Church finds ‘purpose’ in Rwanda

KIGALI, Rwanda

The road to the Husabyimana home is lined with churches.

From the T-junction in tiny Kibungo, down the single paved road jammed with bicycles, and finally onto the dirt track that disappears into Rwanda’s terraced hills, there are churches of various Christian denominations and a handful of unmarked mud buildings that emit boisterous music from dawn to dusk each Sunday.

There are 36 churches in Kibungo, a frontier town of a few thousand people surrounded by dense banana groves in a corner of Rwanda that leads to Tanzania and Uganda.

The Husabyimana family, six children ranging from toddler to teen, and a widow who survives by planting and harvesting a small garden a third of a mile from her home, walk past most of these churches each Sunday to sit in the pews of the evangelical Good News Church.

Recently, three white women sat among them.

When they left to return to their homes in Southern California, they gave the Husabyimana family a new corrugated roof for the mud-and-cornstalk home the family has been building, piece by piece, since the Rwandan genocide of 1994.

The roof is a small example of a fledgling partnership based on the “Purpose Driven” philosophy, outlined in a popular Christian book that spent more than 100 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.

“Even where there is no road, where there is no post office, no shop, no supermarket, no Internet, no telephone — even in places where there is none of those, you will find there is a church,” said the Rev. Augustin Ahimana, an Anglican pastor and the lead Rwanda contact for the Purpose Driven missionaries.

“Working through the local churches is like making change from the bottom up,” said Jane Wallace, one of the three missionaries to visit Kibungo.

“Purpose Driven” was created by Rick Warren, who presides over the 30,000-member Saddleback Church that meets on a 120-acre campus in Orange County, Calif.

Rwanda was declared the first “purpose-driven nation” a year ago, after Mr. Warren visited the country in March 2005 at the invitation of Paul Kagame, a rebel leader credited with halting the genocide who is now Rwanda’s president.

Mr. Kagame was moved to write Mr. Warren after reading his book, “The Purpose Driven Life.”

The partnership matches evangelical missionaries with genocide survivors, in the hope that a shared belief in Christ will help repair a broken nation. The key, say the faithful, is the faithful.

“For years and years, governments, businesses and [nongovernmental organizations] have been working hard to tackle these ‘giants,’ but they are not getting anywhere,” Mr. Ahimana said.

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