According to Thad Barnum, Chuck Murphy had decided that the AMiA should leave Rwanda and had met with retired Archbishops about the future of AMiA outside of Rwanda. Now he returned to Rwanda for the September 2011 House of Bishops (HOB) meeting along with Kevin Donlon and Susan Grayson, his Chief of Staff. If the decision had in fact been made to leave Rwanda, then the next steps of working with Rwanda and presenting the Missionary Society idea to AMiA clergy were formalities that had to be managed, not genuine deliberations. It looks in retrospect as if Murphy and Kolini made the decision and now were going to attempt to manage their way out of Rwanda, or perhaps were giving the Rwandan House of Bishops another chance, gauging how much support there was for the next move.
Before the meeting, Murphy and Kevin Donlon met with Archbishop Rwaje and Bishop Laurent Mbanda at the Serena Hotel in Kigali to present their concept for a Missionary Society. Murphy asked Rwaje and Mbanda to keep the Missionary Society concept confidential until he had discussed it with his colleagues in the United States. Recall that at this time Murphy had already asked the AMiA Council of Bishops about starting this society outside of Rwanda, because, as Thad Barnum put it, there was “a perceived concern that AMIA was suddenly vulnerable to the leadership changes in Rwanda.” Since the American bishops knew already, the concern must have been how to roll this idea out formally to the AMiA clergy.
The next day Bishop Murphy presented the Missionary Society concept to the House of Bishops, which was apparently a surprise to Archbishop Rwaje, who must have thought it was confidential from the House as well. Cynthia Brust told George Conger that Murphy “was warmly welcomed and discussions about the possibility of a missionary society were positive, both as a group and in individual conversations.” Murphy advised the Rwandan bishops against what he called “reverse colonialism” at this meeting. Brust wrote:
The language of “reverse colonialism” as a missiological strategy was used by Bishop Murphy at the September House of Bishops meeting in Rwanda. He used this phrase to explain why it was unwise for the House of Bishops to move into a higher level of direction, vision and decision-making over the Anglican Mission. Giving such a level of direction to a missionary work thousands of miles away was a bad idea in the colonial period (over 100 years ago) when it came from Europe to Rwanda, and it remains a bad idea to attempt it from Rwanda to North America. The Bishops expressed their understanding and agreement of Bishop Murphy’s point.
The HOB decided to create a joint design group present to the next HOB meeting on December 21 about the Missionary Society. I assume this means Rwandan and American leadership were envisioned as working together on the Society. The Rwandan bishops agreed that this “was a new concept that was still a confidential matter in the process of conception.”1 As events would bear out, the possibility of this idea blowing a hole into AMiA was real and so there was an emphasis from Murphy’s camp on secrecy until the time was right. It is curious why Murphy would agree to this joint design group if he had already decided with Kolini and others that AMiA was heading out on its own, as Barnum asserts. Rwaje said of Murphy’s presentation that the Missionary Society concept:
…is still in an embryonic state…You were requested by the House of Bishops to provide us a draft document on the new Missionary Society, and its governance for our study before we could discuss it in our December House of Bishop’s meeting
On the lingering financial questions raised by Bishop Alexis Bilindabagabo, Murphy again did not provide financial reports. Murphy said that there was no legal or canonical requirement for the AMiA to tithe to Rwanda, but rather that payments were occasional, voluntary gifts. According to Archbishop Rwaje, Murphy promised the House that he would send information on all of the financial transactions meant for Rwanda. Cynthia Brust says that the “Bishops expressed satisfaction and appreciation for the information and clarity that Bishop Murphy provided.” Murphy says he was assured that “…there were no financial questions or concerns about money on our side of the Atlantic.”
Archbishop Rwaje drove Murphy and Susan Grayson to the airport after the HOB meeting concluded and told Murphy that he “sensed that a cloud had been lifted within the House of Bishops concerning the financial questions.”
- Cited in Is the AMiA’s New “Missionary Society” Structure the Best Way Forward? by Claire et al. Abp Rwaje to Bp Murphy, October 31, 2011. “As you shared with us in our September 27 House of Bishops, the Missionary Society was a new concept that was still a confidential matter in the process of conception. The agreement was that we would have a joint design group to prepare a presentation to the December 21 House of Bishops.” ↩︎
Leave a Reply