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Theo Mushinzimana, RP's in-country director, says, "Any reconciliation in Rwanda is a result of a biblical process that brings perpetrators and victims together at the foot of the Cross.

"When you have a Hutu who has been transformed by the Holy Spirit to repent and be forgiven, his story can be used in powerful ways to help other victims forgive. A repentant perpetrator also helps other perpetrators to heal, showing them it's possible to move beyond what they have done and be forgiven.

"And when you have a Tutsi who has forgiven, this is huge. It's a process that requires great truth—truth that only God's Word can make possible."

Pascal Niyomugabo, a pastor and RP's reconciliation coordinator, says the process "takes a lot of patience.

"When we ask someone to forgive, we get a lot of rejection at first," he says. "With some, it takes a lot longer to heal their wounds. We follow up, but we don't press them."

Rwanda Partners and other reconciliation ministries work with local churches, equipping them to take the lead in their communities. It's a hard enough job, only complicated by a widespread lack of trust of the church because denominational leaders and pastors played a role in the genocide. (The most notorious case was Rwandan Catholic priest Athanase Seromba, who ordered his sanctuary bulldozed while 2,000 Tutsis sought refuge inside; Seromba is now serving a life sentence.)

"The church is in a tight situation," says Dwight Jackson, Food for the Hungry's national director in Rwanda. "It's taken some severe identity hits because of stories of church leaders participating in the genocide. The preponderance of evidence is that the church—Catholics and Protestants—is complicit, even at a denominational level."

RP's Mushinzimana says some pastors feel a "deep-seated sense of guilt" for not doing more to try to stop the killing. Other church leaders still harbor unresolved ethnic hatred, or aren't willing to undertake the hard work of pursuing biblical reconciliation.

Anastase Rugirangoga, director of the Peacebuilding, Healing, and Reconciliation Program, a nonprofit, notes: "Pastors say, 'We have Hutus and Tutsis in our church. For me to talk of forgiveness and reconciliation, it is very difficult, because I am afraid of losing some of them.' Some feel that if the pastor is asking survivors to forgive, maybe he is taking sides with the Hutus. Or if he asks Hutus to repent, maybe he is siding with the Tutsis. So many pastors just preach in general, because they are afraid to say the hard things."

But many pastors who want to do the right thing feel overwhelmed by the task of reconciliation, because the trauma still runs deep, even in themselves.

Says Mushinzimana, who lost family members in the genocide, "Pastors have been wounded just like other people."

Nyirindekwe Celestin, an Anglican priest, says pastors often deal with arguments between Hutus and Tutsis in their congregation: "When pastors see this, their church looks like a broken family."

But the rifts can be healed, like they were in one church Celestin says was "really divided" over whether Hutus or Tutsis would take leadership. When he later visited and found the two sides fasting and praying together, they told him, "We don't want this to be a Hutu church or a Tutsi church. We want to stay together." Though a few ended up leaving, most remained and worked through their differences, deciding to share the leadership. Celestin grins as he says, "That church did not divide."

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June 2009, Vol. 53, No. 6, Page 28