INSIGHT SPECIAL

The tragic news is emblazoned everywhere. "Seventh-day Adventist ordained pastor found guilty of genocide!" Pastor Elizaphan Ntakirutimana is convicted by the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) in Tanzania and sentenced to ten years (his frail health made the sentence lighter). His son, Gerard, a physician, was also found guilty and sentenced to 25 years. Former U. S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark served as counsel for Pastor Ntakirutimana.
One key piece of evidence was the letter that a host of Tutsi pastors and people sent to Pastor Ntakirutimana, "We are doomed to die. Can you help us?" To which he replied, "I can do nothing for you. Prepare to die. Your time has come." Then he brought in the Hutu soldiers who slaughtered them all.
Most Seventh-day Adventist church members don't want to believe the headlines. Beloved ordained pastors should shepherd the flock, not kill people!
Let us say a word in defense of Rwandan Seventh-day Adventists. They are not monsters; they are people who need the pure, true gospel of Jesus as much as anyone else on earth. We labored among them from 1945 to 1953, when we were sent to Uganda to serve (large numbers of Rwanda people lived in Uganda).
From the beginnings of our work in Africa, the message "we" proclaimed was largely Old Covenant in nature. From 1896 Ellen White was forced to declare that "Satan succeeded" in "our" rejection of the "most precious message" of Christ's righteousness that Heaven sent "us" in 1888. She said that "by the action of our own brethren" it has "been kept away" from both our people and from the world. Our people in Rwanda just had never had a chance to know what that message of Christ's righteousness is. They knew practically nothing of agape.
Hutu hatred of Tutsis was very popular in Rwanda among the people in general. It was for them the "patriotic" thing to do. The hatred they felt was similar to "our" hatred of Osama bin Laden. A lukewarm, "worldly" Seventh-day Adventist just hated the Tutsis like everybody else; when the rip tide swept the people off their Christian feet, our pastor and his son had nothing to hold them. Nothing could have held them except the pure gospel teaching of the New Covenant. They just didn't know what it is.-Robert J. Wieland

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