This past season from November thorough February has seen us host 28 visitors to the Gambella Anglican Centre, 2 clergy training events, 2 Mothers’ Union training events, 1 week-long clergy and lay reader conference, and the Diocesan Area Assembly for over 200 representatives. Combined with visits to various church communities including the student-led church of Mekele, visits to Djibouti and Somaliland, and many meetings about exciting ministry development, this has been a busy time! Crises with the clergy, crises with changing governmental regulations, lack of running water, lack of electricity and lack of time alone to rest and recuperate – all this combined has made us very conscious of our weaknesses; our shortcomings, and, very aware of the unfailing love of Jesus, who loves to fill all that we are not, with all that He is.

~ Sitting under the stars with the Opo at Christmas, watching the Jesus film, when, as one, with their spontaneous and heartfelt applause, they greeted the risen ‘Jesus’ as he appeared to his disciples in the film.

~ Baby Louise’s Oatmeal Eye Infection: 

Laughing and yet a little horrified, the Mothers’ union representatives watched as Baby Louise’s mother (me), happily spread the infection (oatmeal) from one of her eyes to both eyes, and then, using the same dirty cloth, to the face of my other “child” as well as to my friend, who, after shaking my (dirty) hand, rubbed the transferred oatmeal on to her eye as well. 

“What have I done?”, I asked my Mothers’ Union reps. 

And then, “Let’s do this again!!” 

“Shall I use the same cloth to wash Baby Louise’s other eye?”, I asked.  

“Noo!!!!” the Mothers’ Union reps shouted in horror

~Presenting new ways of teaching: Like still-life photographs, the visiting team from South Carolina with one of two gestures then frozen in a tableau brought the reality of the suffering of the woman healed from a flow of blood in a way that enabled our Gambellan women to touch her joy, and to reach out to touch this One who still heals today.

As the season of Lent begins, I’ve been thinking, “What is mission”? I think it is walking with Jesus. As you give Him your hands to be available, your feet to follow, and your home to welcome Him, He gives you His heart for others, His perception of who they are in Him and His joy in seeing hearts become open to love. I believe God yearns to love others through human hands and human hearts; that what Jesus wants to be for us in the moment of our need, He intends to give through us to others. Jesus’ very life was poured out on the cross. To meet Him there, where sin and inadequacy have been taken up into His death, is to find life.

As Wendy has said, we’ve had a lot of visitors in the last two months or so. We are extremely grateful to each one: my good buddy Chuck from near Toronto, a group from Trinity School for Ministry in Ambridge, a Mothers’ Union staff worker from the UK, a family of long-term missionaries to Ethiopia who joined us for a few days of Christmas celebrations with the Opo people, a young couple from York, UK discerning a call to mission work here in Gambella, and finally a wonderful servant-like group from South Carolina. Each person and group has made wonderful contributions to our life and work here. So many others have contributed to our life and work here from a distance – we are keenly aware of the on-going support, especially in prayer, that we receive from so many. Thank you so much.

But the last few days have been quite remarkable.

To start with, Wendy and I became grandparents this weekend. Well, actually, we became grandparents nine months ago, but the baby has now become visible to all! Samuel Grant LeMarquand was born on Saturday February 7 in Calgary to David and Anna LeMarquand. We are grateful and excited – but it is difficult to be on the other side of the world when such a miracle is going on! Thankfully we’ll be in Calgary for the baptism in May.

Meanwhile, in Ethiopia, our Anuak churches in the new Abobo Mission Centre held a “spiritual conference” – two days of prayer, singing and preaching. We travelled there on the Sunday morning and had a wonderful service with Christians from four churches in the area. All of these are new. The oldest of the four, Bethlehem Anglican Church in Abobo town, was started a year ago. Now Bethlehem Church has given birth to three baby churches. The conference was being held in a tiny village called Ukunne. One of the great privileges I have as bishop is to name churches that I visit. This one, to the delight of the people gathered, received the name “Our Father Anglican Church” – in Anuak “Wuawa”  Anglican Church.

Over in Pilwal, one of our staff was invited to a special, high-powered event. It seems there a man in Pilwal who was possessed by a traditional ancestral spirit named Wiu. This man has spent most of his life serving Wiu, performing sacrifices for many people on behalf of the spirit. Even though his relatives are Christians, they were afraid of this man and the spirit who  possessed him. The family, convinced that Wiu is responsible for the recent deaths of three family members, have been begging him to become a Christian and forsake this spirit. Shaken by the recent deaths, the man spent this weekend in conversation and prayer, and opening his heart to Christ, he decided to burn his ritual sacrificial spears, and the leopard skin, a symbol of his spiritual authority, and to take on a new name, David, as a symbol of new life and new joy. His catechetical training has begun in preparation for his baptism.

• for ongoing support to pay for programmes, salaries, Bibles, hymn books, new churches,and for buildings for St Frumentius’ Anglican Theological College on the Gambella Anglican Centre compound
• for the right teachers to come and teach at St Frumentius’ and for the right students to come and learn
• 
• that churches may continue to grow in their ability to take financial responsibility for the life of their churches
• for true peace in South Sudan
• for our many refugees

Refugees Have…

As the staccato shots rang out, we joined hands and, together with the rest of the crowd, fled from the center of Gambella market. Moments later the embarrassed laughter of relief broke out as the crowd realized that we had all been running from a back-firing Bajaj (taxi). Tension and laughter; something that we in Gambella have been living with for the past few weeks.

Sunday found us on the road to Bonga – home, in our opinion, of the best honey in Ethiopia. We passed soldier after soldier, their AK-47’s slung carelessly over their shoulders, now stationed along the streets in this Mezhenger-zone border area. Heart-breakingly, we heard that the bee hives of the Mezhenger people, their source of food and income, had been deliberately destroyed in the recent uprising in this region. Our destination was  St Thomas’ Anglican Church in Bonga. It was wonderful to join our Anuak congregation there in a worship service permeated with peace. I was struck by the beauty of the quiet tears adorning the face of one woman as she raised her hands in thanksgiving and adoration. The Anuak plans to start a Mezhenger-speaking congregation in this area are discussed with excitement and enthusiasm, undiminished by either suffering or unrest. It is great to be part of what God is doing in the midst of the tumult and trust of walking with Him in this part of the world.

“Refugees have no God”

Ethiopia is a majority Christian country. We enjoy freedom of worship. Christians are able to meet freely here without fear of reprisal. Well, most of the time. There are, of course, parts of the country where this is not the case. 

Two sad situations were reported to us recently. Both happen to have taken place near the Sudan border in refugee camps where people are vulnerable at the best of times. In one camp, Anglican Christians were meeting with a camp official who had given us problems in the past, denying the church various things. On this particular day the official seems to have been trying to put Christians in their place, attempting to show them ‘who was boss’, and to assure them that as refugees they had no rights (not true, of course, although refugees often have little knowledge of what their rights are). Our church members were asking for the camp to allow a priest to come to give them Holy Communion and to baptize their children. “Refugees have no God,” the official told them. 

“Refugees have no God”? What does that mean? – especially since it was spoken by a man who, as a Muslim, claims belief in one God.  Does it mean, ‘Your so-called god has let you down. The one I believe in is bigger than your god’?  And what of the underlying  assumption, “You are sub-human. God does not care about you. You are not worthy of having your religious practices honoured and valued – you are mere refugees, unimportant people”?  The lay reader who told me this story also assured me that attendance in the church in that camp has gone up recently. It seems these people have a God after all.

A half day drive away in another camp a remarkable revival has been going on for several years. Every evening at sundown the children and young people of St John the Baptist Anglican Church gather outside the church for a half hour. They sing, they read a short passage of scripture which is commented on briefly, they pray for the sick. Then they all disperse to their homes for the evening meal and bed. Other churches in the camp have tried to model the practice. For some  reason these other gatherings have fizzled after a week or two. God is doing something special in this particular church. It is not a technique, it is not something that can simply be copied. But a few weeks ago in the midst of their Evening Prayer, the camp police arrived. They took the pastor and all the children to the camp jail and told them that what they were doing was illegal. They were told to desist. Our pastor said, “No, we are allowed to pray. We will pray. If you want to imprison us for the gospel of Jesus Christ, we will suffer gladly.” They were finally released…too much trouble to keep them all locked up it seems.

These stories of attempts to humiliate and dehumanize are in sharp tension with the over-arching story we find in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. In that story we find that although Jesus possessed “equality with God” he did not consider that this meant living a life of privilege. He became downwardly mobile, entering our fleshly, dusty, muddy existence, giving himself for others, for us, for refugees, and for the proud, for victims and perpetrators, for his enemies and his friends. This story, encapsulated in Philippians 2:5-11, stands in contradiction to the stories of hatred, ridicule and oppression that are so common in our world. In the face of the attempts to dehumanize them, our people simply continue to sing and to pray, to build churches out of the mud and the sticks, because they know that one day all will become clear. One day “every knee will bow and every tongue confess … that Jesus is Lord to the glory of God the Father.” One day the God of the refugees will be praised by every creature “in heaven and on earth and under the earth.” And the humiliated will be exalted together with the one who “humbled himself” for them, to live and reign with him. 

We have much to be thankful for. We have just finished our annual Area Assembly (like a synod or a convention) which brought together almost 200 representatives from our churches to worship, learn together and make decisions. There are signs of growth in depth and commitment among our churches here – makes a bishop’s heart glad.

Bishop Grant

Area Assembly November 2014:
Click link to read Bishop’s Charge

Small Stature…. Great Dignity

~ Please Pray with us ~

Gambella is a strange place. It’s out of the way (we have an airport but it is used mostly by the World Food Programme). It’s poor (nearly half of the current residents of the region are refugees). Our two seasons, ‘rainy’ and ‘dry’, are more simply known as  ‘mud’ and ‘dust’. In Gambella, not many are educated, not many are employed, not many are well-fed.
But on occasion weird and unusual events happen in Gambella.

Seventeen years ago, Paul Pok,  parish priest of Pinyudu Refugee Camp, made the difficult decision to send his two eldest daughters to school in America under the care of  a relative. Recently Paul, now Regional Dean of Pinyudu (overseeing twelve churches), told me that one of his daughters was coming for a visit – they would see their little girl for the first time in almost two decades. As the visit got closer I began to realize that there might be something unusual about this young woman. She was traveling with a small entourage including a photographer and someone who seemed to be a kind of handler. Slowly the story emerged. This young woman is a (famous, I guess…) supermodel working in Milan, London and New York.    

We were invited to meet her and had no idea what to expect. Wendy and I travel in some diverse circles, but the world of high fashion supermodels was never our interest, really. As it turns out Nykhor Paul is a delightful, articulate young woman. In spite of being out of Africa for seventeen years she has managed to retain her use of the Nuer language. Although she has not been ‘home’ for most of her life, she cares deeply about the plight of her family and the many South Sudanese refugees once again fleeing their homes because of violence. She has started an organization (“We are Nilotic”: see www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZXJDAwUlEQ) and a fund to help these victims of war (see http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/24/south-sudan-supermodel-nykhor-paul).

Then a few weeks back, while shaking hands with the congregation at St Matthew’s in Addis Ababa, the British Ambassador asked if I was going to be in Gambella at the end of September – sadly no, I was going to be in another country for meetings, I responded.  “Why?” I asked. 

“Well, there is going to be a royal visit,” says he.

“In Gambella?? Really? Who?”

“Princess Anne.” (HRH, the daughter of Queen Elizabeth II…) “She is a supporter of a children’s charity that works in Gambella, so she’s visiting the project. She will also lay a wreath at the grave of the only Commonwealth fatality in the World War II ‘Battle of Gambella.’ I thought it might be nice if she could be met by the Bishop, and if he could say a prayer at the grave.”

We have known for a long time that Gambella has many, albeit unofficial, supermodels and princesses – we just didn’t know that Supermodels and Princesses from elsewhere would want to come to visit. We’re glad they did. If their celebrity draws the world’s attention, even just a bit, to the problems in South Sudan and western Ethiopia, well and good!

“In the case of an event keep your head down below the level of the window. The medical kit is right behind your head, just pull it forward if you need it.” The ‘special police’, former British military, were on the alert; an exciting, if somewhat hyper-vigilant introduction to one of the countries in our diocese to east and north of us.

The courtesy and consideration shown to me by the top government official was deeply touching. As we walked to the site of a proposed new Anglican church to be built in this country, it began to rain. “This is a sign of God’s blessing on the relationship between our two faiths”, I was told. Pray for the beloved countries of this part of the world.