At Last, a Visit to South Sudan
by David Nakhla, CDM Administrator
This spring, after some years of waiting, the OPC was able to visit members of a sister denomination in South Sudan: the Sudanese Reformed Church. Their country has been riddled with violence. In 2011, following years of conflict with the northern part of Sudan, whose people are mainly Sudanese Arab and predominantly Muslim, the African and predominantly Christian people of the southern part of Sudan voted overwhelmingly in support of independence, officially becoming the Republic of South Sudan.
But less than three years later, South Sudan entered its own civil war, this time mostly along tribal lines—the Dinka versus the Nuer. Because the president and the government were mostly Dinka, the Nuer were under threat of massacre. Millions sought asylum in the neighboring countries of Uganda, Ethiopia, and Sudan, while many others hid under the shelter of United Nations peacekeepers who placed these Internally Displaced People (IDPs) into camps sprinkled throughout South Sudan.
Among those taking shelter in the IDP camps were members of the Sudanese Reformed Church (SRC).
The SRC, which started in Khartoum in 1992, is a Reformed denomination that, in 2013, was welcomed into the International Conference of Reformed Churches (ICRC), of which the OPC is also a member. The SRC holds to the Reformed doctrinal statements known as the Three Forms of Unity.
In 2014, the Sudanese Reformed Church submitted a request to the ICRC’s diaconal committee that ICRC member churches be encouraged to contribute to their ministry of mercy in the IDP camps. Many SRC members are displaced: as of 2017, the denomination had six thousand members with only sixteen congregations but eighteen groups within IDP camps.
The Challenges of Providing Diaconal Assistance
When the request came in 2014, the SRC was not well known to our denomination. It had been a member of ICRC for only a little over a year. Providing diaconal assistance to those of whom we know very little, particularly where the language, culture, and customs are so different from ours, is quite challenging. There are huge knowledge gaps. Large sums of money going to places where money is scarce has the potential to do damage, even in the best of circumstances—it is well-documented that foreign assistance to Africa has done a great deal of harm. We are always asking the question: How do we help without hurting?
To make it more difficult, the SRC’s 2014 request came to a newly minted diaconal committee that was just trying to figure out which way was up. The ICRC had established and elected it only one year earlier, in 2013. This committee of five (of which I am one) represented four different continents and had almost no connection prior to serving together.
We on the OPC’s Committee on Diaconal Ministries (CDM) always seek to minister mercy where there is also the opportunity to pair the ministry of mercy with the ministry of the Word. Many of the places in the world where diaconal assistance is sent are places where the OPC has a relationship via its Committee on Foreign Missions or its Committee on Ecumenicity and Church Relations. Neither of these were established with the SRC when their request came in 2014.
When evaluating requests, we also endeavor to gauge the ability of the requesting organization to properly oversee the administration of the diaconal ministry. Will the requestor actually be able to carry out the ministry that it is proposing? Will it succeed in purchasing and distributing the food or supplies that it intends to purchase?
We knew an in-person visit would help to answer these important questions. But in 2014, a visit to South Sudan seemed neither practical nor possible.
While it can be heartbreaking to come to such a conclusion, saying no to a request requires that we trust the Lord to provide for his children by another means he has determined. We also trusted that, if it was his will, the Lord would provide an opportunity to come alongside these brothers and sisters.
After 2014, our relationship with the SRC began to grow. The Reverend Patrick Jok attended the General Conference of the ICRC in Ontario, Canada, in 2017, and then he attended a missions meeting of the ICRC in Willow Grove, Pennsylvania, in 2018. Since those meetings, when he got to know the OPC better, and we grew in our appreciation for him, it has been my prayer that I might be able to visit South Sudan on behalf of the CDM.
In God’s providence, I was finally able to make that visit in March 2021!
A Visit to South Sudan
South Sudan is located just north of Uganda. It’s a rugged country with very little infrastructure outside its major cities. The only paved highway in South Sudan runs from its capital city of Juba, over Juba’s only bridge across the White Nile (which splits the city), and south to the Ugandan border. It then continues through Uganda and Kenya to the seaport city of Mombasa, Kenya, on the Indian Ocean. This is the land route by which most supplies are trucked into Juba.
It just so happens that Mbale, Uganda, is along this road. On the edge of Mbale lies the Knox School of Theology, established by the OP Uganda Mission as a place to train up indigenous ministers. Charles Jackson, OP missionary evangelist to Uganda and headmaster at Knox, wants to see the school used by other Reformed churches in the neighboring countries in East Africa. Jackson recently hired one of his top students, a South Sudanese man named Okuch Ojullo, to serve as a teacher at Knox. Together, they devised a plan to visit South Sudan to explore the possibility of South Sudanese candidates for ministry traveling the Juba-Mombasa highway to come study at Knox.
Knowing of the longtime interest of the CDM to visit South Sudan firsthand and assess the needs of its internally displaced people, Jackson invited me to join their team. In God’s providence, the timing worked out perfectly. OP missionary James Folkerts, who has previous experience ministering to both the Dinka and Nuer ethnic groups, also joined.
Currently, South Sudan is considered a dangerous place by the US State Department, and Americans are discouraged from traveling there due to “crime, kidnapping, and armed conflict.” We learned that most of the danger is during nighttime hours. So, like the locals, we were careful not to travel after 5 p.m. We were encouraged to remain behind the safety of the gate and walls of the camp in which we stayed, on the bank of the White Nile River. During our visit, we never felt threatened in any way when out and about in Juba during daytime hours.
Believers of Bethel Sudanese Reformed Church
To reach Bethel Sudanese Reformed Church, which Patrick Jok serves as pastor, we headed to the outskirts of town and down a dusty dirt road. From the outside, there is not much to see beyond a cheap, simply constructed building of wooden poles and tin sheets. But inside, the worship is vibrant, and love exudes from God’s people. Anticipating our arrival, the ladies of the church put together a feast fit for a wedding. They presented us with an incredible spread and treated us as honored guests. They even gave each of us a gift, a handcrafted necklace with a cross attached.
We were encouraged to learn that, despite the strong ethnic division in the country, Bethel SRC has twenty-one different tribes represented in its small congregation. What a beautiful picture of the type of reconciliation the gospel can bring!
We were also blessed to visit one of the two IDP camps located on the outskirts of Juba. At its entrance, we were warmly welcomed by believers of the Nuer tribe (easily identified by the tribal scarring on their foreheads) with whom we sang, prayed, and fellowshiped in their tarp-covered, makeshift church building.
We then snaked through the helter-skelter array of temporary structures to the place one church member has called home for the last eight years. The trails between the tents are so tight that one has to step aside to let another pass. It felt like we were rats in a maze. Having seen the dirty latrines located on the uphill side of the camp and observed the overflow “riverbed” that ran through the middle of the camp, we were particularly disturbed to find ourselves stepping down into the homes of each member, trying not to picture what this scene must look like when the rainy season comes. It is no wonder that these camps, hastily assembled, are ripe for sickness and disease.
And yet, the church members were eager to bring us into their homes and to show us, among their few possessions, their children’s school books that they have used to keep their education going during this period of waiting. (Forty-six percent of South Sudan’s population is under fourteen years old, but schools are scarce.)
When we entered the home of one member of the church, he said to us through a translator: “Welcome, this is your house. Today you are now family. What you do is more than [give] money, because if you see someone, it is better. See the children? They want to see you. ‘Where do these men come from?’ they ask. We tell them, ‘They come from Jesus Christ.’”
This man then told us that, thanks to the generous contributions of a sponsor, his son is currently studying at Mukhanyo Theological College in South Africa and that they look forward to when he might return and serve the church in South Sudan. This was one means of hope for the future, as they and most of their tribe wait for peace.
Another man, an elder in the congregation, shared this with us: “We have been displaced from our original homes. Life is very hard here, but the good thing is that Jesus Christ is with us. All the things of this earth will finish, but Christ will never finish. We have been living here for the last eight years. When it rains, we have hard times. These plastic sheets leak. We have water from above and also from the flooding of the area. But we are thankful for God. It is not my problem alone. Everyone in this camp is affected, especially when there is rain. Please, what we want to request from you is prayer that we have peace in South Sudan.”
Prayer for Our Brothers and Sisters in South Sudan
Will you join me in committing to pray for peace in South Sudan, for the sake of our brothers and sisters there?
And, I am happy to report that, having visited and gained confidence in the ministry carried out on the ground, the CDM, with the concurrence of the Committee on Foreign Missions, has made an initial gift from its Refugee Relief Fund to the Sudanese Reformed Church for the benefit of those suffering in the IDP camps in South Sudan. We pray for increased fellowship and ministry between the OPC and SRC in the years ahead.
The author is administrator for the Committee on Diaconal Ministries. New Horizons, July 2021.
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Lemonade From Lemons: Continuing the Conversation 2021
by Scott Pearce, Church of the Covenant, Hackettstown, NJ
On Saturday, June 12, at the approximate time of what would have been the closing program of the OPC’s Committee on Diaconal Ministry’s fourth Diaconal Summit in Chicago, a hundred deacons from across the denomination instead gathered for instruction, encouragement, and networking…in a massive Zoom meeting!
Call it another lemonade-from-lemons moment associated with COVID-19. Call it another case of the heart of men planning a way, but the Lord directing the steps. Chalk up another “instead,” another “alternate arrangement,” another “in light of present circumstances…” after more than 15 months of cancellations, delays, and postponements. And yet, with COVID-19 seemingly fading into our collective rear-view, we might each actually come to refer to the 2021 diaconal summit as the last important event on our calendar that was significantly altered by COVID-19 (even so, let it be!).
If the 2021 diaconal summit was significantly altered in form, venue, and execution (and it was), be assured that it was not lacking in substance, intimacy, or a sense of brotherhood. This was not your monthly corporate management meeting with that one co-worker oblivious to his dog’s incessant barking. This was not your granddaughter across the country trying to show you her new bicycle but really only inadvertently showing you her nostrils and chin. The resounding testimony of this particular participant was that the 2021 diaconal summit was a great success and a blessing to those able to join in that sweet 90 minutes of conversation.
To be sure, there was a lot condensed into our 90 minutes together on that Saturday! To welcome us, David Nakhla played virtual host while we all configured our Zoom settings and looked to see who we might recognize on one of the other pages of video boxes. David greeted so many of us by name—and not just because we were “wearing a name tag,” so to speak. This is a brother who is personally familiar with the diaconate of our denomination, and it shows in many ways.
Retired Army chaplain and current CDM member Rev. Rick Dickinson opened the meeting with a brief devotional from John 16:32-33. He encouraged us with the words of Him who has overcome the world and challenged us to “learn and remember that the best opportunities to glorify and enjoy God will occur through circumstances we never would have chosen for ourselves.” There are many of us who perhaps knew firsthand the wisdom of that aphorism in the pre-COVID era, but Rev. Dickinson’s words certainly spoke to each of us who have deaconed in and after the COVID era.
A subsequent message from Rev. Nathan Trice was presented in order to prompt us to consider and reflect on three of the main challenges with which seemingly every church and every diaconate was faced in 2020 and early 2021. First, how can a deacon/diaconate help a congregation keep the needs of body and soul in balance? Second, what role(s) does a diaconate play in trying to maintain (or restore) peace and unity in the face of disagreement between brothers? Finally, how can deacons best serve disaffected or contentious people in a congregation? Rev. Trice’s warm and personable testimonies of his own congregation’s struggles and successes were woven through his message and helped “prime the pump” in advance of the keynote portion of our time together.
Through means and methods known only to unseen engineers in the far recesses of virtual lands where people know what things like VDI stand for and how The Cloud (so called) works, we 100 or so deacons on 85 or so independent devices were placed—suddenly and seamlessly!—into discussion groups of 10 to 12. And this, brothers, was where the blessings and upbuilding of the participating deacons was most powerfully and palpably manifest.
Once in our virtual discussion rooms, the event became personal. It shrunk from lecture hall to workshop. It changed from the feeling of sharing an auditorium to sharing seats around a table. The crown jewel of the 2021 virtual summit was the time spent in the discussion group with a group of nine or 10 other deacons from across the country.
There, in three rows of tiled screens, were the faces of fellow front-line workers. There, in ages and voices and experience as varied as Joseph’s coat, were the brothers who had labored in the same ways, struggled against the same challenges, and wrestled with the same uncertainties and anxieties that had faced all our own diaconates. In the discussion group setting was an immediate and intimate sense of camaraderie and encouragement.
We talked about what worked. We talked about what plans went askew. We remembered “back in the early days” and we shared what our congregations were doing to transition back to “normal.” Perhaps most simply (and most profoundly), we talked with brothers who knew what this year had been like for the deacons of Christ’s church. We were each men who had ministered and served in a year like no other. We were men who had executed our session’s unprecedented and ever-changing policies. We were men who were often conflicted and confused ourselves yet couldn’t relinquish the high call of the office at a time such as this. For a heartening half hour, we felt a sense of solidarity and we, I have no doubt, each felt much less alone.
I think that even those of us who couldn’t get in front of a laptop on June 12 can express great thanks to the organizing committee for their work in planning, preparation, and execution. That there was even a next-best-thing option presented to the OPC diaconate is a testimony to the love and dedication that flows from the Committee on Diaconal Ministries on a seemingly perpetual basis. There is a veritable graveyard of businesses, schools, clubs, and non-profits that have folded under the restrictions and volatility of this past year, and the CDM could have folded their hands on the summit in likewise fashion. Instead, we deacons are exceedingly grateful for the invitation and the virtual venue that was presented to us this year.
We would also be remiss if we did not express how well their plans were executed by the team behind the scenes. Trish Duggan’s reminders and instructive emails elevated even the most technologically-challenged of us to competent Zoomers. Mark Stumpff’s unseen hand rivaled only perhaps Gandalf the Grey’s for sheer wizardry and technical precision. That one hundred participants, a dozen breakout rooms, a pre-recorded keynote speaker, and four time zones peacefully co-existed and interacted for a full 90 minutes is a great testament to the Lord’s blessing on the event and to Mark’s great skill.
If you are anything like me, perhaps you have (with a heart full of mixed and conflicted emotions) been uttering some version of the declaration, “Well, I hope that was my last Zoom meeting!” every month since October 2020. How great a loss I would have suffered if those temporal desires of my heart had been fulfilled and I had somehow not participated in the 2021 “Continuing the Conversation” virtual summit! I take no liberties to state that the virtual summit was a great encouragement to each man who participated. May we each carry a torch of refreshment and renewed zeal back to our own diaconates as we each transition back to the “normal” labors of Christ’s kingdom in the months ahead.
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Who Helps the Local Deacon?
You probably wouldn’t have to go far to find a deacon who sometimes feels overloaded. The range of diaconal duties can be overwhelming, even for a seasoned, well-experienced deacon. Why? Well, it may have to do with why he accepted the call in the first place.
For a deacon, it probably started with a need. A need that raised him from his chair and put him into action. Deacons care. Maybe it started with him helping to distribute flyers for Vacation Bible School. Maybe he saw that elderly woman who needed help to her pew. Or maybe he saw the same guy doing “everything” behind the scenes and it caused him to say, “I can probably help.” A deacon is one who has a heart for helping where help is needed.
So, who takes care of the local deacon when he is over-taxed, and needs help or advice himself? With the same desire that a deacon has to fulfill a need in his congregation, the men of the OPC Committee on Diaconal Ministries desire to serve the local deacon, in the midst of his load.
The OPC diaconate is a group of over 800 men! Imagine the blessing to a deacon if he had someone to pray with or with whom he could share burdens or a quick phone call for advice? Maybe he just needs to be encouraged by someone who knows what he’s going through. Some deacons are the lone deacon in a small congregation; others are a member of a large diaconal board. Either way they are a part of a much larger support system—men who are often balancing similar types of loads.
If you are a deacon, you might be saying, “Well, I’m really not feeling that. Praise the Lord, things are kind of low-key right now and I don’t really feel over-burdened.” Ok, but what if you could be the load-lifter for another deacon?
With the postponement of the National Diaconal Summit to 2022, the Committee on Diaconal Ministries is offering an online event that won’t replace being together in Chicago in June, but just might be the most encouraging Zoom call you have during COVID. Fellowship, encouragement, and equipping each other, even if you’re miles apart.
Deacons deal with the same questions and the same situations, yet often feel like they are on their own. The CDM wants to connect more of the 800 men more often, and that can’t wait until the summer 2022. Strength and encouragement for our deacons can’t wait another year until we can meet.
So, why is the CDM event, “Continuing the Conversation”, so important? Deacons need a place to talk. Deacons need a place and a way to support each other. COVID has challenged that. “CtC” is our answer. Join us. We’ll talk, pray, encourage and make plans to do that more often and in different ways.
There are already 66 men registered to be on the call. If you are a deacon and have not yet committed to this 90-minute event on June 12th, please do so now. It will take you just two minutes to register. Go to: OPCCDM.org/continuing-the-conversation.
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