STANDALONE TEACHING PIECES

Teaching Piece 1: “Get Your Passport”

On Listening to What Doesn’t Make Sense

Used in: Module 3, Session 1

The Story

On the morning of April 4, 1994, a man named Amminadab set out on foot toward a bus station in Kigali, Rwanda. He was traveling north to recruit students for a theological school he’d been asked to build. He had his bags packed, his materials in order, and a strict itinerary.

Halfway to the station, he heard something an internal voice that delivered a clear, specific instruction that said: “Go back and get your passport.”

It made no sense. He wasn’t crossing any border. A passport has no function on a domestic bus route between two Rwandan cities. He kept walking.

The instruction came again, more insistent, as he neared the station. He still ignored it. He boarded the bus, found his seat, and exchanged pleasantries with the man next to him. Then it came a third time, quieter now, but final: “I told you to go get your passport. Apparently you are not willing to listen.”

Something about the tone told him this was the last time he’d be asked. He stood up, had the driver remove his luggage, and walked two miles back home. His wife, watching him explain himself, asked bluntly: “Are you crazy?” She offered her own theory, accusing him of simply wanting his students to be impressed by his passport full of travel stamps. Rather than arguing, he simply put the passport in his bag and left again for the north.

Two days later, the president’s plane was shot down. Rwanda descended into genocide within hours. Amminadab was arrested in the town of Gisenyi on suspicion of being a spy and thrown into a prison cell. That night, seven men were taken from the cell and shot. He sat in the dark, certain he would be next.

At dawn, the door opened. A guard told him to get out. He didn’t immediately trust the order, as other men had been told to run only to be shot for “escaping.” He walked anyway, half-convinced it was a trap, until he realized he was alive, outside, and free.

He fled toward the border with what was then Zaire. Documentation was being checked at the crossing, and officials were sorting people into categories of who could pass, who would be turned back, who would disappear. He had nothing to prove who he was except one thing: a passport, stamped with visas from years of international travel, a physical record of a documented, verifiable life.

It opened the border; he crossed, and he survived.

Anchor Quote

“God had known what I did not know. He had seen the cell in Gisenyi and the midnight executions and the four armed men who would open the door. He had seen that the document I was being instructed to retrieve was not a vanity but rather a lifeline.”

Core Teaching

It’s not uncommon for some people of faith to believe or communicate that as long as a person prays consistently or that their faith is strong enough, that everything will work out in the end. But most of the people in Rwanda during that week prayed as hard as this man did, and didn’t survive. He says so himself, plainly, without flinching: “Eight hundred thousand others did not survive. Whatever God was doing in those hundred days, it was not simply protecting those who prayed most earnestly or believed most firmly.”

Instead, what the story actually teaches is narrower and more useful: sometimes the instructions that matter most don’t come packaged as urgent, but rather, quiet, inconvenient, and a little embarrassing to obey. The passport instruction cost him nothing but two miles of walking and looking foolish in front of his wife. Most real moments of listening, whether it’s to your conscience, a mentor’s advice you don’t want to hear, or a nagging sense that something’s off, cost about as much as your willingness to turn around when it would be easier to keep walking.

Discussion Questions

• Have you ever had a “go back and get the passport” moment? A small, illogical prompting that turned out to matter? What did you do with it?
• Rose’s theory (that he just wanted his passport stamps to impress his students) was reasonable, but it was also wrong. Have you ever dismissed something true because a more cynical explanation was easier to believe?
• The author is careful not to claim his survival proves God favored him over the 800,000 who died. Why does that distinction matter? What would be lost if he claimed otherwise?
• What’s a “passport” in your own life right now? Is there something small you keep meaning to do or attend to that you keep talking yourself out of?

Practice

This week, notice one small prompting you’re inclined to dismiss as irrational or inconvenient, such as a phone call you should make, an apology you’re avoiding, or a conversation you keep postponing. Do the small, unglamorous thing before you decide whether it makes sense.

Facilitator Notes

Don’t let this become a magic-formula story (“listen to inner voices and you’ll be saved”). Immediately name the 800,000 who didn’t survive as the author does this himself, repeatedly, on purpose. The goal is to be honest about mystery, rather than completing a theological exercise.

Teaching Piece 2: “Is the God of Rwanda Still Alive?”

When a Child’s Statement Is the Realest Theology in the Room

Used in: Module 4

The Story

After the genocide ended, Amminadab was reunited with his wife Rose and their two small children in Nairobi. Rose had walked four miles through streets full of the dead to reach an airport, carrying their infant daughter and holding their six-year-old son Jonathan’s hand. Seventeen members of their own faith community had been murdered near where she hid the children the night before.

Weeks later, safe now, the family gathered for evening prayer—a practice they’d kept every night of their lives. Amminadab wanted his children to understand that their survival wasn’t random, that the God who had spoken to him in a moment at a bus station was real, present, and worthy of thanks.

He asked the family to pray. Jonathan, six years old, looked at his father and said:

“Daddy, I don’t think the God of Rwanda is still alive.”

Amminadab, a trained minister, and a man who had spent his adult life helping other people understand the goodness of God, had nothing to say. He describes standing there “as empty of language as I have ever been in my life.”

The intention behind Jonathan’s statement was genuine. He wasn’t attempting to be clever or defiant, but rather, he was simply reporting what he’d seen. He’d watched more death in a hundred days than any adult should witness in a lifetime. In the only logic available to a six-year-old who had just lived through that, it made complete sense that God, too, might have been swept up and killed along with everyone else.

That night, instead of contradicting his son’s statement, Amminadab prayed with his son differently than he’d ever prayed before. Instead of using the structured language of a minister leading a congregation, he employed the raw language of a father with no answer, telling God honestly that his son was questioning his understanding of faith in a way neither of them could resolve, and asking God to be present regardless of the present doubt.

Anchor Quote

“How do you answer that? How do you tell a child who has witnessed a genocide that God is not dead without dismissing what he saw… That night, we prayed together in a way I had never prayed before… It was the most honest prayer of my life, and because of its honesty, it became more powerful.”

Core Teaching

Most faith communities are better at answering questions than sitting inside unanswered ones. When someone voices real doubt, the instinct is often to correct it quickly, offering a verse, a blind explanation, or reassurance, because the doubt makes the room uncomfortable. Amminadab does the opposite. He lets his son’s question stand, unresolved, and prays from inside it rather than against it.

This matters enormously for 18–35-year-olds, many of whom are in the middle of their own version of Jonathan’s question. Their speculation may not necessarily about genocide, but about a diagnosis, a family collapse, a betrayal, or a loss that doesn’t fit the faith they were handed as children. The temptation in youth ministry is often to rush people back to certainty, but this story argues that the more faithful move is sometimes to stay in the room with the real question, without resolving it prematurely, and to trust that presence is the more honest offering.

Discussion Questions

• Why do you think the author chose not to give Jonathan an answer that night?
• Has anyone ever tried to talk you out of a doubt too quickly? What did that feel like?
• What’s the difference between “explaining doubt away” and “praying from inside it,” as the author describes doing with his son?
• Later in the memoir, the author distinguishes between “inherited faith,” “examined faith,” and “forged faith.” Which one best describes where you are right now?

Practice

Identify one real, unresolved question you carry about faith, loss, or meaning that you’ve been tempted to bury under a quick answer. This week, instead of resolving it, write it down honestly, in one sentence, and sit with it without trying to fix it.

Facilitator Notes

This session will likely surface real grief in the room. Do not rush to comfort participants out of silence after this story is read. Let a pause happen. If someone shares something raw, resist the urge to immediately offer a scripture or reassurance, and instead, model exactly what the story is teaching.

Teaching Piece 3: Rachel and Karemera

What Reconciliation Actually Sounds Like

Used in: Module 5

The Story

In October 1994, months after the genocide ended, a retreat was organized in Mwanza, Tanzania, bringing together Quaker survivors from Rwanda and Burundi with leaders from neighboring countries who had watched the horror from just outside it. The goal was a simple move towards processing the devastating events that had transpired and beginning to construct the next steps toward reconciliation. The issue was that survivors often cannot heal each other in the earliest aftermath of catastrophe, as the wound is too fresh and the pain is too close. What was needed first was people steady enough to stand on solid ground and reach a hand down.

Two testimonies from that retreat became defining moments in the author’s understanding of what reconciliation actually requires.

Rachel, a Hutu woman, stood before the gathered community and described a childhood without hatred that hadn’t taught her to fear or despise her Tutsi neighbors. But when the civil war reached even into homes like hers in 1990, the language around her changed. Suddenly, Tutsis couldn’t be trusted, she was told. They were “Inyenzi,” otherwise known as cockroaches. As these sentiments were repeated over and over again, they began to infiltrate her cultural perception and corrupt her relationships, role in community, and values.

But what was striking about Rachel’s testimony was that she didn’t attempt to excuse herself, nor did she cite the propaganda she’d absorbed as a defense. She stood up and said plainly: “I am very sorry for my wrong attitude toward my Tutsi brothers and sisters,” and vowed publicly to work for peace and reconciliation in Rwanda for the rest of her life.

Karemera, a Tutsi pastor, had lost sixteen members of his family, including parents, siblings, cousins. During the one hundred days, an entire branch of his existence had been wiped away with violence. He told the room, without softening it, that he had been actively planning revenge, taking real steps toward perpetrating violence against those who had been responsible for his loss. He said God intervened before he acted, and that the release from that plan didn’t feel like his own achievement, but rather, a deliverance.

What was most unexpected was when he turned to the American missionaries in the room and asked them for forgiveness, and for the hatred he’d carried against Americans and the U.S. government, which had known what was happening in Rwanda and chosen not to intervene. This wasn’t a small ask, but he offered his humility anyway, naming the specific failure. The missionaries, weeping at the man’s example, received it.

Anchor Quote

“This is what reconciliation actually looks like. It can’t be done with the signing of agreements in conference rooms, international diplomacy, or even the organized programs of transitional justice… Reconciliation looks like a Tutsi pastor with sixteen murdered family members turning to strangers and asking them to receive his forgiveness, and a Hutu woman standing up and naming her wrong attitude and vowing to spend her life differently.”

Core Teaching

Two moves make both testimonies real instead of performative: specificity and cost.

Rachel didn’t say “I’m sorry if I’ve ever offended anyone.” Instead, she named exactly what she’d absorbed and exactly who it was aimed at. Rather than offering a vague statement about letting go of anger, Karemera named his plan, its target, and the specific group he needed to forgive and be forgiven by.

Vague apology and vague forgiveness cost nothing and repair nothing. But naming the actual wrong, and recognizing the person or group it was aimed at, is what makes reconciliation different from a performance of niceness.

This is the piece of the program most directly transferable to ordinary 18–35 life: workplace conflict, family estrangement, a friendship broken by something specific and namable. The scale is different from genocide, but the mechanism (and its results) of specific naming of the transgression, its cost, and refusing to rush to a premature resolution are exactly the same.

Discussion Questions

• What’s the difference between Rachel’s specific confession and a general “I’m sorry for whatever I did”?
• Karemera says God “delivered” him from his plan for revenge rather than talking himself out of it through willpower. What does that suggest about the limits of self-discipline in real forgiveness?
• Is there someone in your own life you owe a specific apology to, rather than a vague one?
• Is there a group or category of people you’ve absorbed unexamined fear or resentment toward, the way Rachel describes absorbing fear of Tutsis? What would naming it specifically sound like?

Practice

Write one sentence of specific, honest confession or forgiveness, presenting something you would actually be willing to say to the person it concerns. You don’t have to send it this week. Just write the true, specific sentence, instead of the vague, safe one.

Facilitator Notes

Do not pressure anyone to share their sentence aloud. The point of the practice is precision in private, not public performance. Watch for participants trying to “perform” reconciliation quickly to move past discomfort, then gently slow them down.

Teaching Piece 4: The Five Threads

What Every Lasting Peace Is Woven From

Used in: Module 7 (can also serve as a standalone workshop)

The Framing

After decades of peacebuilding work in Rwanda, Kosovo, Uganda, Nepal, Yemen, Iraq, and finally a small city in upstate New York, Amminadab began to see a familiar pattern following every encounter that he had witnessed. This consequently began to change the way that he viewed individualism versus collectivism in peacebuilding efforts, arriving at the conviction that no individual thread can hold the weight of conflict alone. A single strand snaps under tension. A woven fabric, made of many threads distributing that same tension across the whole, can bear far more.

He names five threads that, together, make a peace durable rather than fragile:

1. Belonging: “Peace begins where people feel they belong… People who feel they belong nowhere are available to the recruiters of extremism who offer, as the price of membership, a sense of purpose and identity that no legitimate institution has provided.”
2. Trust: “Trust is the invisible infrastructure of social life… Conflict destroys trust systematically… Once trust has been destroyed, rebuilding it is extraordinarily slow and extraordinarily difficult.”
3. Human Dignity: “Conflict often begins when dignity is denied… Violation of dignity is the engine of conflict.”
4. Shared Responsibility: The move from mere coexistence (not actively harming each other) to genuine investment in each other’s flourishing. “Coexistence without trust or shared identity… is a peace that is always one crisis away from collapse.”
5. Reconciliation: “The art of repairing a community even though the memory of their cause of pain is still well within reach.” It requires truth, naming, and time, but never rushed forgiveness.

Anchor Quote

“A single thread stretched between two points will snap under any significant tension. But threads woven together… produce something with a tensile strength far exceeding what any individual thread could provide. The fabric holds because of the relationships between the threads, not despite them.”

Core Teaching

This framework is deliberately usable at every scale, whether it’s national, within a neighborhood, a friend group, a family, or a college dorm floor. Ask which of the five is missing wherever there’s conflict, and you will eventually arrive at a diagnosis.

For an 18 – 35 audience specifically: this is the age range in which people are choosing their adult communities through roommates, churches, workplaces, friend groups, and eventually families of their own. Naming these five threads gives them vocabulary to notice, early, which thread is thin in a relationship or community before it snaps, rather than only diagnosing it after a rupture.

Discussion Questions

1. Pick one relationship or community you’re part of right now (a friend group, a team, a family). Which of the five threads feels strongest? Which feels weakest?
2. The author distinguishes coexistence from shared responsibility. Where in your life do you have coexistence but not yet shared responsibility?
3. Which of the five is hardest for you, personally, to offer other people: belonging, trust, dignity, shared responsibility, or reconciliation? Why that one?
4. Is there a “one crisis away from collapse” peace in your life right now? Something that looks stable but is actually thin?

Practice

Choose one community you’re part of. Identify its weakest thread. Do one specific, concrete thing this week to strengthen it. It doesn’t have to be a grand gesture, just one real action sized to the actual thread (e.g., if it’s trust: follow through on something small you said you’d do; if it’s dignity: name someone’s contribution publicly that’s gone unacknowledged).

Facilitator Notes

This piece works well as a whiteboard exercise. Draw the five threads as an actual woven diagram and have small groups map a real conflict (workplace, campus, family) onto it. Keep it concrete; this framework is strong enough to survive contact with participants’ actual lives, so don’t let discussion stay abstract.