The Christian genealogy of Rwanda: Mission, revival, division, genocide, reconstruction, and the contemporary Christian field.

Rwanda provides an unusually concentrated case study of how global Christian genealogies become local religious histories. Permanent Catholic mission began at Save in 1900; German Protestant mission followed in 1907; Adventism entered in 1919; the Church Missionary Society established the durable Anglican station at Gahini in 1925; Baptist work began through distinct mission trajectories from 1939 and the 1960s; and Swedish-linked Pentecostalism developed in western Rwanda during the 1940s into the church now known as ADEPR. These traditions did not merely coexist. They competed for geographical space, schools, converts, institutional recognition, and moral authority; they were transformed by African catechists, teachers, evangelists, pastors, and lay networks; and they were reshaped by the East African Revival, independence, migration, the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi, refugee return, charismatic expansion, and increasingly formal state regulation. This chapter reconstructs those developments from missionary records, denominational histories, official legal sources, census evidence, primary organizational documents, and modern scholarship. It distinguishes imported denominational descent from indigenous renewal, postwar reorganization, restorationist claims, and post-1994 independent church formation. Particular attention is given to the Catholic mission-state relationship, Presbyterian and Anglican trajectories, the Balokole revival, Adventist Sabbath identity, Baptist plurality, ADEPR, neo-Pentecostal ministries, Branhamism, ecclesial responsibility during the genocide, reconciliation, and contemporary governance. A Sola Scriptura assessment affirms genuine evangelistic, educational, reforming, and reconciliatory achievements while testing sacramental claims, prophetic authority, Sabbath obligation, prosperity teaching, charismatic practice, ethnicized Christianity, and church-state entanglement by the apostolic Scriptures. Rwanda emerges as a microcosm of modern Christian fragmentation and recombination, not a simple denominational import map.

Keywords: Rwanda; Christianity; missions; East African Revival; ADEPR; Seventh-day Adventism; Pentecostalism; genocide and reconciliation