Amahoro

Amahoro means Peace in Kinyarwandan -- in the same sort of way that Shalom means peace, or Salaam, or Paz, or Heiwa, or any of the other hundreds of languages in which people express their deepest yearnings for being at one with the universe. It's the name of the gathering I'm now part of here in Kigali, Rwanda. And they are calling this a "gathering" -- not a conference -- because it's all about the conversation we're having with one another from all over Africa and many other places around the world. People have been gathering for the last 24 hours, and just this evening we had our first "conversation." Actually, there have already been hundreds of conversations -- interesting, challenging, enlightening conversations -- all day long. It's going to be a great week.

Amahoro-Africa is the result of the desire among a whole group of African church leaders (mostly from independent evangelical and pentecostal type churches, but also some Lutherans and Anglicans and Presbyterians thrown in) to move beyond what they refer to as the "evacuation gospel" to the gospel of transformation and reconciliation. In other words, take the focus off of "how do we all get to heaven some day in the sweet bye and bye" and turn our focus instead to how we bring heaven to earth right here where we are -- to pray and work for (as Jesus put it) "thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven."

This is a radical shift for some of these folks. It's the shift I started making over 30 years ago when I went through my own theological transformation. I'm really happy to be here supporting the effort and am learning a tremendous amount from all of them -- already! Last year was the first of these "gatherings" in Uganda, and this year here in Rwanda. Some of them expressed this evening how important it has been to them to have those of us from the West here to listen and learn -- not as people from the West have usually done which is preach to them and expect them to do all the listening.

The focus this year is on the gospel of reconciliation -- and the place is so important because of what Rwanda has been through and is still going through. We had some very poignant reminders today of just how tragic the history has been. We visited the Rwanda Genocide Museum, and then we visited two churches where people were killed en masse as they sought refuge in the churches. The museum put the Rwandan genocide in the context of the 20th century's other notorious examples: Armenia, Nazi Germany, Cambodia, Bosnia, and Rwanda. I've been to a number of Holocaust memorials, including Yad Vashem in Jerusalem and Auschwitz itself in Poland -- all of which have been extremely powerful experiences.

This one was right up there. Mind-boggling inhumanity. So incredibly difficult to imagine how human beings can be overcome by a group psychosis that allows them to engage in such brutality. The problem is that these acts have not been carried out by monsters, but by regular people -- regular people who have bought into fear: fear of "the other", "the enemy within."

We visited two churches where there were massacres, one a small Roman Catholic Church out in the countryside where Tutsi from the area had fled to, believing that surely the bands of murderous people roaming their area would not come into a church to kill them. They were wrong. Over 5,000 people were brutally hacked to death with machetes inside this church. The second church was worse. Not only were there substantially more people killed there (over 10,000), but the church leaders were actively complicit in the murders. Now, I had known that the church had bloody hands in the Rwandan genocide, but I had imagined that it was in a more passive way, just getting caught up in the hysteria of the moment with preachers exhorting people to defend themselves against the enemy, etc.

Wrong. This church was actually built with a death chamber under the sanctuary where even prior to the 1994 public genocide, for the few years ahead of that, the church leaders participated in the extermination of the identified enemies (the Tutsi) and had their bodies placed in a mass grave -- under the church. Murdered bodies, right under the very place where people gathered for worship. And behind the church were several large chambers built into the ground that looked almost exactly like the infamous barracks at Auschwitz that I saw just last year. This one, however, still has the skulls lined up inside to make the point even more graphically. A church that was every bit as much a part of the death machine as the godless Nazi concentration camps across Europe were a generation before. It was hard to imagine.

Rwanda has come a very long way in the last 14 years. A new government and a new constitution following the genocide, and a people who seem determined not to let this horrific past define them, have come together to try to heal this nation of its shameful past. There have been prosecutions of perpetrators, but some have gone free. There is also something like the South African "truth and reconciliation" process, which goes by a slightly different name that I'm blanking on at the moment. People sometimes still have to live side by side with the people who tried to kill them or who in fact were involved in killing their families and neighbors. Every Rwandan we have met, even those at the sites today whose family members had been killed, seems determined to move beyond the past.

This is the context in which we are here meeting to have conversations about what the gospel of reconciliation means. The Kenyans here are so painfully aware of how close they came in the past few months to such a scenario. I am here as an Anglican, very painfully aware of the divisions within the Anglican Communion around issues of human sexuality. I see the Rwandan demonization of the Tutsis as a cautionary tale for us when it comes to the gay and lesbian people in our midst. That goes not just for the Anglican Communion, of course, but for any group that wants to scapegoat gay and lesbian people. That's probably another topic for another blog.

It's pretty amazing to hear the stories already of the work people are doing in churches all over Africa and elsewhere around the world, doing grassroots work to build the kingdom Jesus talked about.

Gotta tell you (any of you who read my depressing account of my Goma experience yesterday) about the young Congolese guy I met here tonight. He is the only person here from Congo as far as I know. I went to him after the session to tell him I had just been in Goma. He grew up in Goma. He's 25 years old and working in student ministry in Uganda. I would give anything for an audio tape of our conversation, because he taught me so much. 25 and so filled with wisdom. I can't begin to capture it here, so I'm not going to try tonight -- but I am going to go back and have some more conversation with him, this time with my notebook in my hand. I turned 53 today, but I'm happy to be learning from a 25 year old who sees the world through the lens of his unique background and has so very much to teach me. If I can really learn it, I just may have a shot of creating a little more amahoro in the world. Gonna sharpen my pencil for that conversation!