Caring Evangelism Complete Leader's Package
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Joy Comes with the Morning
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Caring for Inactive Members Leader's Teaching Kit
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Don't Sing Songs to a Heavy Heart: How to Relate to Those Who Are Suffering
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More than a Parting Prayer: Lessons in Care-Giving for the Dying
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Caring Evangelism--
A Mission to Rwanda

Community Presbyterian Church,
Danville, California

Rwanda in east-central Africa has one of the largest Christian populations in the world, with more than 90 percent professing some Christian faith. Yet the country has also experienced some of the worst violence imaginable. In just over three months--from April through early July of 1994--more than 800,000 Rwandans were murdered in one of the most horrific ethnic conflicts ever. The country and its people are still healing: physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually.

On the 10^th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide, Annette and Bob Bevier determined to use their Stephen Ministry skills to help in the healing.

Bob, associate pastor of Community Presbyterian Church in Danville, California, and Annette, a Stephen Leader there, had already had some contact with Rwandan missions through a trip with their previous church, but they felt called to do more.

"In the previous year [2003], my husband and I visited Rwanda with another team," Annette said. "It was a wonderful trip; the Rwandans were thrilled to have us and were prepared, but we weren't very well prepared. Very little training had taken place."

Annette wanted her new team to be better prepared. "I was determined that my team would not have that experience," Annette said. "I was determined that my team would be trained and comfortable with one another.

"We fell in love with the Rwandans--they're just amazing Christians," Annette said. "We wanted to be with them as they celebrate the victory of their nation over the atrocity, as they continue to rebuild and heal."

Building a Team of Caring Evangelists

For this second trip, Annette decided that she would equip a team of volunteers who would then be ready to give the kind of care the Rwandan mission needed. She screened and interviewed many hopefuls before finally choosing her team of nineteen church members of all ages.

"God really brought the team together," Annette said. "People on both continents were praying hard for us. The strong team in Africa that hosted us prayed for months that the perfect team would be established and that it would do exactly what God wanted it to do while there. We had a very strong team of pray-ers in our church, too, who were praying constantly that this whole adventure would be to God's honor.

"People were turned away who were not right for this rigorous trip," Annette said. "If they were worrying about hairdryers, they were just going to be miserable in a place where we couldn't even count on hot showers. If they were going to be nervous that we couldn't tell them what we'd be doing when we got there, that wouldn't work either. Emotional stability was important; so was willingness to be challenged. It was kind of like interviewing someone to become a Stephen Minister."

The group trained for six months before their two-week mission trip in 2004. Because they would be caring for Rwandan Christians who were searching for renewed strength of faith, Annette wanted her team "to think of themselves as evangelists. I wanted to think of myself as one as well."

Annette used Stephen Ministries publications and materials to equip her team. She leaned heavily on Rev. William McKay's book Me, An Evangelist?, which teaches a concept called caring evangelism--"that our entire lives should read evangelism to anyone we meet," as Annette puts it.

"I found the book just incredibly helpful," said Annette. "I picked it up for the title and only later learned that it was a Stephen Ministries publication. I'm sorry I didn't know beforehand about the course on Caring Evangelism because I found that the material lent itself very naturally to teaching."

Annette and her team focused especially on the listening skills the book teaches, "since we would be hearing lots and lots of stories." Two sections of special importance for her in training her team were "Eight Common Reasons Why Christians Don't Evangelize" and "Caring Evangelism Always Takes Place in Relationships."

"We used a few Stephen Minister training exercises as well," Annette added. "Having been a Supervision Group Facilitator several times, I used many of the team-building exercises to help us develop trust, confidence, and familiarity with one another."

United as a Caring Team

Once in Rwanda, the group harvested the fruits of their preparation.

"We were involved in at least twenty-one ministries while we were there," Annette said. "We had business graduates meeting with businessmen from Rwanda, university graduates meeting with university students, single women meeting with widows, teachers meeting with orphans who were heads of households.

"We met with prisoners, AIDS victims, prostitutes, and street children. We heard stories from those who survived under the most horrific circumstances and from those who did the killing. We met those who were deformed from brutal attacks, trying to get their lives back together. We attended crusades where thousands of people praised God as well as services in small dirt-floor churches with hardly any walls."

The trip pushed the team's boundaries, but Annette praised team members for using their training to meet the challenge.

"They were just a fabulous team," Annette said. "They just ended up loving each other, caring for each other, standing behind each other. They helped each other overcome the obstacles and irritations of homesickness, physical sickness, having no water, no electricity, riding down bumpy unpaved roads, and more.

"This is when I began to see how valuable Stephen Ministries' ChristCare Group Ministry could be. There are wonderful materials out there for learning about short-term missions, and we used those as well, but what I wanted for my team was the greater experience of being a team. I thought the Stephen Ministries materials were perfect for that; they prepared my team in a way that a lot of other groups don't experience."

Reaching Out with Healing

The team's training in Stephen Ministry concepts proved helpful to others as well as themselves.

"My husband and I had the privilege of teaching some Stephen Ministry skills to about 40 Rwandan university students over two days--all hand-picked so that they could go back to their schools and churches and teach other people how to listen, be assertive, and forgive. Because we didn't know we would be asked to teach when we came, we did this through an interpreter, without materials, relying on memory."

The listening skills of a caring evangelist and Stephen Minister were called on as well, often in challenging situations.

"During a healing workshop, I had adults crying in my arms, giving me their testimony in Rwandan language that I could not understand, crying their eyes out because they felt they had not done enough when literally they had done heroic things to keep alive. We had people who had been hiding under dead bodies for days to keep alive--what more could they have done? So we were trying, with no materials and just a vague memory of how we taught it here in the U.S., to teach them that Jesus forgave them and therefore they could forgive themselves. We were absolutely blessed to be there, to be working with Stephen Ministries materials, to be able to bring that background and that experience."

Transforming Lives Both Near and Far

The mission team shared both sorrow and joy with the Rwandans they served.

Annette recalled, "The first thing we did in Rwanda was to go into a prayer room where we removed our shoes, sang, and prayed. Everyone prays aloud, all at the same time. They literally raise the roof when they praise God.

"There's no embarrassment in the African church. There's none of this prim, proper business," she added with a laugh.

"We come from a very privileged area here in the U.S., and here we had the opportunity to learn to love people who have food perhaps for today but have no clue where tomorrow's food is--yet they praise God every day."

The experience proved transformative, not only for the Rwandans who received care but for Annette's team as well. For example, one woman whose daughter had lived on the street could empathize with Rwandan mothers separated from their children.

Another young woman from the team, while sharing her testimony of faith before a group of prostitutes, found herself able to speak for the first time about sexual abuse she had suffered years ago.

"She was immediately surrounded and loved by those who knew her plight in a manner that cannot be described," Annette said. "She now has a significant ministry among young suburban women of high socioeconomic status here in California. She thought she would be shunned if she told her story here. What she did not know was that she had 'sisters.'"

Other team members also found their sense of calling rejuvenated through the service done on the trip.

"Older people who had retired were now able to throw themselves into ministries back in the States. Also, four young men from the team--all Stanford graduates--immediately came back and decided they wanted to do other things with their lives besides the jobs they had accepted on graduation."

Annette affirmed that practicing caring evangelism helped her team to develop missionary confidence, deeper faith, and fresh compassion.

"It is true that a mission trip involves risk, discomfort, and uncertainty," she said. "But it's still possible to go without fear if you feel trained, grounded in God, and comfortable with your teammates. I think that, because of this trip and the preparation we did for it through Stephen Ministries resources, people's lives were really changed."