He has experience.

That experience - and concern - become especially significant in the context of the involvement of the United States and the United Nations with the physical genocide in Rwanda in 1994. During that event, more than 800,000 Tutsis were slaughtered by majority Hutus in an effort at ethnic cleansing of the minority population. The United States and the international organization were castigated by media and many worldwide civil rights organizations for a limited and late contribution to stop the killing.

The Rev. James Murphy made reference to this criticism in introducing Kolini during a recent speaking engagement at Emmanuel Anglican Church in New Bern.

"Even though the U.S., the U.N. and Christian churches in many ways and forms turned its back on Rwanda, he would not allow spiritual genocide to take place over here," Murphy said.

Speaking at the public forum, and later during a closed meeting with a member of the media, Kolini detailed threats indigenous not only to Rwanda, but to American and European societies, painting the event with broad strokes under the headings "life" and "faith."

The failure of government to publicly embrace Christian ideals is largely responsible for what Kolini sees as an erosion of morality in the United States. Such failure can promote individual immorality and a straying from the tenets of organized religion based on scripture, he said.

"Your law has history," Kolini said. "When Europe was still a Christian continent ... laws were based on the Bible. It's changed."

Such change was evidenced in Rwanda, Kolini said.

"To me, the physical genocide is a result of spiritual genocide," he said, "when you live without God, when you have lost spiritual values."

Such values are tied by both life, as directed by government, and faith, as directed by the church, Kolini said. Crafting the image of the church as a mother and government as a father, the archbishop said the two must support one another to create a spiritually healthy society. As in life, he said, this does not always happen.

"At times you have irresponsible husbands," Kolini said.

And irresponsible churches. Capriciousness can extend to organized religion. Envisioning faith without denominations, which can become walls blocking spiritual growth, Kolini lauded the idea of one church acting an "extended family" under a conservative canon.

"Here is my canon," Kolini said, holding a Bible.

Action toward traditional values is necessary now in America and elsewhere, he said. And so it has become incumbent on a tiny African nation, where once "the devil has manifest himself," to tackle the spiritual concerns of a nation 30 times its population. That God has situated the AMiA in small countries such as Rwanda is evidence of that incumbency, Kolini said.

"What God wants to do with a tiny country where the devil has put his headquarters," Kolini said. "He connected it to a big continent. There is something God wants to do."

END