"My parishionners did not know how to say 'no' to killing. We are baptizing, but we are not educating. How do we form Christians who are capable of saying 'no'?"

— Rwandan church leader, July 2005, to a Duke Divinity School group in Kigali, speaking of the killing of 800,000 people in the 1994 Rwandan genocide

African Great Lakes Reconciliation Leadership Initiative

The Center for Reconciliation has named the Great Lakes Region of east/central Africa (Uganda, Southern Sudan, Rwanda, eastern Congo, Burundi) a key geographic area of focus.

This region remains overwhelmingly Christian while continuing to experience great social turmoil and conflict — from AIDS; to the genocide in Rwanda; to civil war in Northern Uganda, Burundi, the Congo and Southern Sudan.

A January 2008 Kampala Gathering is planned. The meeting will bring together African leaders engaged in the work of peacebuilding from a Christian worldview to dream and strategize about a program of leadership training grounded in the biblical/theological framework. This gathering is a continuation of a series of other meetings, conversations, and gatherings the Center has carried out in the past year with African church leaders. The gathering will center around three main themes: community, content, and catalytic leadership. At the heart of the Great Lakes Initiative is a desire to build community for Christian leaders engaged in reconciliation, to explore content for leadership training, and to enhance catalytic leadership in the church’s work of reconciliation.

There are a number of Christian agencies and organizations in the region involved with programs to assist the poor, refugees, AIDS victims, and to aid in economic reconstruction. The Center's in-depth conversations with African partners have identified an acute need voiced by Christian leaders in the region to reflect on and strengthen their work for reconciliation as rooted within a Christian vision and to vitalize Christian leadership able to translate such visions into concrete places of brokenness.

In partnership with a number of significant grassroots Christian leaders, ministries, and institutions (including World Vision International, the Mennonite Central Committee, and Africa Leadership and Reconciliation Ministries — ALARM), the Center is exploring the development of a long-term initiative to serve African leadership through intensive institutes.