This week the OFM team will be traveling to a place with no church, no believers, no worship of the true God. We’ll be producing a video that may bring awareness and prayer support to this area, but as always there are delicate paths to tread. Please be in prayer for the team as they try to capture the life of this people and the love God has for them.

Rwanda has come a long way since 1994.  As you descend into Kigali international airport, the sun glints off the corrugated roofs that decorate rolling hillsides, and many people on the plane will leave the country a couple of weeks later convinced that Rwanda itself is a glimmer of light in a ‘dark continent’ that often seems to make the headlines for the wrong reasons.  Significant aid money and foreign investment are driving an ambitious development programme that is producing tangible results in health, education and infrastructure, but those who stay here for any length of time soon become aware of a heaviness in the atmosphere that cannot be solely attributed to the sub-tropical climate.  Clouds of a different variety still hang over Rwanda.  The annual week of mourning remembers the dead but also traumatizes many of the living, and there are daily reminders of the genocide in the war of words with France and the war of attrition a few miles over the border in Eastern Congo, where the humanitarian catastrophe caused by ethnically-motivated fighting has claimed 5,000,000 (yes, that’s five million) lives since 1998.  How can we not lose heart?

Perhaps a better question is how can we lose heart, when Rwandans themselves – who have suffered so much – refuse to do so?  Rather than blame God for their problems, they look to Him for solutions and recognize the need to depend on Him in a way that they never have before.  ‘We are in God’s hands now’, they reason.  Nominal Christianity has had its day here.  90% of the country was ‘Christian’ before 1994, but too many churches now serve as memorials for that statistic to be taken seriously.
Here’s a statistic that should be taken seriously – only 5% of the country’s proliferating evangelical churches have a pastor with any kind of theological training.  This is a problem in most African countries, but it seems to be particularly acute in Rwanda where the very events that led to a new spiritual openness have deprived the country of the people best placed to fill in the blanks.  A generation of pastors who were not prepared to condone genocide either fell or fled in 1994.

By 2001, the Church was starting to look forwards instead of backwards, and the scale of the task ahead of them became apparent.  ‘We realized that we needed our own college’, says Pastor Karangwa, President of the Evangelical Alliance of Rwanda, a grouping of thirty different evangelical denominations.  In a country infamous for division, this bold demonstration of vision and unity was something that AIM felt compelled to encourage, and we agreed to partner with the Alliance as they developed a facility to equip church leaders for the unique challenges of ministering to post-genocide Rwanda.  Slowly but surely, the Faculté de Théologie Evangélique au Rwanda (FATER) has grown in size and effectiveness.  It is now in its third set of rented premises, teaching evening classes in the classrooms of a local school and using the conference room of a neighbouring church for office space and a library.  The plywood partitioning gives our accommodation a very temporary feel and it will soon be time for us to move on again.  With a growing library, faculty and student body (now up to 62) we are working closely together in every sense, and we desperately need our own set of premises.  You have to see the funny side when your lesson is drowned out by a rainstorm or when you see the older students using torches to read their exam papers in the gloom provided by a couple of 60W bulbs, but if we are serious about training men and women to lead Rwanda’s churches, then we have to aspire to something better than this.

And so we find ourselves on the brink of some momentous changes in the life of the college.  As Rwanda joins the East African Community and the Commonwealth, we are having to teach in English as well as French and we are now known as The Rwanda Institute of Evangelical Theology, as well as FATER.  To make this transition we need to recruit English language teachers and we are also looking to take on additional theology lecturers.  We are keen to maintain the balance of Rwandan and ex-pat staff that we currently have, with a view to the college being led by a Rwandan principal within a few years.

Other challenges include the need to pursue accreditation and to move ahead with the building project.  We currently have a piece of land and a set of plans, but the realization of those plans is in the Lord’s hands.  We are keen for the Evangelical Alliance to be the driving force behind the college’s development, but as they seek to raise money from local churches, we recognize the need to partner with them and give Christians from around the world the opportunity to invest in something that will help to establish God’s kingdom in Rwanda and to empower the Rwandan Church to look beyond its own borders to the unreached peoples of Africa.

At times the challenges that lie ahead seem daunting and I am tempted to ask myself that question: how can we not lose heart?  But then I look at one of my students, Gratien, a pastor in his fifties, who did not lose heart when the militia hammered on the doors of his church and demanded the lives of the 300 people that he was sheltering there.  I remember what Gratien told me about how his time at the college has transformed his ministry and given him a new confidence to teach God’s Word to those who are often tempted to lose heart.  And I look at Phanuel, who found the answer to his own question and is now back in Rwanda.

Instead of airplanes, OFM used a Land Rover to travel to it’s last video production. Located in the picturesque Cherangani hills, overlooking the great Rift Valley to the east, Kapsowar is a small town known throughout the region as a place of healing. There is a mission hospital there, and few families of the Kalenjin population have been untouched by it’s ministry, both physical and spiritual. Dr. Paul Larson and family have lived and worked there for two years now and we had the privilege of capturing their life and the ministry of the hospital on video.

-Ted

In less than a week Andy, Tim and I will be flying Kenya Airways to Kigali, Rwanda. There is an new Theological College there that has a story to tell and we are privileged to tell it. Pray that God will give us eyes to see and creativity to produce a video that shows how God is changing lives in Rwanda through the Rwanda Institute of Evangelical Theology. -Ted

A ladies’ Bible study has been meeting at the house of our hosts. At some point in its growth, the question was raised as to whether or not a secret church should sing out loud. Worshipping together in this manner, they decided, was well worth the risk of being caught. But the decision to sing was costly. Before we had arrived, a hostile neighbor, suspicious of the workers’ true intentions, lifted a cell phone over the wall and recorded some of the singing. As we pulled out of the driveway on our way to visit another worker, we received word that a radio broadcast across the city had exposed the meeting and several ladies had already been kicked out of their homes and beaten. One lady’s five-year-old son was missing. We heard that the police were coming and would arrest any woman attending the study, and in light of this news the next meeting was cancelled. We continued on, riding in the back of a pickup truck, wondering what was behind the eyes of the masked women and robed men we passed along the street.

Persecution for your faith is not a light burden, but there is one far heavier for these foreign workers. They believe in the Gospel of Truth so strongly that not only are they willing to risk their own lives for it, but, grasping tightly to the knowledge of eternity with a loving God, they are willing to risk the lives of the people with whom they share their faith. “The war for souls is very real here,” I thought. I felt it as tangibly as the blazing sun on our backs. “This whole country is caught in one of Satan’s greatest deceptions. And here, I am the enemy.” Just then, as if to confirm my thought, a wad of spit landed with a smack in my friend’s face.

We’ll be talking about that one for a while, my friend and I. Knowing him, though, there will come greater injuries in the war for souls than merely being spat on. Later that day, as we sat and talked to another worker, a sizable rock came sailing over the wall and landed inches from her feet. She didn’t even flinch, but smiling knowingly looked up at us and brushed it off saying, “we get these “gifts” all the time.”

The next day, relieved to hear that the believer’s five-year-old boy had been found, we visited a local woman who was a friend of our hosts. In studying the culture they have found that a mark of an honorable rich person is the giving away of food to the poor. So, they went out this day to give, and we went with them. It was a quick visit, and we had been invited to bring our cameras. Shortly after we left, the neighbors, suspicious of us and angry over the cameras, came and harassed the woman, dumping out a large gunnysack of flour she uses to earn a living.

We talked to a group of men about Islam and their country. They claimed religious freedom, but it was easy to see that only the foreigners have that freedom. Anyone from this country naturally has to be a Muslim. I asked if they knew any local Christians. “No,” was the simple answer. How would it be for a person of their culture to become a Christian? “It would be very bad,” I was told, “I’m sure you would feel the same way if a Christian became a Muslim. If a person is a Muslim they should stay a Muslim.” But what if a person of their culture, I asked, had come from somewhere else and had always been a Christian? Would he be accepted? An icy pause was the response followed by a resolute, “They would never come here.”

So who does come here? Who are these “workers” who so willingly leave the safety of their homeland and embrace great risks for their faith– risks that missionaries have not regularly faced since the early days of Missions when death from malaria was so common? Who are these that find in their heart an ability to love the people as God loves, who grieve the sight of so many lost souls, who value faithfulness to God’s truths more than anything?

They are surprisingly ordinary. They have no more ability than an average person. They have no more courage than what God gives them for any given day. They are very simply those who have responded wholeheartedly to their Father’s instruction for them to Go. They are Christians.

The ranch owners called the police in two locations to report the threat. The police promised to increase the number of officers patrolling the surrounding area. The ranch owners knew this might not be enough. The ranch workers and guards, along with the ranch manager, organized themselves to patrol through the night. Some of the ranch workers from the Luhya tribe felt their families were also at risk. A Kikuyu domestic worker living in a small house near the main ranch buildings, offered her home to the wives and children who felt afraid.

The Luhya workers patrolled until midnight. Then a group of Maasai from the area, along with some off duty ranch guards appeared with spears and knives ready to guard their church’s guests through the rest of the night. The ranch manager spent the night riding his motorcycle around the farm and touching base with the various patrols.

After Kenya’s elections on December 27, 2007, a fierce dispute erupted between the two political parties. Supporters of the losing party, many of them Luo, attacked members of the president’s Kikuyu tribe who lived in Western Kenya. Other fighting broke out in Eldoret with Kalenjin people turning on Kikuyu farmers in the area. Several slum areas of Nairobi also flared up with clashes between Kikuyu and Luo.

In the town of Limuru, a group of young Luo men worked with a youth project. They organized environmental programs like planting trees. Others coached soccer teams for the youth in Limuru.

As the post-election period became more tense, several Luo people in Limuru town were killed in retaliation for the attacks on Kikuyu people in Western Kenya and Nairobi. Feeling nervous, the young men with the youth project ran away from Limuru. Fearful of entering public transport because Kikuyu youth would stop the vehicles and ask for IDs or ask passengers to speak so they could determine their tribal origins, the Luo hiked through a forest and dropped down the escarpment of the Rift Valley to the ranch. They knew about the ranch because a few years before they had assisted with a tree nursery project and had brought some of the youth from Limuru to help construct the church.

Other non-Kikuyu refugees showed up at the church and Pastor Philip and his church members welcomed the refugees with open arms, housing them in a small building next to the church. Pastor Philip, a Kikuyu himself, and the church members, mostly Maasai, provided food and worked with the ranch manager to obtain further food and supplies from a fund organized by nearby AIM missionaries.

At one point the church housed about 30 people who had come for protection. When the church heard there would be a bus carrying people to western Kenya from Limuru under police escort, they helped arrange for some of the refugees to get on the bus. Later another group of twelve were carried to Kisumu in a vehicle driven by some Catholic Sisters in the area.

At the time of the night threat, only five young men remained in the church center.

At dawn on January 30, 2007, the men who had patrolled through the night were tired but happy. No raiders had come. The five men who had run to the church for refuge were safe.

The future for these five men is uncertain. As they wait through this tense time, they have planted almost 500 trees as part of a reforestation project. One young man spoke proudly of his cousin who coaches the Kenya national seven-a-side rugby team, which had just flown to New Zealand for a tournament. Another young man said his father was the Anglican Bishop of Kisumu. Both men, despite the threats, continue to stand firm in their faith in Jesus Christ. And until the future becomes clear, Pastor Philip and his church on the floor of the Rift Valley continue to provide food and security for those in need.