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To understand the role that churches have played in Rwandan social and political developments, churches must be view as loose collections of relatively independent agencies directed only marginally by their central leadership, rather than as monolithic, centralized institutions. In the years of turmoil leading to the massacres of 1994 and the fall of the Habyarimana regime, the churches played an inconsistent and sometimes contradictory role. Some groups and individuals at all levels of church life were fully integrated into structures of power and worked to preserve the status quo. The close connection between church leaders and government officials prevented the churches from taking a strong stand against ethnic and political violence as it emerged in the country beginning in 1990, and many people within the churches were involved in the massacres that swept Rwanda in April 1994. At the same time, other …