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Kenya Reports

Report #59
August 8, 2008

Why East and Central African Quakers are increasing while American and English Quakers are declining

While I was in Rwanda I visited Gisenyi Friends Church on the shores of Lake Kivu. I went there to see how the AGLI workcampers had done at their just finished workcamp. They have finished the flooring, plastering, windows, and doors of a four room building so that I think with the addition of furniture and using the church for a meeting space, the Gisenyi Peace Center can start holding residential workshops there.

To be polite, I asked Pastor Augustin Hahimana, the leader of the workcamp and the church, how things were going at Gisenyi Church. He replied that things were going very well. When he came in January of this year there were about 35 adults attending the church and this had grown to 75 in the last 7 months. There were always lots of children and teenagers. He replied that some of the increase was due to the HROC (Healing and Rebuilding Our Community) program that AGLI supports. HROC-Rwanda has done a number of workshop in Gisenyi. Augustin said that some of the participants from the workshops starting coming to the church and others who just heard about the program also starting coming. People were impressed by a church which was doing something active, concrete, and beneficial about the ills of the community. Putting in practice what it was teaching.

I had heard this often before. In Byumba in Northern Rwanda, AVP-Rwanda had done many workshops starting about five years ago which led to the founding of a church there. It is now a very active church as I have seen its choir come to Kigali to sing at the service at the large Kagarama Church in Kucikiro. I was told that in Kibungo in southeast Rwanda where they had also started doing AVP workshops, another church is forming. One of the results of the peacemaking work done by the Friends Church Peace Teams in Kenya after the violence at the beginning of the year is interest in the Friends Church by people who were not involved with the church; for example, three Kikuyu applied to Friends Theological College this coming year and have been admitted. People are also interesting in learning about peacemaking which they closely associate with the Friends Church.

So the AGLI programs, HROC and AVP, are methods of increasing the number of Quakers--this is called evangelism. Wow, this is a negative result according to many unprogrammed Friends! Rather, I think, it is an unintended consequence of doing the workshops. To put this in another way the numbers are increasing in the region because Friends are very active in addressing the problems in the community, particularly those of war and peace and its consequences. This makes the Friends Church attractive.

Awhile back, I was discussing this with the Legal Representative (General Secretary) of Rwanda Yearly Meeting. He was emphasizing the evangelical nature of the AVP and HROC workshops. But then he said that the purpose of doing is was to make "better people" and it didn't make any difference if they came to the Friends Church, to other churches, or even no church. This, I think, unprogrammed Friends can agree with wholeheartedly.

In this last tour to the US, Gladys and I spoke at Santa Rosa Retirement Center in California. The following morning an elderly Quaker gentleman made breakfast for us. He mentioned how in 1947 he was in Poland with the AFSC feeding starving children (some could have been my second cousins). He said that he was somewhat down for the difficulties of the work when he was elated to hear that the Quakers had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize!

On my long trips on the airplane from the United States to Kenya, I get big, long books to read. On this trip I read Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization, by Nicholson Baker. Unlike most reporting on this period Baker (OK, he is a graduate of Haverford College) included the statements of those who opposed the war including Gandhi and the Quakers. The work of the Quakers in trying to stop the buildup to war, to help the Jews to escape, to become conscientious objectors, etc. is detailed in the book. In essence the Quakers received the Nobel Peace Prize because they were doing something of significance, were leaders contrary to the conventional wisdom and their political leaders.

During the Vietnam War I was concerned by the tepid response of Friends to that war. Friends Meetings were hardly the core, the vanguard to opposition to that war although many individual Quakers played an active part, but usually with other anti-war organizations. But I remember Pittsburgh Meeting where I attended at that time was overflowing with people opposed to the Vietnam War.

On this last tour I heard a Quaker comment that the United States is "peaceful." Really!!! Isn't the United States engaged in two major wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, let alone many minor military adventures such as the bombing of suspected Al-Qaida dens in Somalia (which you probably didn't even hear about in the US media)? Quakers opposition to these current wars is fainthearted. Quakers as a group in England and the United States are hardly doing anything!

That is why the numbers decline year after year. Rather we spend our time, energy, and money on arguing on tangential issues such as whether to withdraw from Friends United Meeting or if we should have a "guard" at the front door to keep out undesirable people. When a religion (or an organization) spends its resources looking inward to the exclusion of looking outward, when it examines its navel rather than looking to rectify the ills of the world, it is going to be in decline. If Friends as a body in the United Kingdom and the United States were as involved in peacemaking activities as Friends in Rwanda, Burundi, and Kenya are, then perhaps new people (many who may not be "traditional" Friends as we now see in our Meetings and Churches) would become interested in a vibrant religious body.

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