AFRECS E-Blast: February 17, 2022

Former Ambassador Leads AFRECS

The AFRECS E-Blast has recently been featuring responses by American Christians to the question “Why haven’t you left?” – title of the inspiring book by Marc Nikkel, the late Episcopal missionary who worked with Southern Sudanese virtually up until his death from cancer in 2000.  In this issue we learn how Prof. Ellen Davis became involved in teaching at Renk Theological College and has been channeling students from Duke Divinity School to teach Sudanese students at Bishop Allison Theological College, a Sudanese seminary in exile in Uganda.

My own introduction to Sudan came with an assignment as Deputy Chief of Mission at the US Embassy in Khartoum in 1986.  I became acquainted with the growing armed struggle of the South Sudanese for self-determination.  My wife and I worshiped at the Episcopal Cathedral in Khartoum, under the leadership of impressive priests from South Sudan. That assignment was perhaps the most interesting of my Foreign Service career. Years after my retirement from the Foreign Service I returned to Sudan in 2011 for a two-year assignment as senior advisor to the U.S. Government on Darfur, just as South Sudan was making good on its independence.  My duties on several occasions made me a participant in negotiations with the South Sudanese leadership.  However, it was joining the Board of AFRECS in 2016 which put me in regular touch with the leadership of the Episcopal Church of the Sudans, including Archbishop Justin Badi Arama, who visited the US in 2019.  Two visits to South Sudan in 2018 and 2020 acquainted me with the dedicated leader of the Mothers Union, Mother Harriet Baka, with Archbishop Ezekiel Kondo, Primate of the Episcopal Church of Sudan, as well as a number of bishops and priests with whom we work directly.

I discovered that in a place where dysfunctional government places terrible burdens on ordinary women and men, the Episcopal churches are educating children, sponsoring trauma healing activities, promoting small business, and encouraging peace among ethnic groups hitherto engaged in violent conflict. That discovery has motivated me to work to ensure that AFRECS — our network of American churches, dioceses, faith-based organizations and individual Christians is providing support to these embattled churches as they seek to meet the needs of their people.

That’s why I’ve come back to the Sudans.

Executive Director

P.S.I hope to see many of you as we promote AFRECS’ work at the CEEP Network Annual Conference in Atlanta February 23-26.

“My People Live in the Old Testament”
                                                                                               

Ellen F. Davis
Amos Ragan Kearns Distinguished Professor of Bible and Practical Theology
Duke Divinity School

It was the vision of Daniel Deng Bul Yak, then the “baby” (newly installed) Bishop of Renk Diocese, that captured my attention in 1996, when he came to study at Virginia Theological Seminary. I was surprised by the unstinting effort he put into writing, and sometimes rewriting, essays for my Old Testament Interpretation course. VTS was, as he put it, “the first school I have ever attended that was not destroyed,” and further, this was his first exposure to critical biblical interpretation. Refusing to be daunted or bored by academic exercises that belonged to Western culture, he was thoroughly, rapturously engaged by the text itself: “My people live in the Old Testament. They need to know their story.” Over the course of that academic year, my own sense of vocation was touched by Bishop Daniel’s commitment to preparing himself to advance biblical education, and theological education more broadly, for the Christians of Sudan. I promised to come to Renk to teach when peace came to Sudan, although it was nearly eight years before the Comprehensive Peace Agreement of 26 May 2004 allowed us to make good on that promise.

Just ten days after the Agreement was signed, I traveled to Renk Bible School (now Renk Theological College) in the company of my colleague Richard Jones. There I encountered people for whom the Bible is a lifeline, people who would walk for a couple of days in order to study the book of Isaiah – the only book of the Bible that makes unmistakable reference to the people of the Upper Nile (see Isaiah 18). On the way home, Professor Jones and I imagined into being the Visiting Teachers Program, whereby Duke Divinity School and Virginia Seminary sent advanced students, alumni, and clergy to Renk and other theological colleges to teach Hebrew, Greek, and theological subjects for periods ranging from two weeks to three months. That program has now morphed into a partnership with Bishop Allison Theological College, a Sudanese seminary in exile in Arua, Uganda. One Duke Divinity alumnus has just completed more than four years on the faculty at BATC, and this summer three Duke students will travel there for a ten-week field education placement, under the supervision of Sudanese colleagues.

Studying Bible with Sudanese Christians – on multiple trips to Sudan until 2012, and later in Uganda – has transformed my reading of the Bible, making it three-dimensional and fully contemporary. They share a mindset with the biblical writers, one that I appreciate only across the vast distance imposed by my own full immersion in North American culture. Through them I have begun to develop a second-hand understanding of what it is to live in land torn by nearly constant armed conflict, to be an agrarian people inhabiting a semi-arid land, where human and animal life and the wellbeing of the land and its water sources are inextricably intertwined daily realities. Further, they showed me how those facts-on-the-ground shape religious sensibility. The very pressure of a corporate life that has been inexpressibly difficult and dangerous over generations has formed many African Christians in a stubborn faith that says, (contrary to what many Westerners would consider to be the relevant evidence) “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God’” (Pss. 14:1, 53:1). Against much evidence, they witness to the nature of tough hope, which the writers of both Testaments hold up as an essential religious practice. Moreover, my students and I have received from sisters and brothers in the Sudans the radical hospitality of those who have very few material possessions. Thus they have instilled in me an existential understanding of why hospitality, care for strangers and sojourners, who would not survive without that care, is the most important public value of the biblical world.

I hope my work with Sudanese Christians has contributed a little toward former Archbishop Daniel Deng Bul’s lifelong goal of educating leaders for the Episcopal Church of the Sudans. I know that it has profoundly shaped me as a teacher in my own local contexts and continues to do so. Through that work I have gained a sharper eye for what matters in our reading of the biblical text, what is potentially life-giving in every place and age. I pray that my students on both continents will advance that work, to the glory of God and the welfare of God’s people.

Ellen Davis serves on the Board of AFRECS