Radical Hospitality

We have been waiting for you.

Those words sounded so good to the six strangers who showed up at the Kigali Lutheran Parish Sunday morning.  Lars, Luke, Ryan, Emily, Jake, and I should have felt out of place.  We didn’t look like everyone else.  We didn’t speak like everyone else.  We were far from home.  But we didn’t feel out of place.  “We have been waiting for you,” said one of the men of the congregation as he shook my hand.

The congregation didn’t let us sit alone.  They sat in between us so we would have someone to translate.  The bishop spoke in Kinyarwanda.  He told the congregation to welcome the “big, strong” visitors. (We are arguably the tallest bunch of YAGMs to be deployed.)  “They are tall but they are young,” the bishop continued.  He told the congregation that we had left our parents, so now they needed to be our parents.  He told the youth that many of us had left behind brothers and sisters, so now they needed to be our brothers and sisters.  Looking at us he said,”We will be your parents, your pastors, your bishop.” As he continued his sermon, he talked about unity.  He shared his excitement about building this relationship between the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America and the Lutheran Church of Rwanda.   He addressed the six of us directly and urged us to work hard so that our time here would be a testimony to the future of this relationship.  When he finished, he invited us to the front to introduce ourselves.  He had the congregation turn to us with open arms, as if in a hug.

After church we had lunch with the youth of the congregation.  (In Rwanda, when they say youth, they mean people in their twenties.)  We were overwhelmed by their hospitality.  They were eager to help us learn Kinyarwanda.  They gave us their cell phone numbers in case we ever needed help.  They tried to provide us with the insight to their culture that you can’t learn about in books.  We talked about college, about the careers we want, about what we like to do for fun.  I was amazed by the ownership these peers of mine took in not only their church but also their country as a whole.  After we ate, one of the girls stood up to offer us an official welcome from the youth group.  “We love you,” she said, “We already love you.”  She said she hopes we will become like twin sisters and twin brothers.  Smiling, she pointed to me and said, “You are my twin sister.”

This is an exciting time for the Lutheran Church of Rwanda.  It’s still a relatively small church and less than twenty years old.  It’s roots are in Tanzania, Rwanda’s neighbor to the east. Many Rwandans were refugees in Tanzania during the genocide in 1994 and the violence prior to that.  When the refugees returned to Rwanda in the mid-1990’s, they brought Lutheranism with them.  What’s cool about the history of the Lutheran Church of Rwanda is that it was not founded by foreign missionaries but by Rwandans. 

Welcoming foreign missionaries is new to them. 

Being a missionary is new to me.

This is gonna be cool.

ELCA and LCR youth.

My twin sister and I.  See the resemblance?