Download Free Christianity And Crisis In Rwanda Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Christianity And Crisis In Rwanda and write the review.

This book studies the role of Christian churches in the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Timothy Longman's research shows that Rwandan churches have consistently allied themselves with the state and engaged in ethnic politics, making them a center of struggle over power and resources. He argues that the genocide in Rwanda was a conservative response to progressive forces that were attempting to democratize Christian churches.
To many observers, Rwanda was a colony of the White Fathers. That Roman Catholic religious order, created in Algiers in 1868 by Cardinal Lavigerie, evangelized the country from 1900 onwards, effectively becoming the state church. To maintain its domination, the Roman Catholic Church's hierarchy supported the theory of the so-called hamite supremacy by selecting, educating, and establishing an elite among one of the three Rwandan social groups, the Batutsi, who were given the monopoly of power. Frustrations and recriminations that resulted from this injustice and its accompanying exclusion of other groups from power, led to the bloodshed of the uprisings of the 1959 revolution that preceded independence in 1962. Then, in 1959, the Roman Catholic Church abandoned the Batutsi in favour of the Bahutu majority. From 1973 to 1994, both Catholic and Protestant leaders entered into close political relations with the regime of the MRND (Mouvement RŽvolutionnaire National pour le DŽveloppement), which alienated them from the people of Rwanda when human rights abuses were widespread, culminating in the war in 1990 and the genocide of 1994. If the church's mission remains that of teaching and evidencing love, justice and righteousness (Micah 6:8), there is the need for it to recover its credibility so that it can play its part in the healing and reconciliation of the country, and this can only be done through its confession and repentance of it failures and complicity in the tragedies.
We learn who we are as we walk together in the way of Jesus. So I want to invite you on a pilgrimage. Rwanda is often held up as a model of evangelization in Africa. Yet in 1994, beginning on the Thursday of Easter week, Christians killed other Christians, often in the same churches where they had worshiped together. The most Christianized country in Africa became the site of its worst genocide. With a mother who was a Hutu and a father who was a Tutsi, author Emmanuel Katongole is uniquely qualified to point out that the tragedy in Rwanda is also a mirror reflecting the deep brokenness of the church in the West. Rwanda brings us to a cry of lament on our knees where together we learn that we must interrupt these patterns of brokenness But Rwanda also brings us to a place of hope. Indeed, the only hope for our world after Rwanda’s genocide is a new kind of Christian identity for the global body of Christ—a people on pilgrimage together, a mixed group, bearing witness to a new identity made possible by the Gospel.
In 1994, genocide put Rwanda on the map for most of the world. It also exposed one of the most shameful scandals of the Rwandan churches-the complicity of the Christian churches in the genocide. Rwanda is the most Christian country in Africa. More than 90% of its people are baptized Christians, with the Roman Catholic and Anglican Churches having the greatest number of adherents. According to Archbishop Desmond Tutu: "The story of Rwanda shows both sides of our humanity. The churches were sometimes quite superb in what they did in the face of intimidation and at great cost to themselves. But there were other times when Ýthey ̈ failed dismally and seemed to be implicated in ways that have left many disillusioned, disgruntled and angry." Genocide In Rwanda provides a variety of perspectives through which to assess the complex questions and issues surrounding the topic, and, even raise some new questions that could provide some new insight into this historical event. They are questions we must ask - otherwise, how can the Church begin to make moral restitution, change structures and behaviors, and once again reveal the human face of God in our fragile world?
Pioneering study of the role of the Christian churches in the Rwandan genocide of the Tutsi; a key work for historians, memory studies scholars, religion scholars and Africanists. Why did some sectors of the Rwandan churches adopt an ambiguous attitude towards the genocide against the Tutsi which claimed the lives of around 800,000 people in three months between April and July 1994? What prevented the churches' acceptance that they may have had some responsibility? And how should we account for the efforts made by other sectors of the churches to remember and commemorate the genocide and rebuild pastoral programmes? Drawing on interviews with genocide survivors, Rwandans in exile, missionaries and government officials, as well as Church archives and other sources, this book is the first academic study on Christianity and the genocide against the Tutsi to explore these contentious questions in depth, and reveals more internal diversity within the Christian churches than is often assumed. While some Christians, Protestant as well as Catholic, took risks to shelter Tutsi people, others uncritically embraced the interim government's view that the Tutsi were enemies of the people and some, even priests and pastors, assisted the killers. The church leaders only condemned the war: they never actually denounced the genocide against the Tutsi. Focusing on the period of the genocide in 1994 and the subsequent years (up to 2000), Denis examines in detail the responses of two churches, the Catholic Church, the biggest and the most complex, and the Presbyterian Church in Rwanda, which made an unconditional confession of guilt in December 1996. A case study is devoted to the Catholic parish La Crête Congo-Nil in western Rwanda, led at the time by the French priest Gabriel Maindron, a man whom genocide survivors accuse of having failed publicly to oppose the genocide and of having close links with the authorities and some of the perpetrators. By 1997, the defensive attitude adopted by many Catholics had started to change. The Extraordinary Synod on Ethnocentricity in 1999-2000 was a milestone. Yet, especially in the immediate aftermath of the genocide, tension and suspicion persist. Fountain: Rwanda, Uganda