A Church for Kanara…

Google can’t find Kanara, but when Isingoma did, he made it his home. Fifteen years later, he is planting the fishing village’s first church.

Located on the southern shores of Lake Albert, Kanara is made up of 15,000 to 20,000 displaced residents. Most of them arrived after spending four hours on a rickety boat, all they knew fading behind in the wake.

Isingoma arrived in 2003 as the official fighting from the Second Congo War was coming to a close. Between the fighting and all the disease and starvation that has marred the aftermath, more than 5.4 million people died, making the African World War (as it is often referred to) the deadliest conflict on earth since World War II. 

Isingoma survived, but was among the 2 million people who were displaced. He might have considered going home, but violence has marred eastern Democratic Republic of Congo ever since. Today, it is home to the largest United Nations Peacekeeping Mission in the world. Still, people are boarding old boats for a one-way trip across Lake Albert into Uganda — more than 60,000 in the past year have braved passage through the storms, hippos and crocodiles common to Africa’s seventh largest lake (2018 statistic).

Some make their way to refugee camps, but others start a new life where they land. That’s what Isingoma — who goes by his Christian name, Richard, among Westerners — did those 15 years ago. He landed just across the Uganda border in Kanara, a village made up of Congolese refugees. All these years later, Uganda doesn’t claim them, Congo has no record of them and Google won’t even put them on a map (try mapcarta.com).

Life in Kanara is extremely difficult. There is little in the way of natural resources outside of the lake, so Isingoma became a fisherman and helped build homes on the side. With a wife and two daughters, he was always worried about disease, particularly from the absence of a clean water supply.

Five years ago, the family moved south to Fort Portal. Isingoma, who became a Christian as a boy in Congo, found a church for the first time in years at Living Spring. He began working on the evangelism and cell group teams, where he found a partner in a man named Kyamanywa (Christian name, Tadeo). Kyamanywa had lived in Kanara for five years himself. While born in Uganda, his father was Congolese.

Not long after being in ministry together, the two men approached Living Spring Pastor Ronald with an idea. Why not do an evangelism crusade in Kanara, a place so close to both of their hearts? The answer: yes. But they would need to pray for a partner to help with finances, and they would need to plant a church so that the work of the crusade would be a seed that could continue growing. 

With support from Living Spring and its western partners, that dream was realized more than three years later. Isingoma and Kyamanywa (Richard and Tadeo) helped lead that long-planned crusade, and land was purchased in 2019 for the church plant.

“I feel the call to go and minster to the people,” Isingoma said before launching the church plant, speaking to ABIDE representatives through a translator as Swahili is his native tongue (as well as Kanara’s chief language). “I want to take the Lord’s salvation there. As the Bible says in the book of Mark 16:15, ‘Go into the whole world and preach to every creature’ so that those people may be saved and enter the Kingdom of God. I feel that call in me that I should go and actually do that in Kanara. They don’t know Jesus. It would be an opportunity for them to know about the Lord and turn their lives around. When we take the crusade there, our dream is to then stay there and spread the Word. We begin from there. That is what I feel in me.”

Google may not know about the people of Kanara, but God knows each one. He knows each story of fleeing violence, of lost loved ones, of passages over stormy waters. He knows. We pray more of the people of Kanara will meet this God who knows them and loves them so personally — at a church just across the lake from where so many of those stories began.

Want to help Richard and Tadeo continue the work they have started in Kanara? Contribute through ABIDE to the Kanara Church Plant Project.