Missionary Support

I grew up in Virginia, New Jersey and New York and my father is retired Pastor Warren Strickler (II), who started a mission congregation in Lexington (Good Shepherd Lutheran). I majored in music at Wittenberg (the Ohio one, not the German one) and then got an MA in linguistics in Wisconsin. I've had a meandering career that took me through music education, after school day care administration, personnel management and teaching English in Japan for eight years.

In Japan – or rather, while I was home on vacation from Japan – I met my husband (Pastor) John Rutsindintwarane who was studying at Eastern Mennonite University and the rest, shall we say, is history. He is the General Secretary of the Lutheran Church of Rwanda, and I think it was God's intervention that shifted my life's focus from Asia to Africa, a place I never even expected to visit.

Robin Strickler with her husband, Pastor John  Rutsindintwarane

In 2005, I founded the Rwanda School Project with three other people willing to sign the paperwork. That was very much an act of faith since I'd spent only two weeks in Rwanda. Today, due to God's grace, the very amazing help of the ELCA, hundreds of people, dozens of volunteers and a great staff, there is now a secondary school with 43 students in 7th and 8th grade in Rwamagana, the capital of Eastern Province in Rwanda.  

   
The students and teachers of Rwamagana Lutheran School

 
Geography class at Rwamagana Lutheran School


Three students with chickens from the chicken project

Robin Strickler, ELCA missionary in Rwanda


Rwanda is a mountainous country just south of the equator in central Africa

Rwanda is a mountainous landlocked country the size of Maryland with nine million people. Most people hear the name and think of the genocide that happened in 1994 – and they should. But it is also the locus of an astonishing recovery and progressive measures to build a new country. For example, Rwanda has the world's highest female participation in Parliament, at 54%. Plastic bags are banned and it was called "Africa's cleanest capital" in The Economist. New electricity and water infrastructure is reaching even remote villages. But the complexities and traumas of 1994 are also very present, and the work of Lutherans – and indeed, of all persons of faith, both Christian and Muslim, in Rwanda, must always address issues of reconciliation, justice and forgiveness.

I am delighted to welcome the congregation of Christ Lutheran Church into co-mission with the Lutheran Church of Rwanda!

Robin Strickler

   
Drummers from a cultural troupe that started as a reconciliation effort