An open letter to the Seventh-day Adventist Church

Dear fellow believers (if at all you accept me as a believer),

I believed the Seventh-day Adventist Message in 2000 when I was a schoolboy in ‘O’-Level in Central Uganda.

It took me five years of learning the seventh-day Adventist Message before I accepted to be baptised in 2005 in a camp meeting at Kaburasoke Church District which was in Central Uganda Field (I don’t know what it is today – I left long ago).

From that time, my life changed forever and started living like an Adventist in everything including food and friends.

I was dismissed from Kaburasoke Teacher’s College in 2006 where I had been competitively admitted but found that I could not comply with turning up for classes on Sabbath.

I got some teaching jobs in Church-related schools including Maddu Light SDA Primary School in Central Uganda where I was bursar, assistant chaplain, pupils’ patron and teacher, conducting prayer service as a faithful (2007-2008).

I joined 'A’ Level in 2008 at Nansana Education Centre, an SDA-affiliated school in Kampala where I was also in charge of liturgy for students.

To cut the story short, in 2011, I returned to Rwanda, the land of my forefathers, the country that borders Uganda in the southeast and became a reliable believer as usual at Munini SDA Church in the Rwanda Eastern Field.

I have had a lot of challenges as any Rwandan who has no relative in the country, jobless for almost all my life in Rwanda and other general challenges but I have never doubted the God I knew through the message of the Seventh-day Adventist Church.

In 2016, while Pastor Ted Wilson was preaching in the Total Membership Involvement in Rwanda at Gisenyi, I was translating for Pastor Daniel Matte the President at Uganda Union who had come to Rwanda to preach at Kabarore in Eastern Rwanda.

The task given to me by the church leaders required me to be at the site on time while I was always looking for something to sustain my family as a jobless father and husband.

But I proudly carried out the task especially because it bound me to attend all the sermons which would not have been possible for a wandering father who wakes up without knowing where to get bread for the family.

I have celebrated with the church the 100 years of existence in Rwanda and grieved with it when hundreds of SDA churches were closed for substandard claims by the government.

When the Coronavirus was declared and the subsequent mandatory vaccination came, informed by what I have been taught and read in the Adventist Church, I was hesitant to accept the Covid injection.

I had got a job in a communications office at an NGO in Kigali for the first time since the few-months job I had in 2014 but two months down the road, I was required to get the Covid injection.

I could not claim religious liberties because the church had already supported vaccination moreover through campaigns to have all SDAs given the Covid injection in Rwanda.

The church has fervently disowned anyone who claims religious reasons in refusing the injections, arguing that individuals refuse on their own which may be true but, in my case, my conscience was informed by the Adventist Message.

I don’t want to bring the debate on how the current situation of limiting buying and selling to vaccination and the force applied and the union of church and state on the matter looks like the image of the beast, but my point is that had it not been the SDA message, I would not have doubted the vaccines.

At this moment I would expect the church to support a person like me even when it may fail to stand up for my religious liberties at the top level.

The church in Rwanda actually condemns a person like me for not accepting the vaccines and we’re no longer Adventists just because we have not accepted the vaccines that were not manufactured by the church.

I have no problem going through what I'm going through due to my faith but, to be frank, I always wonder where Protestantism is when the church cannot defend its believers’ conscience who are victimised for believing the church’s message.

May the Grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with us all.

Kelly Rwamapera

Kelly Rwamapera is a writer at Faith Reporters and is a Seventh-day Adventist in Kigali Rwanda

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