Rebuilding a Year Later

Pastor standing on the rubble of the previous church

It’s now been a year since the riots that burned churches across our country. One of the main churches in the capital just laid the first brick to rebuild their sanctuary- with the goal being that it will now be expanded to meet their current needs. A church I visited in the fall in a smaller town has started making the concrete bricks to rebuild their sanctuary with relief funds that came from our denomination. But the rebuilding efforts are not just in terms of sanctuaries that were destroyed. The church knows it needs to make this effort with relationships as well. 

We were recently told that the church leaders are experiencing three main ways that their neighbors are responding to them after the riots. There is a small group of people who are glad the riots happened and who were still bold enough to insult the Christians at a court hearing for some rioters who were caught (although there wasn’t enough evidence that they were doing the destruction). Another group is the people who used to actively engage Christians in conversations about the difference between their faiths, who still have positive feelings about Christians but are now mostly too ashamed to continue the dialog because they don’t feel they have much ground to talk after their people behaved in this way. The largest group are the ones that were not actively engaged in dialog with Christians before, but largely treated them like normal neighbors. Many of these people are now scared to share normal neighborly things with them in fear that they will be targeted in the future for being too friendly with Christians. So even though initially there was some increased interest in Christianity, in the longer term, it seems that the riots have had a negative effect on Christians’ ability to share with their neighbors. I will add that there do seem to be a lot of relationships, at least in our city, that haven’t been changed and are still as friendly as ever.

Here are two basic ways the church is trying to rebuild relationships and have more chance to share with their neighbors: As I’ve mentioned one of the churches also used relief funds to buy a grinding machine to create a business that brings neighbors back to interact with the church and see it as a helpful resource. The national church is also embarking on a plan to develop a “hosting” ministry for students. Many students have to walk up to 15-20 km from their villages to get to a nearby town in order to go to secondary school. The church plans to start building two room “dormitories” on the grounds of their churches in these towns that have secondary schools, so then they can offer a place for Christian students from the surrounding villages to stay. The hope is that these Christian students can invite a non-Christian friend to stay with them and also receive this benefit. The town that has been targeted for the first of these “hosting centers” has already had a Muslim neighbor offer them adjacent land as he can see that they are going to use it in a way that will bring blessings to the community, and maybe even his extended family.  

--El Padre