Lausanne World Pulse – PUBLISHER'S MEMO – The Dance of Life in Rwanda
By Lon Allison
October / November 2010
(Publisher’s note: “Biblical Partnerships that Advance the Gospel” is our theme for this edition of Lausanne World Pulse. Just two months ago, I had the privilege of preaching the gospel and dialoguing with church leaders in Rwanda. The article that follows is the result of that time. I trust it represents the first half of a gospel partnership. Why the first half? Because in 2011 we at the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College will be inviting evangelists and church leaders from Rwanda to come to the Chicago area to preach the gospel and minister to us. You might think of it as “reciprocal partnership.” We minister in Rwanda and Rwanda ministers to us. We give our best to them and they give their best to us. Like many in the West, I believe we are in the era of “mutual missions.”)
Several months ago I proclaimed the gospel of Christ in Mukamiri, Rwanda. Several congregations gathered in a large, concrete structure. Grey and barren of art or color, nevertheless, it is their church. The service went 2 ½ hours before I spoke. Different choirs, filled with men, women, children, and youth sang and told the gospel story. Above all, the choirs danced. Oh, how they danced.
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ne example of reciprocal partnership in evangelism is taking place between pastors in Rwanda and the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College. |
Earlier in the week I’d witnessed and experienced the same on a hillside outside the Anglican Cathedral in Musanze. Africans love preaching and we had given them our best efforts. Preachers from the West (like me) and African bishops and archbishops took turns declaring the word. It was, I’m told, reminiscent of the East African revivals bursting upon these lands in the 1930s. We preached and we sang. But most of all we danced. Bishop Nathan grabbed my hand after we’d just finished preaching together and said, “Come, Dr. Lon. We dance.” And did we dance! Hundreds of Africans, many who had just come forward to commit to Christ, danced. The dance was a glad, exuberant kind of dance, unstructured and full of complex and vibrant African rhythms. I’m not absolutely positive, but I believe I saw Jesus in the crowd.
The dances of Rwandan life are sometimes overwhelmingly sad as well. Our trip started with a sad dance. We’d come to Rwanda from Vancouver and Chicago as a team of ten. Part of our purpose was to experience and learn from Rwanda. The sad dance defies descriptive words. I sum it up with one: genocide. In the spring and summer of 1994, chaos and evil reigned. Neighbor betrayed neighbor, family betrayed family. Ethnic cleansing spilled blood throughout Rwanda. More than one million people perished. Today, memorials are found in every region of the country. And at each memorial are buried bodies.
At the Genocide Memorial in Kigali, 250,000 bodies are buried in vaults; most are nameless. We witnessed a bombed-out church where grenades had punctured the walls and five thousand people had perished, mostly from machetes. Skulls of that destruction and the clothes they wore are on display. Dark brown blood marks puncture many of the walls and the floor. “Man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward” reads Job 5:7. Rwandans get that.
Sixteen years later, the country and its ten million people still struggle to find ways to cope, understand, forgive, and when possible, reconcile. The Church of Jesus leads in the reconciliation, teaching and guiding the way to peace which only the gospel affords. The government participates as well. In many places, reconciliation leads to restitution and restoration. Across the red dirt street from the bombed-out church are new homes built for families who lost loved ones. The builders are remorse-filled perpetrators of the genocide.