Light Church Rwanda
When God called my wife and I in 2012 to move to Africa and plant a community church, living in Africa was the last thing on our minds. I was working as head of strategy for an Inc. 500 healthcare consulting company. My wife was a stay-home mom taking care of our two daughters who were one and two years old at the time. Saying yes, to a calling to Africa, with very little children and a busy career, proved harder than we had imagined. At first, we ignored the call hoping it would go away.
By 2013 the call had become so strong; we couldn’t ignore it anymore. I quit my job and we began preparing ourselves to move to Africa. In 2014, we sold our house and everything we owned, packed eight suitcases- two for each member of our household, and moved permanently to Rwanda.
Light Church Rwanda was launched three months after we arrived in Kigali, Rwanda. It began as a small gathering with 15 people in attendance. Today the church has an attendance of 250 adults and 100 children. We support our ministry in the church through “tent making-” myself as a finance professional, and my wife as a professional accountant and administrator.
Light Church, also referred to as Light center, is a community-centered fellowship in the Eastern part of Kigali city with a population of fifty
thousand people. The center houses several community programs including a local church, a children’s club, a sewing school, and a media center.
Since its founding in 2014, the center has served The Rwandan community contributing to the healing of a nation that has gone through a lot. The Rwandan community has been healing and rebuilding from the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi that saw more than one million people killed in less than 100 days. The nation of Rwanda, through its great leadership, has been emerging from this bad history and has made great progress. Rwanda is both a nation on a path to a great future, and a nation still dealing with the wounds of the past. Light Church serves at this crossroads where we are lifting some up, and looking up to support the progress of a nation.