The Man in the Back Row

For years, Rev Richard sat near the back at EPW’s training conferences in Soroti. He was always present and rarely spoke. To anyone scanning the room, he was one more face among many.

But the Word was doing its slow work. Conference after conference, as the Bible was taught and the gospel came into focus, something shifted in him that no one could see. Then one evening at the final session, he asked to speak privately. What he said had been building for years: he was serving in a prosperity gospel church, and he now understood that what he had been preaching was not the true gospel. He could not stay.

He knew exactly what leaving would cost. The prosperity gospel is not only bad theology. In much of the Global South, it is a livelihood. Walking away meant losing his financial support, his standing, and his security, with nothing certain waiting on the other side. He did not ask for an easier path. He asked for prayer for the courage to take the right one.

Today Richard serves as an evangelist in Soroti. Many have come to faith through his preaching, including women driven into prostitution by poverty, the people the prosperity gospel had nothing to offer but blame. Hope has taken root where there was little before. It began with a quiet man in the back row who heard the true gospel, counted the cost, and paid it.

We tend to measure a training conference by the men who speak up. God measures it by the men who go home changed.