My first time at church since Coronavirus started

This is my experience on my first time at church after over 1.5 years Coronavirus was declared in my country.

It’s 21^st August 2021, three weeks since the lifting of lockdown in Kigali and reopening of churches on Coronavirus directives.

I have not been going to church even when the government eased restrictions several times or attending illegal gatherings in homes in which hundreds have been arrested for violating the Coronavirus directives.

I have resorted to my tablet for virtual worshipping and prayers or watching famous preachers, especially Pr Mark Finley and the Baptist Paul Washer.

Today, I would go to the Adventist University of Central Africa (AUCA) where many English speakers go but their preachers are mostly people who found English at universities or just had some language training and they struggle to find the right words when preaching moreover in a central African French accent.

This Central African country was Francophone since the 1900s but suddenly changed to English in 2008 after years of deteriorating relations with the French who were accused of a role in the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi.

The Kigali government that emerged from refugee rebels from neighbouring Uganda drove the nation of French-speaking elites into the East African Community bloc and the Commonwealth, making English important for the first time in this country.

Very few people, mostly a handful who went to British-tuned protestant schools got a chance to learn some English in a country whose monarchy dedicated it to the queen of heaven and her son in the 1940s under the guidance of French-speaking Belgians.

So I go to a Kinyarwanda church that is near the University, in the shadows of the magnificent structures of the Adventist medical school inaugurated by President Paul Kagame and Elder Ted Wilson, the President of the Seventh-day Adventist General Conference, in 2019.

At the church

The church is surrounded by a fence of pencil cactus also called Indian tree spurge or milk bush which is very common in this semi-arid country that boasts about being a land of thousand hills.

At the entrance is a handwashing point of white tiles made in India which was recently constructed as required by government directives to prevent the spread of Coronavirus.

I notice a deacon unsmilingly making sure we wash our hands and another with a thermometer gun and two with books at the stairs of the church entrance, all in reflective jackets.

The four of them wearing pathfinder scarves are standing like the porters at the Jerusalem gates or probably like Shallum, Akkub, Talmon and Ahiman described in 1Chronicles 9:17 as porters at the king’s gate.

About a dozen of us stand in a queue, keeping the three-foot distance in the middle until I reach the man with a thermometer gun who reaches up to my head above him to take my body temperature.

A deacon and deaconess are sitting on a bench on one side of the door ajar with pale books, recording the details of those who have come to worship who ascend the stairs with their silhouettes staggering tall on the dewy grass.

On another side of the wide door ajar is a banner, not like the one in the “Royal Banner” hymn but one bearing the government's health directive on Coronavirus that the congregation has to obey.

On the left column, the directives say: wash your hands, mask up, no hugs and on the right column, there's: maintain 1-meter distance, no children (banner calls them kids) and using e-payment services for the offerings, all with descriptions and pictures.

The deacons record my name, temperature and my phone number before I’m welcomed by another deaconess in her fifties with mild looks and wearing a head wrap to lead me to the extreme left of a bench in the middle column just a few rows of benches to the hind wall.

I'm inside the church

Each bench used to have a dozen people sitting on it but now, only three can sit on it, not talking to each other and covering their mouths in masks.

It is at this observation that I decided to write the story of my experience even though I had not come with any gadgets to take pictures; I don’t carry phones to church to avoid being obstructed by them.

After the church services, I approached one deacon and he told me there were 305 people in this church, where up to 1200 worshippers would be every Sabbath.

“Even with such spacing, the church has never been full since the event of Coronavirus,” he told me, which means total deterioration of church-going culture.

Time for singing hymn comes and the chorister announces that we need to sing from the 200 old hymns, not from the 150 new ones that the Rwanda Union Mission had recorded and spread with much emphasis.

We sing the first five advent hymns: “Watchman Blow the Trumpet, The Coming King at the Door, Face to Face, How Sweet are the Tidings and How Far From Home.

My mask is filled with warmth and moisture from the mouth; I feel like pulling the mask down for some fresh air that comes from the seven open windows on both sides of the church but the serious deaconess is watching.

It is a tense situation for me and I’m tempted to pull it down whenever she faces the other side.

The hymns draw the congregation into the awareness of the end times and one can read from many faces the realisation that Home is not far and the readiness for the ‘Coming King at the Door’.

The mood of reflecting on the end times is frequently interrupted by the chorister and announcements including one on public blood donation and Coronavirus directives.

The chorister abruptly removes his multicoloured mask to dangle from his left ear over the upper chest but I don’t see anyone in the congregation attempting to lower the mask so I continue stealthily lowering it whenever the deaconess is not watching me.

A lady next to me on the other column has no hymnbook and she seems to be unfamiliar with the Adventists’ worship. I feel like talking to her or lending her my hymnbook but I fear violating the directives in the watch of the serious deaconess.

A choir in the uniform of gitenge style for gentlemen and multicoloured dresses for ladies emerges from the congregation.

It’s my first time to see such attire for a Seventh-day Adventist choir in the stead of ties and single-coloured shirts tucked in trousers for gentlemen and single-coloured dresses for ladies.

We delve into the Sabbath School lesson and you can easily realise it was influenced by the present days of Coronavirus health news as it is filled with stories about hospitalised and dipressed people.

Here in Rwanda, reports say there have been over 500 suicide cases in the last two years including three raw ones of two men who have jumped off the same storied build in Kigali in the last two months.

A choir’s special item song with advent message is inconsistent in the number of syllables per line but the congregation is again drawn back to the mood of the coming of the Lord as the song alludes to Luke 21:28 “And when these things begin to come to pass, ... know your redemption is nigh”

The Sermon

The preacher today is Faustin Nsengiyumva, a student of theology at the Adventist University of Central Africa, with whom this church shares the demarcations.

I am about 30 meters away from the pulpit so I can vaguely see his countenance but at least I can see that he has an extended forehead that writes an M when he bends to read from the Bible.

He speaks a Kigogwe accent from north-western Rwanda where the first missionaries built the second Adventist church at Rwankeri following the one at Gitwe in the south.

For the last few years, I've been in this beautiful country of ours, I have realised that there is a diabolical power struggle for church leadership in Rwanda between people from the South (Gitwe) and those from North (Rwankeri) and I’m happy I don’t belong to any of them.

I’ve heard complaints that the current church leadership is taking many from the north to study theology allegedly as a way of consolidating leadership in their hands.

The preacher’s sermon: “Behold I’ve come to stop you”, rotates around believers’ convictions toward God's work and the barriers such as the temptations the old prophet of Bethel used to trick the man of God to disobey Him in 1Kings 13.

The sermon deeply sinks as the special item song is repeated at the end and we move out but we’re too many to be controlled to respect the social distancing order.