Rwandan Genocide and the Church

The following quotations are from Rwanda: Why?, by John Martin, and the full article can be read in Transformation Magazine, April 1996:

"RWANDA IS WITHOUT DOUBT one of Africa's most evangelized nations.  Eight out of ten of its people claim to be Christians.  Moreover, thanks to the East African Revival, in the 1930s and a spontaneous movement of the Holy Spirit in the majority Roman Catholic Church in the 1970s, Rwanda has been held up as one of the jewels in the crown of charismatic Christianity."

"So how is it that a Christian country deeply affected by revival should have perpetrated a holocaust of ethnic purification in the same league as the former Yugoslavia?"

"There is no escape from the truth that the Christian Church as been a major player in the tragic events in Rwanda which have horrified observers throughout the world in 1994.  Churches have been the scene of massacres and church leaders have acquiesced to hideous cruelty."

"The world-wide Church should be deeply concerned: not just in their compassion for suffering on the part of its fellow human beings, but as a warning to itself.  There must have been serious inadequacies and failings in the theology and spirituality of the church in Rwanda if the East African Revival and mission legacy could prove so weak.  Other churches should take very seriously the dramatic breakdown of Christianity and evangelism under pressure."

Four basic components of the gospel:

1. the cross
2. the resurrection
3. the person and power of the Holy Spirit
4. the kingdom of God as justice--in opposition to ethnocentrism and oppression

The Puritans, Afrikaners, and White Southerners were all strong on preaching the cross and the resurrection, but weak on the Holy Spirit and the kingdom of God as justice.  They all engaged in ethnocentrism and oppression.

The Rwandans were strong on the cross, the resurrection and the Holy Spirit, but weak on the kingdom of God--little biblical teaching on justice and against ethnocentrism and oppression.  Result:

near genocide.

It is dangerous to preach and practice only 2 or 3 components of the gospel.  All 4 components must be preached and practiced.

Puritans, Northern White Evangelicals, Southern White Evangelicals all had no biblical social ethic, no biblical theology of oppression, no biblical theology of New Testament justice.  A weak understanding of the kingdom of God as justice.  The Protestant Reformers had a good theology of the cross and the resurrection, a weak theology on the Holy Spirit, and a weak theology on the kingdom of God.  Pentecostals added the Holy Spirit to the cross and the resurrection, but neither the Protestant Reformers nor Pentecostals had a biblical understanding of the kingdom of God as justice that releases the oppressed.  As a result, in America, Indian genocide and African enslavement, coexisted for hundreds of years with the cross and the resurrection.  The Rwandan genocide was terrible, but lasted only a short period of time.  American-Indian genocide and African enslavement was terrible and it lasted for centuries.  

The American Church still does not understand the kingdom of God as justice that releases the oppressed.  So we have not ended systems of oppression in America, we have only redesigned them.