Having had the privilege of being able to participate in this summer’s inaugural Amahoro Institutes in Uganda and Burundi,  I am so thankful to report that a new generation of African leaders are on the ever-closer horizon.
I had the good fortune to make friends with Emmanuel Oliam in Uganda, who told me over hot mashed matoke that “As sons of Africa, we must learn from the mistakes of the older generation of leaders.  We must make a better way.  Our future lies in our ability to rise up as the fresh generation, striving to live out God’s true calling for Africa”.  Emmanuel has every intention of being one of those leaders, as he wraps up his university studies next year and looks toward pursuing a career in political leadership.

I met a friend Micheline Barandereka, who is struggling through what it means to be a female pastor in the male-dominated culture of Burundi.  I spoke with new friend Jean Pierre Niyonzima, who narrowly escaped death in the Burundian genocide in 1994, and now travels around spreading the message of reconciliation and active peacemaking.  Their stories challenge my understandings of faith and inspire me to new levels of courageous living.

What came alive at these gatherings was the sense of local community.  Within their context, within each set of friends, those in Bujumbura and those in Kampala, common threads were discovered of struggle, hardship and joy.  The recognition of a brotherhood and sisterhood of local leaders was a joy to behold.  In this lies the true beauty of the Amahoro Institutes: they provide a liminal public square to discover what it means to be a follower of Jesus as a Ugandan, a Burundian, or a South African.

One of the friends I met, Hannah Nayoge, is a beautiful young woman who is working on a public health degree in Kampala.  After a long few days of deconstructing old theologies, Hannah and I had a conversation in which she told me she was tired.  Tired of it all. Tired of a world hurting and a church content to turn its back and make lofty pronunciations on the eternal fate of outsiders.  Tired of performing the mental gymnastics of truly wrestling with what it means to follow Jesus.  “But”, she said, smiling hopefully at me, “something new is coming.  I feel it”.

As I’ve reflected on that moonlit conversation, and of our laughter as we slapped mosquitoes away in the velvety African night, I’m left with a profound feeling of thankfulness for how inspired and encouraged I’ve been by Hannah’s simple words.  In a world that is longing for the true healing from our brokenness, Hannah and our other African friends are right.
Something new is coming.

I have handled a lot of various currency this summer; the Ugandan schilling, Rwandan francs, some South African Rand, Burundian francs and the US dollar. The exchange rate fluctuates with each day, each country, and the movement of each market. Some days our own currency is strong where we are, and we seem to get more than we invest. Other days we know that we are getting the weaker end of the exchange, losing with the current climate of the markets. But we must engage in the exchange if we intend to stay somewhere for very long, to have the ability to get what we need (or want) while visiting this new place. So we exchange our currency when we arrive to a new country and hope for the best.

When we gathered together for the South African Institute on the first winter evening, we each came with currency in our pockets. Not rand or dollars, but the currency of our own unique story. We each hold this currency very close to our heart, and we are careful how we exchange it and with whom. Our story, and as a result how we see the world, is of utmost value and something we are not eager to squander. There is a fair bit of discernment that happens internally before we share the most true and treasured parts of our story. No one wants to show their local currency and then get a bad exchange rate, and therefore have their own currency devalued. So when we first arrived to this new place and encountered this new context, we have to determine how to engage in the dance of the exchange rate.

We all were gathered by our mutual friend, Marius Brand. There is some safety in knowing him as a fixed point in our fluctuating market. We also could guess that everyone convened cared about the future of the new South Africa and believed that Jesus has something to say on that type of transformation. But we were an extremely diverse group, as I looked around the circle; English and Afrikaans, Colored, Xhosa, Zulu, Xhoi Xhoi and a couple of Americans. What are the chances that the exchange rate among us would be good, that there would be ample stability for good interactions? Would some trade high and others walk away with less? This is the risk of true conversation, when we all have our currency in our pocket and make those decisions about how volatile we perceive the market to be.

So we began… Marius offering a word of welcome and I offering a word of context. Next was a good conversation about… conversation. How do we encounter others, how do we determine who we are with and what we assume about them? What happens within us, each one of us, that allow us to share or withhold, to trust others or remain slightly suspicious. And then he laid down the gantlet; he challenged us each to verbalize our own biases, as we looked around the room. He asked us, in reality, to confess the things that might hinder us in connecting with the others gathered around the circle. You can only imagine the thick silence, as we all held our currency in our hands, buried in our pockets. Will I be brave enough to say what I fear, what I assume about you, what fear that you will assume about me?

An amazing thing happened… one man did. He pulled out the currency in his hand and showed it to us. He told us a deeply true nugget of his story, revealing who he understood himself to be in the South African context. And he shared how hard it would be if we were unable to validate this part of himself. And everyone listened intently. And then another one shared. Then another shared. And then… all 25 of us had shared our biases, our fears, our stories. And we discovered there was this common currency between us, a currency that had shared value where none was diminished. None of us left that room getting the sorry end of the exchange rate, as a matter of fact I think we each traded high. I think when we were each brave enough to share our personal currency, our story, with the others we left with a full pocket and a full heart.

This first night we arrived with our currency and made the necessary exchange. And we found that with the stellar exchange rate that night, we had more than enough for the conversations to come in the days ahead. We cut through superficiality and went to substance, and that held true for the entire time we shared together. This common currency created a rich environment for us to be our most honest selves with one another. We could be open about where we came from, how we see the world, why we misunderstand each other’s world… and find ways to connect with one another based on this common currency. I often marveled at the truth-telling and honesty I witnessed that first night in South Africa. Imagine the friendships that grow from such a night?

South Africa High Note:
One of the great joys of the Amahoro Institute in South Africa is that all the teachers were African! It was a great delight to be taught by friends and scholars from the African continent, with no need to bring in outside teaching assistance. So we were really given a teaching experience that mirrored the cultural background of the group gathered - no translation or explanations necessary! Marius Brand coordinated the event from start to finish, and he was the one who recruited the teaching team for this Amahoro conversation. Many thanks to Marius for all his hard work in pulling together such a great group of both instructors and participants!
This is one of the highlights from this Institute - one fully operated by our African friends. For Claude and I, this is the ultimate dream for all the Amahoro Institutes in the future - that Africans are the primary instructors and leaders of these learning sessions. We know that there is a depth of knowledge, wisdom and contextual understanding among our African friends that can be a great blessing to their fellow Africans. So we are eager to create space for Africans to teach and learn together, and try our best to not get in the way! We are already gleaning lessons learned from these African instructors (as well as those from Burundi and Uganda) and plan to shape the Amahoro Institute accordingly next season. But I will always remember South Africa with a particular fondness, as they are the first to have an all African teaching team, demonstrating that they can instruct within their context with great depth, dexterity and wit!

This summer we successfully launched the first series of the Amahoro Institute in Uganda, Burundi and South Africa.  This was created to be a regional conversation, bringing leaders together for further conversation and allowing their shared proximity to give rise to new relationships and collaborations in their home city.  On the final day of these sessions, the question always asked was, ”What is next?”

We believe the next step is a collaboration between Amahoro Africa and TREK.  Our friends Wes White and Andrew Perriman, who were both with us in Kigali this summer, are skilled at hosting theological reflection in a relational context.  They have shared their interest in hosting such a discussion in Africa, taking the conversation of reconciliation to the next level in terms of theological reflection and practice in the local context.  Our hope is to host an intimate gathering of 10-12 leaders this fall in Kenya for such a time of shared discussion, discovery and even dreaming.

TREK (Theological Resourcing for an Emerging Kultur) is a small-scale initiative to help churches and communities of faith (mostly in Europe) to reflect theologically on their life and mission.  They have developed a simple learning model of conversation around a local table.  They encourage an informal but serious collaborative engagement in key issues relating to mission in an emerging culture as they are encountered in a local context.  Once you’ve met them, you know that they enjoy themselves in the process!  (You can learn more about TREK at www.localtable.org)

Our Kenyan friends are excited to continue the conversation about reconciliation in the wake of the post-election violence they experienced just last year.  They want the church to be a prophetic voice in their communities, and see this more condensed conversation as one tool that will bear good fruit for them as leaders of fractured communities.  They are eager to receive Wes and Andrew and dialogue and learn together this November.

In order for this collaboration to happen this fall, we will need some assistance with funding.  We anticipate needed at least $1500 to make this next level of conversation a reality.  If you were in Kigali this summer, you know that we only began the work reconciliation requires in our various countries.  This is a tangible way to come alongside our Kenyan friends and partner with them as they continue this conversation in their community.  Please consider this opportunity to further the conversation and deepen the practice of reconciliation in the name of Jesus in Kenya.

All checks can be sent to Amahoro Africa, P. O. Box 8867 Surprise, AZ 85379 with a note on the memo line: Kenya TREK. You can also donate online at www.amahoro-africa.org

Amahoro,
Kelley Johnson