As the Baptist World Alliance (BWA) held its first world congress in Africa, the global organization also transitioned to new leadership with a South African pastor taking the helm as president — only the second African to hold the top elected spot since BWA’s founding in 1905.
Paul Msiza, pastor of Peniel-Salem Baptist Church, Pretoria, was installed during the Baptist World Congress held July 22–26 in Durban, South Africa. The congress, held every five years in various cities around the world, drew about 2,500 participants from about 80 countries.
As Msiza takes on his five-year role as BWA president, he said he aims to be guided by the organization’s theme for 2015–2020: “Jesus Christ, the Door.”
“The door speaks about freedom, emphasizes the issue of liberty — freedom of religion, freedom of worship, freedom for justice. The people need to be set free from all sorts of shackles.”
It’s an essential task, he said.
“We’re living in a world that is full of suffering. We need a message of hope, a message of the Door. … We trust the Lord will use us to become agents of transformation.”
Msiza himself was an agent of transformation in apartheid-era South Africa, facing the uphill battle of separating Christianity from the state church that associated with the oppressive legal and social systems that discriminated against blacks.
“Christians were seen as the ones who actually maintained the system of oppression,” Msiza said. “Whenever you said, ‘I’m a Christian,’ you were associated with the oppressors.”
Those realities meant “our commitment to Christ was tested almost every day,” he recalled.
Spreading peace
“When you would talk to schoolchildren they would say, ‘don’t bring us the religion of the oppressors.’ And we had to be very clear that it was not only going to be a preaching of the Word, it had to be accomplished by action and with power.”
Msiza and others were largely successful. Christianity, he said, is embraced broadly in South Africa where almost 84 percent of the population identifies themselves as believers.
Another agent of transformation — Corneille Gato Munyamasoko, general secretary of the Association of Baptist Churches in Rwanda — was honored along with his wife, Anne Marie, during the Baptist World Congress for his vision of “the church as a home of peace” in Rwanda.
Munyamasoko was born in the Democratic Republic of Congo to Rwandan parents who had fled ethnic violence in their home country in the 1950s. In 1994 as many as 1 million Rwandans were killed in tribal violence, primarily by Hutus against Tutsis.
In the wake of the genocide, Munyamasoko moved to Rwanda to help rebuild the nation.
He worked to help Rwandans “to understand the causes of the genocide, to seek and to extend forgiveness and to build relationships based on the principles of justice, mercy and faith, emphasizing the need for reconciliation with God, self and others,” said BWA general secretary Neville Callam in presenting the award.
Munyamasoko launched a peace camp movement, bringing together young survivors of the genocide with those whose parents were imprisoned for acts of genocide. He has been a peacemaker encouraging Rwandans “to overcome national rivalries and ethnic differences,” Callam said. That included leading pastors who had condoned acts of genocide to seek forgiveness from the survivors.
Caring for HIV/AIDS
Munyamasoko also led his association of Baptist churches to combat stigma associated with HIV and AIDS, training pastors to care for those infected by the virus.
Munyamasoko said, “This award is recognition of the resilience of all Rwandans. The award is a great encouragement to me to continue to strive for the wellbeing of my brothers and sisters. I feel re-energized in the calling to work for peace.”
(BNG, BWA)
For more information visit www.bwanet.org.
Share with others: