480 Members of Congregation To Convert To Islam And Change Their Church To A Mosque

RWANDAN clergyman has conducted what is arguably the largest conversion of Christians to Islam when he successfully got all 480 members of his congregation to switch faiths last Tuesday.

In a first such mass conversion of its kind, Pastor Mikdad apparently got all the members of his flock to switch faith.

According to one church members, they all turned up for a church service only to be forced to convert to Islam by their pastor.

In addition, he also got the church converted into a mosque during the radical conversion ceremony that took place on Tuesday August 25.

Apparently, an Islamic cleric had preached to Pastor Mikdad and succeeded in convincing him that Islam was the way to go, making him decide to switch faiths.

Rwanda is a predominantly Christian country but of late, has seen a gradual rise in its Muslim population.

About 56.9% of Rwandans are Roman Catholic, 26% are Protestant, 11.1% are Seventh day Adventist and only 4.6% are Muslim, most of them being Sunni. I

slam started growing in Rwanda after the country’s 1994 genocide as both Catholic and Protestant churches helped to make the killing of about 800,000 people possible by giving moral sanction to the murders.

Churches have longed played ethnic politics themselves, favouring the Tutsi during the colonial period then switching allegiance to the Hutu after 1959, sending a message that ethnic discrimination was consistent with church teaching.