This blog reported a year ago that “BUILD training is spreading steadily and successfully from diocese to diocese in Rwanda.” It gave qualitative impressions of that growth in the four dioceses in the south west quadrant of Rwanda – Shyogwe, Butare, Kigeme and Cyangugu. Those local reports and comments represented an encouraging measure of success, particularly when coupled with the analysis of the spread, which has been driven locally – BUILD is a resource in the hands of local church leadership rather than a programme of a parachurch NGO, reliant on external resources.
Near the end of the post Aimable Mutabaruka’s comment noted that, “those who have been trained are training others and as a result the number of trainees is increasing continuously”. But what are those numbers? Is that aspect of success being measured? Much or even most of the numerical impact is off the radar because of its informal nature. Those who have been trained non-formally have later reported that they shared the training informally; at one end of the spectrum one local evangelist claimed to have passed on basic aspects of the training to a hundred and seventy others. But it was helpful to hear last week that to date, across the four dioceses, 973 individuals have been recorded to have received non-formal training. In addition, a core team of seventeen have received more formal training as trainers and drive the process, which conveniently takes the number to 990 we know of.
In order to give a more granular feel to the 973 a breakdown in terms of numbers and locations is as follows. 75 have been trained non-formally as trainers in training teams for the four dioceses: Shyogwe 18, Butare 18, Kigeme 21 and Cyangugu 18. At an archdeaconry level 422 local-facilitators have been trained: Shyogwe 140 (20 each in these archdeaconries Shyogwe, Gitarama, Hanika, Nyamagana, Ndiza, Nyarugenge, Runda); Butare 164 (with this split: Bugina 35, Gikonko 26, Huye 20, Mpanda 21, Mutunda 20, Nyanza 24, Remera 18); and Kigeme 118 (Buyenzi-Nyaruguru 29, Kigeme 29, Mugombwa 28, Bunyambiriri 32). Cyangugu, the further and latest diocese to take up the programme is yet to take it to this level, and so there is considerable room for growth there.
And with growth in mind, almost half of the 973 are the 476 local level pastors and evangelists who have been trained at a parish level in Shyogwe, the original BUILD diocese. In Shyogwe these 476 are distributed as follows: Nyarugenge 80, Nyamagana 60, Gitarama 38, Ndiza 148 and Hanika 150. The plan is that the other dioceses will follow suit at this level, which could therefore lead to a three-fold increase in the overall figure for those trained non-formally in the near future.
All this is an encouraging measure of success. The measure of success is long-term transformation. We continue to pray for and work towards in partnership with these churches in various ways, including through a visit to all the dioceses next week, and to Cyangugu’s neighbouring diocese of Bukavu over the border in D R Congo, which is now picking up the vision.
