Letter from the World Church
We often think of church in terms of the local building where we worship, or as the Christian community to which we belong. But the Church is so much more than that - there are estimated to be 2 billion Christians in the world, and the church is present in every country on earth. This world wide church is huge and diverse and we are blessed in The Six to have Clare Amos amongst us. Clare works in the worldwide church and will be writing a letter every now and then bringing this worldwide church to us in North Kent, giving us a taste of what life and faith are like in other parts of the world.
You can read her letters here. Previous letters are available for download at the bottom of the page
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A story of Sudan
Unlike the last two ‘letters’ I have written for The Six website – this one is about a place that I have never visited – though I have wanted to do so very much for a long time (and I will be trying hard to find a reason to do so during my next few years working for the World Council of Churches!)
It is what I believe is the ‘newest’ country in the world – South Sudan, which declared its independence from the north in July this year.
Sudan featured quite strongly on Alan’s and my horizons when we lived in Beirut in the 1970s and 1980s. That was because there were a considerable number of students from Sudan (largely from the south of the country) who had come to Lebanon in search of a university education. A number of them, both Anglican and Presbyterian, were studying at the Near East School of Theology where I taught for a number of years – and where Alan too had many links and contacts. There was one student in particular that Alan was very close to before our marriage. He was an Anglican Sudanese priest from the Dinka tribe by the name of John Malou Ater. Alan helped to supervise his dissertation which compared priesthood in Dinka religious culture and Christian priesthood. After he returned to the Sudan John became a bishop. I only met him the once when he returned to Beirut for a visit. He presented me with a leopard skin handbag (and I mean real leopard skin). Beirut was the kind of place where you learned how to accept graciously gifts whose ‘taste’ you found distinctly questionable! (I passed on the leopard skin handbag to a Seychellese friend when I eventually left Lebanon and Ravinia absolutely loved it.) Back in Sudan John, like a number of other senior Anglicans got caught up in the Sudanese civil war and the struggle for liberation by the southerners. He was twice caught up in an aircrash. The first time he was the only survivor and though he was quite badly injured he eventually recovered. Sadly the next crash, when his plane was shot down by the SPLA (the Sudanese Popular Liberation Army) as it was seeking to bring in food supplies to a southern town, was the one he did not survive. If he had been still alive today I suspect he might either have been the Archbishop of Sudan or a senior figure in the southern government.
I both marvelled at the dedication of the Sudanese students at the Near East School of Theology (NEST) and wondered at the appropriateness of their coming there to study. They normally came for four years, leaving their families behind in the Sudan, and generally not returning there at all during their study years in Beirut. It concerned me whether it was right for them to train for ministry in such a different context to their own – Beirut was a sophisticated urban environment, worlds away from the rural and subsistence lifestyle that many of the students had come from and where they were going to minister. About the only thing that Beirut had in common with the Sudan was that they were both places that were experiencing a long running civil war! So the students came from one civil war to another in desperate search of an education. One could not but respect them, even if some of the time I was ambivalent about what they were doing. Many of them of course were studying in their third or fourth language – their tribal language being their first, Arabic next, and English their third.
In those days I was a young and fairly inexperienced lecturer of Old Testament studies. So I tell this story against myself. I am not sure what possessed me but I set my Old Testament class an essay title ‘What does it mean to call God the Lord God of hosts?’ In the Old Testament the ‘hosts’ is a name for God’s heavenly army – the angels, and even the bodies like the stars. I was a little surprised to receive from one of my Sudanese students an essay that ranged from discussing how Abraham had offered a meal to three angels, how Jesus had fed 5000 people, and how Psalm 23 speaks of God spreading a table before us. Suddenly it dawned on me – the student concerned had understood the phrase ‘Lord God of hosts’ as meaning ‘God the chief host’, ‘God the great party-giver.’ Though strictly speaking it was of course wrong – there felt to be a wonderful rightness and wisdom about it. The vision of God as the great party-giver felt a far more healthy picture of the divine than a God who was defined by being at the head of his armies. And this was particularly true in Beirut – where we had rather too many armies around at each others’ throats, and perhaps not always enough occasions for rejoicing. Ever since those days that novel understanding of Lord God of hosts and the importance of the theme of hospitality has been a thread running through my theological and biblical interpretation.
Ever since those days in Beirut both Alan and I have kept a watching interest in developments in Sudan. In the moves towards independence both the Anglican and Roman Catholic Archbishops have played a significant role. Archbishop Rowan has, on a number of occasions and in a variety of ways offered appropriate support.
There are of course still major problems in areas disputed between north and south – such as Nuba and the Kadugli mountains – but thankfully the transition to independence seems to have (for the moment at least) passed off relatively peacefully in the major centres of the south such as Juba.
I invite you to remember the people of Sudan, in particular the Anglican Church there, in your prayers, and I offer you two prayers you might like to use. The first comes from Salisbury Diocese, which has a long-standing and very committed link relationship with the Anglican Church of Sudan. The second is by a Sudanese Anglican/Episcopalian writer and poet by the name of Mary Garang.
God our Father,
whose son Jesus Christ wept over your people who knew not the way of peace,
and were as sheep without a shepherd,
hear our prayer for the people of the Sudan.
Turn the hearts of their leaders to reconciliation and peace.
Bless their Archbishop and clergy, that they may be true shepherds of your flock.
Strengthen those who heal the wounded and feed the hungry.
Hasten the time when all nations will own your just and gentle rule and receive your gift of peace, in Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
(Prayer for Sudan used in churches of Salisbury Diocese, England)
Let us give thanks to the Lord in the day of devastation,
and in the day of contentment.
Jesus has bound the world round with the pure light of the word of his Father
When we beseech the Lord and unite our hearts and have hope,
then the demons have no power
God has not forgotten us
Evil is departing and holiness is advancing,
these are the things that shake the earth.
(Mary Alueel Garang, Episcopalian Christian of the Diocese of Bor, Sudan)
You can read Clare's previous letters here
http://docs-eu.livesiteadmin.com/bcd7df4f-c1c5-44df-8645-3d41aec76f4c/letter-1--4-small-mugs--july-2011.pdf