The Colorado Pastor Rwanda Calls a Terrorist: Christine Coleman’s Fight for Truth and Faith

By Shaina Cole | Contributing Writer, Rocky Mountain Voice

When Pastor Christine Coleman opened a message from a friend in Belgium earlier this month, she didn’t expect to find her own name on Rwanda’s new Domestic Terrorist List. “She texted me and said, ‘Christine, they released a list of terrorists, and you are one of them,’” Coleman recalled. “At first, I was shocked. But then I had a deep joy—because when wicked people hate you, it means you’re doing good.”

The document, issued on October 14, 2025, by Rwanda’s National Counter-Terrorism Committee, named twenty-five individuals accused of supporting or financing terrorism. It accused her of “supporting the FLN and inciting terror acts against Rwanda.”

Coleman flatly denies the charge. “They cannot find one proof,” she said. 

She lived through Rwanda’s genocide in 1994 and made a home in the United States, becoming a US citizen. From Denver she keeps an eye on her homeland, praying for peace in Central Africa…and warning that violence in Rwanda and the Congo never truly ended. She worries most about the churches and for the pastors who vanish – and the believers who still meet in secret.

The Moment Rwanda Erupted

It felt like an ordinary evening in Kigali. Then a flash tore across the sky. The plane with President Juvénal Habyarimana fell. All aboard were lost, including Burundi’s President Cyprien Ntaryamira. Rwanda changed in that instant.

Immediately after…the massacres began.

Pastor Coleman remembers that week as if it never left her.

“I was at my sister’s house and I was supposed to stay there for a week—we were on spring break,” she said. “My sister had gone to work, and all of a sudden, something in me stirred me up to leave.” I did not know it was God. At that time, I was not a born-again Christian.”

She phoned her sister and said, “I think I’m going to go see my other sibling in the countryside. I will come back Sunday.” Her sister asked her to stay, but Coleman insisted. “My brother came in to pick me up. We went to the countryside, and that very same day, the plane of the president of Rwanda was shot down, and the killings began,” she recalled. “And these rebels, they came to my sister’s house. They had mapped every household. They knew who was who…and they killed my sister and her entire family… If I did not leave, I was going to die.”

She escaped across the border into what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo. “We became refugees in Congo… and the same people who killed my sister and her family…they came to get us back by force,” she said.

Coleman fled as the violence spread. “But in doing that, they secretly killed a lot more people in Congo,” she said. “When I got to the country, they were killing left and right.”

She states the voice of God spoke to her saying, “Don’t worry. I’ll protect you.” And she replied, “I made a promise to God that—if he saves me through this war, I will serve him.”

Her survival, Her promise, Her mission

That vow became the foundation for everything that followed—her immigration to the U.S, the founding of Blazing Holy Fire Ministries, and her lifelong mission to speak for the voiceless. Based in Colorado, it now also has branches in Asia, Africa and Europe. She stated, “So me doing the Blazing Holy Fire basically is me paying my vows back to God—just, okay, you saved me. Here I am to serve you.”

“When I began to advocate for the oppressed, Rwanda’s government started doing acts of surveillance and espionage on me,” she explained, “I did not know how bad it was until I had seen they had put me on the terrorist group on October 15, 2025.”

Regarding her placement on the Domestic Terrorist list in Rwanda, she stated, “I knew it was coming. For a long time they tried to hurt me, but I am not afraid. My only concern was how to tell my family.”

Pastor Coleman believes the persecution stems from her open criticism of Rwanda’s leadership. “So in Rwanda, starting the year 2017, the president of Rwanda went on the TV and he told his administration ‘close these churches’…So in 2017, by his order, they closed over 6000 churches within three months.”

Rwanda’s History of Religious Persecution

A 2018 Christianity Today report confirms—Rwanda shut down more than 8,000 churches and 100 mosques, citing safety violations. 

The U.S. State Department’s 2023 International Religious Freedom Report, also, confirms that “authorities continued to require faith groups to re-register, monitor sermons, and restrict public gatherings.” In 2022, an Open Doors International’s dossier on Rwanda stated, “the government suppresses freedom of association, assembly and religion … as can be seen in the closure of thousands of churches.”

Human Rights Watch has reported a climate of fear for religious and political voices in Rwanda, including surveillance, torture and intimidation of exiles. 

Coleman’s experience aligns with the reports of transnational repression. According to Freedom House, Rwanda ranks among the world’s most aggressive states in targeting dissidents abroad—through “espionage, threats, harassment, and attempted renditions.”

For Pastor Coleman, those findings mirror what she has witnessed personally—a nation where prayer itself can become an act of resistance.

She stated the Rwandan government uses money to fuel its surveillance network. “They pay people to report who is speaking, who is praying…They pay for tips—they pay to destroy lives.”

“They will murder groups of Christians who pray together,” she said. “They closed the churches, and they hunt those who pray.”

“They wanted to try to hurt me,” she said. “But I am not afraid.”

The Price of Silence—and the Politics that Followed

Rwanda collapsed into violence in April 1994, while the rest of the world stood by. The Clinton administration avoided calling the crisis “genocide,” unwilling to commit troops after losses in Somalia. By the time the violence ended, more than 800,000 people had been murdered. 

According to to Coleman, “The UN tried to come and send in soldiers. But, Kagame, the President of Rwanda refused. He wanted the genocide to happen so that the international community would sympathize with him and help him get to power. He is the mastermind of the genocide. They could have intervened but he refused.”

During his visit to Kigali in 1998, President Bill Clinton apologized. “We did not act quickly enough after the killing began. We did not do as much as we could have and should have done,” he said. “It is important that the world know that these killings were wrong and that we must never let them happen again.”

U.S. policy shifted after that apology. With USAID funding, Washington helped Paul Kagame’s government frame Rwanda as evidence that post-genocide recovery could succeed.

Coleman sees that history differently. In her essay I Survived the Killings of Hutus by RPF During the Genocide, she wrote, “After the Rwanda genocide of 1994, Kagame’s RPF, who also committed horrendous massacres (together with Interahamwe), took power in Rwanda. After installing the new government, they are the only ones who were allowed to tell the story of the Rwanda Genocide.”

“How can a criminal tell the truth of the killings they participated in?” she said. “It’s like Hitler telling the story of the Holocaust.”

“With Clinton’s support, he won the war and became president,” she said. “So they give us a murderer, and he killed the beautiful people.”

Her Message to Those Who Feel Silenced

When asked what message she would share with others who feel silenced or persecuted for their beliefs, she replied, “Our belief, it’s a God-given right. We do not demand that from a president. We do not demand that from a politician. It’s the right that we are born with to speak up and to choose our religion.”

She said, “Fight for your freedom. You are stronger than those who were trying to steal your freedom. You are more powerful, and they fear you. That’s why they want to silence you, because your voice is stronger than their guns and weapons. So speak the truth.”