An associate pastor from Steinbach has found a second home in the African country of Rwanda. Dave Kehler of Calvary Chapel explains how he came to be involved with a Pentecostal Church of just over two million members in 3,200 congregations across that country.

"Somebody from Rwanda came here, walked into our church. He'd walked across the border with a suitcase on his head. He was a refugee claimant. My job here is to train the young men and women in leadership. I discipled him for 17 months and then he went back to Rwanda. And, when they (the church leadership) met him, they said, you're just completely different than the guy who left before, can we meet the people who trained you?"

Kehler says he and his wife Lynn started going to Rwanda five years ago and now spend six months of the year there training leaders.

"We ended up connecting with the national leaders of the church, the highest level in the country, and the executive declared that anything that we felt God wanted us to do, anywhere in the country, before we asked, the answer was 'yes'. When I came back here (to Steinbach), people were saying, Dave, who are you telling them that you are? I said, I keep telling them I'm nobody in the middle of nowhere and they just keep saying, oh but God sent you and this is incredible, this is fantastic. So we've been throughout the nation many times and we work with the very top leaders of a church of just over two million adults, 3,200 chapels, and that's what we do."

He adds they have started an organization called 'Bridges Beyond' to take that training to the next level.

"Bridges Beyond means, if we connect with people now, we do something now. But that's not good enough. We're training and equipping leaders so that they will lead. If people come and say, what you're teaching us is so wonderful and great, I say that's wonderful but it really doesn't matter unless you're actually going to do something with that training and lead others."

A fundraising dinner was held Saturday night at Calvary Chapel in support of that project.