Sunday, December 10, 2006 Field testing Pastor Rick Warren's peace plan Missionaries raise spirits and expectations, but can their methods cross cultures? By GWENDOLYN DRISCOLL The Orange County Register RUHUHA, Rwanda - "The first thing to understand is it's not about me," says Mark Broussard, a Saddleback Church missionary from Capistrano Beach. "I'm not the most important person in the world."

Broussard's audience - about 1,000 peasant farmers packed inside an austere brick and concrete church in southeastern Rwanda - stare at him from concrete-block pews draped with disintegrating banana fiber.

Broussard pauses to look down at the crib sheet he is holding, an excerpted passage from "The Purpose-Driven Life." It is the book that brought Broussard and his group of Orange County PEACE plan missionaries to this faraway village last March.

Such short-term trips by Christian groups have more than quintupled in the past decade, part of what Saddleback Church Pastor Rick Warren and others hope will foster a "second reformation" of humanitarian and spiritual aid. It may also, as Broussard's presentation suggests, foster confusion.

"Contrary to what many people say, it's not what people see in movies or read in books that's what's important," Broussard reads.

He waits while his translator thinks about how to phrase this in Rwanda's language, Kinyarwanda. There are no movie theaters in Ruhuha, an isolated hamlet of aluminum-roofed mud shacks at the unpaved terminus of a long, bumpy road. There is no library or bookstore. Illiteracy is high. Possessions are few.

Broussard perseveres.

"We never really own anything in our brief stay on Earth. It was God's property before you arrived. And God will loan it to someone else after you're gone. You just get to enjoy it for a little while."

Broussard's presentation - one of five that missionaries from Saddleback Church gave to Ruhuha's Episcopal Church during a one-week visit - is meant to turn thoughts from material gain to spiritual worth.

In America, and especially in Orange County, this message has made Warren, author of "The Purpose-Driven Life," one of America's most recognizable names.

In Rwanda, something might have been lost in translation.

"In our Rwandan language we don't have such language," says Louis Muvunyi, a pastor and the Saddleback group's translator. "I have traveled in Europe. I understand how it works there. It's a much more material and individualistic culture. Everything is 'I, I, I, mine, mine, mine.' I think ('The Purpose-Driven Life') speaks much louder there."

Not that Muvunyi is discounting the importance of these visitors from Orange County, the first wave of missionaries to come to Rwanda as part of Warren's PEACE plan.

"Presence evangelism is very powerful," Muvunyi says. "Just (being here) can make an impact more than words."

To understand why, travel down Ruhuha's rutted dirt road a mile to the local administration buildings and to the slabs of inelegant concrete that sit nearby, surrounded by fences draped with mournful purple cloth.

About 8,000 bodies, or remnants of bodies, lie buried here. It is one of dozens of genocide memorials that speckle the countryside of Rwanda like a tragic constellation.

The root causes of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda are complex. The response from the rest of the world was not. The international community failed to intercede. Up to 1 million Rwandans were killed waiting for help that never came.

Many of the people in church today are survivors. Jean-Pierre Bukizi, an Episcopal pastor, fled a massacre in a nearby church. He and his pregnant wife hid for six weeks in a swamp, where his child was born. Muvunyi lost 40 members of his family, including three brothers.

"Most Rwandans, after the genocide - there was a feeling that people in the West didn't care about us, they just left us to die," Muvunyi says.

That sense of abandonment explains much about the joyful reception given Saddleback's missionaries during their brief time here.

When one of the group, Nicolette di Cicco, talks about being a widow, there is a murmur among the women in the congregation.

"Because there are many widows here in Rwanda," Muvunyi explains. "The (Rwandan) women said: 'Eh! Even the (Americans) they are widows.' God can use just that small thing to help us feel we are not alone."

There are other reasons to welcome Saddleback Church.

After one of the services, Bukizi shows the missionaries his new six-bedroom brick house, which sits in splendid contrast to the smaller mud and thatch houses of the village.

"This would go for $1.5 million in Orange County," Broussard says appreciatively.

In Rwanda, the house cost Bukizi's parishioners about $21,818 - a monumental sum in a country where most villagers live on less than a dollar a day. But more is needed. Bukizi wants the Saddleback group to fund an electrical line to his house and church.

Bukizi has other uses for Saddleback's money as well: a pastor's car, a hospital, a school, "modern cows" that give more milk for his pastoral fields. Although he is grateful for theevangelism, "it wasn't like we didn't know those things before."

Bukizi's association of missionaries and material resources is typical, according to Gary Scheer, a Baptist missionary from Denver who has lived in Rwanda since 1979.

"People flock to (missionaries) because (they) are a white person and (they've) got money, but the minute (they're) gone it collapses," Scheer says.

The missionaries themselves, who incited mini-riots in the village by tossing small gifts of candy, jewelry, pencils and water bottles out the windows of their van, may have fostered this impression, a point they are quick to acknowledge.

"I feel like I committed a lot of faux pas this week," says the group's leader, Nicole Lu. "In Africa there's a whole lot of etiquette I don't understand. We need a whole lot more training."

PEACE plan staff members say they are aware of the dependency issue and caution their missionaries against giving handouts. Confronted with Rwanda's extreme poverty, however, some promises are hard to keep.

The problem, Scheer says, is growing across the country as short-term visits by Western missionaries increase.

"Every day there's a new group," he says. "People feel sorry for Rwanda, so there's more money coming in, and it's making that issue of dependency even worse."

Mission trips of two weeks or less rose from 63,995 in 1996 to 346,270 in 2001, and amateur missionaries outnumber professional missionaries by a rate of more than 10-to-1, according to The Protestant Mission Handbook.

"There is good reason to believe that more than one-and-a-half million U.S. Christians travel abroad each year on short term mission trips and ... are transforming the way North American Christians are engaging the world," scholars wrote in the October edition of the journal Missiology.

The scholars, including Robert J. Priest of Trinity International University in Deerfield, Ill., say the estimate is a conservative one.

"What we have is a grass-roots movement," he wrote.

The PEACE plan hopes to harness that movement by posting Web-based trip reports by its missionaries. The idea is that any group that travels to Ruhuha in the future could build on the knowledge and experiences of previous visitors.

In practice, short trips by successive waves of strangers are problematic because, Scheer says: "This is a relational culture. If you want to have an impact, you've got to have a relationship, and the bigger the relationship, the bigger the impact."

During their visit, Saddleback missionaries visited churches and schools, meeting with a variety of local leaders and community groups, taking notes on worksheets prepared for them by PEACE plan staff members and politely fending off requests for resources.

What short-term missionaries can give, says Steve Haas, vice president of the Christian aid organization World Vision, is their compassion and their physical labor.

"There's no end to the number of volunteers that can be employed to do tasks" such as teaching literacy or public health, Haas says.

Haas is less optimistic about short-term groups' ability to find long-term solutions.

"It usually takes us one to two years of sitting with (African) leadership to understand the problem," Haas says. "Short-term teams may not understand the longstanding issues in a community. They may not have the language skills."

But he is "absolutely delighted" that Saddleback is getting involved, saying that such exchanges will build Americans' knowledge of, and advocacy for, disadvantaged places like Ruhuha. And he warns about any rush to judgment of the PEACE plan, an experiment in its earliest stages.

"Down the line there's going to be a very hard look by media, by churches themselves, on who's ... really making a difference," Haas says. "But a lot of people are trying to get to the last chapter ... when they're not even on the first, or even the prologue."

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