The Anglican Church will soon start its own university that will among other things offer theology courses in a bid to improve the quality of education for church leaders to abide by the new law governing faith-based organisations. The East African Christian University is located in Kabuga, Gasabo district and is ready to start, according to officials. It will also offer courses such as theology, communication, business, public health, education, among others, according to Laurent Mbanda, Archbishop of Anglican Church in Rwanda. Officials made the revelations on Friday during the closing of a two-day conference that brought together senior church leaders and their counterparts from United States of America to discuss how the church can contribute more to the development of the church and Rwandans in general. “Construction activities of the university are almost complete and all is set. We applied for accreditation fromthe Higher Education Council (HEC) to allow us to start offering courses, we hope they will visit and give us the go-ahead to start,” he said. “We want to start as soon as possible, we have many students to start with and we want to offer different courses to contribute to the education development. But mainly, we have a particularity to teach theology as it was made a requirement for churches to hire church leaders who have at least a diploma or bachelor’s degree in theology,” Mbanda noted. Early this month, the Anglican Church appointed Prof. Viateur Ndikumana as the new vice chancellor of the new university. Under the new law, the leader of a church should possess a degree in theology because in most cases church leaders mislead their followers because of lack of such skills. Infrastructure development The Anglican Church also laid a foundation stone to start construction of a commercial complex building at the Anglican headquarters in Gasabo. The Rwf 600million building seeks to complement to activities of the church to improve living conditions of the church and Rwandans in general. “We seek to improve on what we are doing, we often depend on donors and Christians contributions if we want to say construct schools or anything to contribute to the citizens’ welfare, this was not enough and we hope that the building will help us in financing our people centered projects such as in education, especially through Early Childhood Development (ECD) education,” said Mbanda. The complex building will have several rental rooms for commercial purposes to support various activities geared towards improving citizens’ welfare in all dioceses throughout the country, according to officials. editor@newtimesrwanda.com
