Sister Rachel Aderi's Testimony
I don't have many details about what has been going on, but my experience in the church life has been such that since the first day I listened to Brother Tim Knoppe speak, I was spellbound. I had never heard anyone clearly speak on anything to do with God.
We belonged to a Pentecostal denomination that had "cell groups." Sister Sarah Kihuguru invited these brothers to speak to our cell group, and I remember it was on Galatians—the matter of the law versus grace. We listened, and I came to appreciate the way these brothers enjoyed Christ. I decided there and then that I did not care what price I had to pay, but that I was going to gain what this brother, Tim Knoppe, had. Thus I became regular in attending the meetings.
What struck me the most was the element of life in his speaking. The words he spoke were alive and immediately enlightened the mind. It occurred to me that there must be something different he was doing—that we were not doing. How was he so effective in his speaking, and how was there was so much life in his words? Eventually he told us about how we need to eat and drink Christ, grow in life, and become constituted so that we speak what has been constituted in us. This was our first introduction to using our spirit. We requested and even pressed these saints that we could meet every morning for morning watch and learn to exercise our spirit. Eventually these kinds of meetings went on for two years until these saints left Kampala.
Around the time that the Knoppes left, things had become quite different. My first suspicion that something was not right was aroused by the way we saints were being overly pushed for numbers. There was a need for the saints to have greater numbers, and this seemed to be the pressing issue. It was uncomfortable to us because this focus was reminiscent of what we had left behind in the denominations. In this case, all the gimmicks that were being used seemed to have been adopted from the denominations—with the similar, accompanying pressure to get the numbers coming in. I felt that the numbers could wait, if only to give us some time to adjust to all the new things that we were experiencing.
More workers came to visit every few months and tried to encourage us to go back to doing things the way we used to do them—the "old way." For instance, I was encouraged to go back to singing, which is what I used to do but had given up because this new way of life was so much more effective than what I had before.
The local brothers, except for one local brother who agreed with them (because he felt he had lost his congregation as a result of coming into the church life), tried to explain our concerns to the visiting brothers but to no avail. Eventually, in a very crafty way, we were all split up into three groups, one of which (our group) was left to die out completely, because we were not cooperating with the way the visiting brothers had decided to go. They took care of the other two groups: one at the university campus, and the other belonging to the former pastor mentioned above. However, the Lord was merciful! Just when we thought it was all hopeless, Brother Tim Knoppe came back to visit us and plugged us back into the Body, and we felt we were back in the life flow.
