manhood and womanhood.
Ministry leadership recruited Ron and Christina Kirk to join the staff of New Hope Uganda help launch the new Master’s Institute for Education (MIE). MIE holds tremendous promise to redeem Ugandan culture and society for Christ, taking NHU’s success to the nation and beyond.
MIE is educating Uganda’s teachers to bring every thought captive to Christ in every area of life. They produce graduates capable of true Christian leadership in the home, church, business, and government. The work of MIE includes educational advocacy as well.
NHU recruited us — as effective pioneers in a uniquely Biblical approach to education — to make additional contribution, to take an active role in teacher training and curriculum development for MIE.
From the beginning, the Kirks’ work in education fundamentally contributed to the NHU ministry.
What if an entire nation’s culture could be redeemed for Christ?
Many years ago, I sought God for the best way to break the vicious cycle of foundation-destroying, sinful degradation in our culture, and to reach the next generation for Christ. I realized the best contribution I could make was intervention through child and family education. This realization led to a unique and effective partnership with Jay and Vicki Dangers.
Rebuilding a Nation
For over 25 years, Jay and Vicki have worked fearlessly and tirelessly to bring the fatherhood of God to the fatherless in Uganda, Africa (Ps 68:5-6). The Dangers and the Kirks shared the expanded Biblical view that says everything in life belongs to Christ and His earthly and eternal purposes. Via the Master’s School ministry in the mid-1980s, we assisted the Dangerses with working Biblical tools for accomplishing their vision. In turn, they enhanced our vision.
Through their Kasana Children’s Center — a Christian town in reality — and other ministries, Jay and Vicki have long worked alongside the Ugandan people to help replace soul-damaged orphanhood, dysfunctional families, and broken society with godly families, relationships, and economic success in expanding spheres. This is the complete, culture-changing Gospel the Lord always intended. Today, their great success has caught the attention of Ugandan community and national leaders, up to and including Uganda’s first family. You can read their compelling story in detail at their website and in their daughter Jennie’s excellent book The Long Road to Hope.
In our visit to Uganda, Christina and I were humbled and amazed at the functioning, godly community at Kasana. Rather than institutionalize orphans created by Idi Amin and rampant AIDS, the children belong to real families. These new families provide most of their own support through agriculture and other industry. Along with nearby village children, these children of Kasana’s families have consistently achieve among the highest passing rates into secondary school. Many of these young people have become personally accomplished community leaders.
A New Educational Initiative
God has now arranged many spiritual and material elements to allow New Hope Uganda to make a further major impact toward the building of a godly and prosperous nation. Uganda has mostly known backwardness and trouble. Far better than recovery missions are those that provide the solutions to problems at their very root.
Christ’s internal kingdom expresses itself through godly relationship and economic activity. Higher expressions include solid families, churches and civil communities living in liberty under protection of individual life and property to the blessings of all. In turn, these provide the foundations for the work of the Great Commission.
While, the present Ugandan educational system self-consciously seeks sound Biblical Christian goals such as honest productivity, cheerful community investment, etc., its materialistic Enlightenment methods cannot get there from here.
The Kirks’ Contribution
Meanwhile back in the States over several decades, the Kirks’ effective educational approach succeeded with a great variety of students of various educational and cultural backgrounds. We operated on the premise that God created us in His image with inherent personal value and purpose, but, due to the Fall, we desperately need redemption from sin. Sound educational training prepares the child to receive the reality of God’s transforming grace in due season. A character capable of walking by faith toward excellence and with relationship central in all things grows through a crafted, proven, correctible system that has produced good fruit wherever it has gone. It is the Lord’s doing and He receives the glory.
Because the New Hope worldview and educational system built upon the Kirks’ work, they urged us to join them to help plan the new Master’s Institute for Education teacher training college and educational advocacy foundation (MIE). Our short month’s work seemed miraculously prosperous with the result that many Christian Ugandan leaders in education, government, ministries and business are becoming increasingly excited, encouraged and ready to join the effort. The MIE folks move ahead by faith.
Back in the States, the Kirks provided intensive training to MIE leadership to further their already advanced expression, capable of training others into the Christian worldview and into a thoroughly Biblical educational content and method toward the Lordship of Christ in all areas of life. Through the preparation of the nation’s teachers into a thoroughly Biblical understanding of life and education, Uganda stands to be completely renewed as a nation through its families (Matthew 28:18-20; Isaiah 2:2-4).
America’s present dismal condition arguably persists through an increasingly militantly materialistic educational system. The decline began as early as the 1830s through the influence of Horace Mann. Little by little American schools killed our love of God, of Christian liberty, and of wisdom. On the contrary, God promises to restore effective generational Biblical Gospel faith, skill and wisdom through a redeemed educational system. Through godly vision, effective tools, and the power of the Holy Spirit, true education rebuilds the home, church, school, business, civil government and all of life in obedience to Christ.
MIE asks us to continue the work from the U.S. and periodically in Uganda. As resources permit, our main tasks will be to assist project leaders Godfrey and Olga Kyazze and education professor Dr. Gillian Kasirye in building curriculum and training faculty.
We have long prayed God would release us to finish and propagate our refined educational body of wisdom crafted over the years through faith in action. Curriculum needs polishing and editing into publishable teacher’s guides and textbooks. Thank God, we are making progress.
The Future
This work is extremely portable and readily reproducible in people of every native gifting, cultural background, and education. Thus, an important element of the MIE work is the promise that as we are successful in Uganda, others in Africa and beyond may receive similar power of blessing. We pray the United States may once again revive its amazing heritage of godliness and blessing in every institution. Indeed, our educational vision largely grew out of God’s hand on early America.
Contact us if you wish to contribute to this ministry.