Episcopal Press and News
Sudanese Episcopal Church Is a Bulwark for the Holy Spirit
Episcopal News Service. March 19, 1998 [98-2122]
John Ohmer, Regular Contributor to the Virginia Episcopalian
(ENS) While the church continues to pass resolutions calling attention to religious persecution throughout the world, a group of Virginia Episcopalians, joined by a representative from the Diocese of Chicago, went to the Sudan in January to take a close look at the precarious situation facing the Episcopal Church in that war-tom country.
During the 11 days they spent in two dioceses the group received a rare first-hand look at the persecution Sudanese Christians endure, fulfilling the Sudanese expression they often heard: "A man's true brother is the one who visits him when he is sick, not the one who comes to lower him into the ground."
Bishop Daniel Deng Bul has been bishop of church's Diocese of Renk, in the northern upper Nile region, since it was created in 1992. While studying at Virginia Seminary, Bul told those he met of the conditions facing his church.
The Rev. Pierce Klemmt of Christ Church in Alexandria, who met Bishop Bul in 1996, said that he could not shake the bishop's plea: "Come to the Sudan. Visit my people who are suffering. I need people to come to us...my people are drowning. Will they come?"
As Klemmt said in his report to Virginia's Annual Council, "Seven of us entered Khartoum like sheep running through a wolf pack."
The Diocese of Renk is frequently identified as an important diocese, not only for the Episcopal Church but also for worldwide Christendom, because it is strategic for geographic, political and spiritual reasons.
Sudan is also a war-weary nation, involved in war for 130 of the past 170 years, with 30 of the past 40 years scarred by civil conflict between North and South. The radical Islamic-controlled government deliberately harasses and torments non-Muslim people. Christians in particular are subject to ethnic, cultural and religious persecution. A major concern of Sudanese Christians is that Islamic countries are investing in the spread of fundamentalist Islam throughout the continent of Africa, pouring money into efforts to force conversions.
Renk Diocese has been described as the "front line" of the Sudanese government's intention to impose Arab and Islamic culture on the African people of Southern Sudan. Russ Randle of Alexandria says that Bul's diocese is "the breadbasket of Sudan, and a place which will either be a gateway for militant Islam to bludgeon its way south at gunpoint, or a bulwark for Christians in Sudan and Southern Africa and a springboard for the Holy Spirit to move north."
In the refugee camps of the Sudan, Christian parents are wrestling with a heavy decision: should they allow their children to receive an education in the Islamic schools, where they would receive a rigorous indoctrination into Islam, but also increased access to medical care, and additional food?
Or should they allow their children to remain Christian, and therefore receive virtually no education, no medical attention, and suffer hunger?
"What we saw and heard and touched is the material for nightmares, a human hell," Klemmt said. What makes the suffering of Sudanese Christians so painful, according to Klemmt, is how their oppressors taunt them, saying, "If this is how your contemporaries remember and care for you, why do you remain Christian?"
Reflecting on the trip, Randle said, "Seeing people who put their lives on the line for the faith on a daily basis makes us both much more thankful for the blessings we enjoy and embarrassed that we as a church fight like spoiled children over issues which are so trivial in comparison to what these people face joyfully on a daily basis."
What do Christians in Sudan face? Recently, instances of enslavement, ethnic cleansing and genocide have driven literally millions of people to refugee camps there. The Sudan team traveled to one such camp, Jebel Aulia. Despite resistance from local government officials, they saw and photographed the camp's health clinic, a three-room adobe with a thatched roof. With no electricity, no running water, and packed-dirt floors, this one clinic serves a population of over 38,000 people. A few water pumps in the camp must serve that entire population.
On the day the team visited, the pharmacy apparently consisted of a one-shelf table containing only 50 bottles of medicine, which had just arrived from England. For lack of resources, nurses in the Sudan commonly remove, wash, and re-use "sterile" gauze bandages until they wear out.
Yet the Episcopal Church of Sudan is one of the largest and fastest-growing Christian denominations in that country. Church members will spend the equivalent of a week's wages on a bus ride, in order to get to the cities where Sunday church services are held. A major reason for that devotion, the Sudan team says, is Bishop Bul.
"'The church is the church only when it exists for others. ...it is not abstract argument, but example, that gives its word emphasis and power," wrote Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in Letters and Papers from Prison.
Those who meet Bul inevitably compare him to Bonhoeffer. The Rev. Geoffrey Hoare told the story of Bonhoeffer in a sermon at the Eucharist during the diocesan council meeting because he could not help seeing parallels between the Sudan of the 1990s and the Germany of the 1930s, and between the two men. Both men studied for a short time in the security, peace and extravagance of the United States, only to return to the suffering, violence, and squalor of their own nation. Both men emerged as leaders of national prominence in a church struggling with internal turmoil against a government hostile to its very existence. And yet both men focused on planting seeds for the long-term future health of the church, at a time when its day-to-day survival is uncertain. At his diocesan council, Bul produced a five-year strategic plan for his diocese, including plans to establish five new parishes, new Christian schools, and provide basic food and medical care to refugees in his diocese.
The Sudan team is still sorting out the meaning of their mission in the long term yet all agree that what Bishop Bul and the Christians in Sudan want most of all is very simple. When the early missionaries converted them to Christianity, they told converts that they were joining a family, a worldwide community of believers, one that transcended all political and geographic barriers.
They simply want to know if that is true.
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