NEWS STORY: Relief worker: Church growth `exploding’ despite crises in Sudan

c. 1998 Religion News Service UNDATED _ In war-ravaged, famine-plagued southern Sudan, the only crop thriving is the number of Christian converts, but the escalating crisis there makes it nearly impossible to keep tabs on church growth.”What makes it hard to work with figures is that the church is exploding but the people are dying,”said […]

c. 1998 Religion News Service

UNDATED _ In war-ravaged, famine-plagued southern Sudan, the only crop thriving is the number of Christian converts, but the escalating crisis there makes it nearly impossible to keep tabs on church growth.”What makes it hard to work with figures is that the church is exploding but the people are dying,”said Clive Calver, president of Wheaton, Ill.-based World Relief, the international assistance arm of the National Association of Evangelicals.”I asked one church leader how many people are coming to faith. He said, `Too many … we can’t disciple them all,'”said Calver, who just returned from a two week mission to London, Kenya and Sudan to meet with Sudanese Anglican, Roman Catholic and Protestant leaders.

Calver said he met with one church leader who at the beginning of the 15-year-old civil war was responsible for 12 congregations but now is responsible for 1,000 small groups throughout the region.


And, he said, southern Sudan has witnessed a two-fold increase in the number of Protestants _ from 1.2 million in the early 1980s, the last time official numbers were available, to at least 2.2 million today.”The years of pressure mean that people are looking for answers, for help, for strength outside themselves,”Calver said.”And a personal relationship with God is the direction that people have turned.” Sudan has a population of some 30 million and one of the largest Arab populations in Africa. Clashes between the Muslim Arab-controlled government in the north and rebels in the mostly Christian and animist south have left about 2 million dead since 1983.

Dan Eiffe, a relief worker with Norwegian People’s Aid who has spent 11 years in southern Sudan, told a Capitol Hill news conference last month the conflict is essentially a”religious war”in which a fundamentalist Islamic government is orchestrating a”carefully manipulated”genocide to rid the region of African Christians and animists, thus gaining access to an area rich in oil and other natural resources.

The Dinka, the cattle-herding tribe most affected by the famine, have little to gain by converting to Christianity because they remain persecuted by the Muslim Arabs simply because they are Africans, Calver said.

Regardless of religious belief, death by starvation remains a grim reality for many in southern Sudan since current levels of humanitarian aid are insufficient and the rainy season has hampered its delivery. Relief workers estimate hundreds are dying each week and say the final death toll will exceed that of last decade’s horrific famine in Ethiopia.

The crisis in Sudan has intensified in recent months as a three-year drought has come to a head, creating more than 4 million internally displaced people and threatening to kill more than 2.6 million, according to the U.S. Committee for Refugees.

To help facilitate relief efforts, the Sudanese government on Monday (Aug. 3) declared a unilateral cease-fire throughout southern Sudan. The truce, announced on the eve of peace talks between the Khartoum government and the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Army, was to take effect Tuesday, according to news reports.

But many Sudanese Christians believe the establishment of an independent nation is their only hope for survival.”Most of the churches see the war as a war of liberation,”Calver said.”… The Islamic government clearly wants to impose Islam.” In the meantime, government and religious humanitarian aid groups have stepped up their efforts in southern Sudan.


Calver said World Relief would”like a million dollars now … so we can open a feeding center … provide medical supplies … and the opportunity to operate chaplaincies in the military.” And last week, a State Department official said Operation Life Sudan, a U.N.-sponsored relief program that will provide 15,000 metric tons of food per month to southern Sudan, will be the largest such effort in history.

Still, Calver estimated international relief effort are meeting just 50 percent of the need in southern Sudan.”When you go into the worst areas, it is absolutely incredible to see,”he said.”I know now what the American troops saw when they liberated Auschwitz and Dachau. I’ve seen skeletons walking.” But”there’s hope for Sudan,”he said, adding that during his mission to southern Sudan he visited a”normal African village”where Christian aid groups had brought food and medicine to enable the villagers”to create their own community and health and welfare.” That example, he says, should speak to the world community.”The message is: Where there’s just a little bit of help … these folks can build a future. But where there isn’t, they’re dying like flies.”

DEA END PAQUETTE

Donate to Support Independent Journalism!

Donate Now!