Church finds 'purpose' in Rwanda

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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.