Written words are patient things. Once they find their form in so many sentences and are bound into books, they wait. They remain unchanged in the fleeting breadth of a human lifespan, and untouched in the devastation of a human conflict. It may be decades before a book once neglected is turned open again and its words are absorbed as they were meant to be. When that time comes they will still fulfill their purpose – but only if the words can be read and understood.

AIM missionary Martha Hughell could not have known what lay ahead when she bound up the words of the New Testament in the Otuho language in 1969. Her translation had taken 17 long years of patient labor, and when she retired she did so with the satisfaction of knowing the Lotuho people of Southern Sudan finally had the Word of God in their mother tongue, even if only few could read the language at the time. The church embraced the translation and volumes spread in the years between Sudan’s first and second civil wars. But those years were short and by 1983 the Lotuho homeland was engulfed in conflict once again.

By the time peace returned, 22 years had passed; nearly two million Sudanese had lost their lives, and an even greater number had been scattered. Some ended up in neighboring countries as refugees, others simply fled over the next mountain ridge and waited – wandered and waited for decades while the war ran its course.

Many of Sudan’s social structures suffered during this time, and the schools were no exception. Among the varied international relief efforts addressing each emerging crisis in the country, there were those who saw the importance of education as a stabilizing force in the conflict, and as a hope for any future beyond it. So there beside the drama of a protracted African war, beside the aid workers, peacekeepers, and pallets of relief food, were teachers. And some of them were missionaries.

Russ and Lyn were living in Juba, Southern Sudan’s principle city, when the war began. Both had come with AIM to teach in the schools; Russ was from urban New York, Lyn from the county of Kent in England. Juba, where they first met, was unlike either of those places. The town was oppressively hot, set on the western bank of the Nile in the southernmost part of Sudan. Juba was also a hub of war-time activity and a safe haven for relief efforts. This allowed both Russ and Lyn to continue in their ministries despite the steadily unraveling situation around them.

For two single missionaries in such a place at such a time, the assignment was a bonding experience. Russ and Lyn shared more than just a unique knowledge of which roads in Juba had land mines. They shared a genuine love for teaching. And they were both curiously persistent – stubborn perhaps – in their desire to serve the Sudanese people.

But by the late 80’s, Juba was under siege. By 1990, most Western workers had either left or been evacuated, including Russ and Lyn. They landed in Nairobi and, not surprisingly, were married there that same year.

When asked how a lady from Kent ends up married to a man from Queens, Lyn smiles and declares in her soft-spoken way, “The war threw us together.”

And together, they were doubly persistent.

“When I came,” Lyn says, “I knew this was a place I could spend the rest of my life. The calling was specific. The circumstances, not so much.” Russ’ story is much the same. So they simply followed their calling and worked around the circumstances.

When living in Sudan was no longer an option, the Nobles based themselves in Kenya and made frequent returns across the border. When AIM pulled all their missionaries from rebel-held areas, Russ and Lyn found a way back in with an Africa-based church ministry. When the mission planes quit flying due to insecurity, they found a ride on UN chartered planes instead. They continued to focus on teacher-training. They developed training modules and then carefully skirted conflict areas and held workshops over month-long trips to rural villages and towns in scattered locations in the South.

In all of these places, the Nobles were witness to the deterioration of the education system, which in rural areas was already little established. Sudan, it seemed, had a more fundamental problem than struggling schools and displaced students. The teachers were few and inexperienced, and many of them lacked basic literacy skills in their own language.

Literacy is like a living thing. Children who read are taught by adults who themselves can read. It is a skill that trickles down from generation to generation, and when the cycle is broken, a people group can become functionally illiterate in a very short time. The war in Sudan disrupted education to such a degree that an entire generation was being left behind. The official literacy rate in Sudan today stands at 27%, but in parts of South Sudan adult literacy is as low as 5-10% among women. Either way, these are some of lowest literacy rates in the world.

The discovery of this trend caused the Nobles to take a step back and refocus their efforts on a ministry of helping the Sudanese teach literacy to their own people.

In its simplest definition, literacy is the ability to read and write. But it’s also a doorway to further life skills – simple things like writing a letter, counting money, or casting a vote with some knowledge of how it will affect your future. Literacy is also the key to education. It’s been estimated that a 15 year old girl in South Sudan has a higher chance of dying in childbirth than of finishing primary school. But even more, literacy is a doorway to the Word of God, which a literate person can read for themselves and be transformed.

For the past ten years the Noble’s ministry has been all about this. Russ and Lyn have touched on as many as nine different people groups and languages since they began, promoting literacy and leaving a trail of self-sustaining literacy classes all over South Sudan. But how do you facilitate literacy in a language you don’t speak?

“We’re not linguists,” Russ explains, “They know the language, we bring the expertise.”

That expertise comes in the form of training and equipping volunteer literacy teachers who are chosen by the local church. The volunteers then go out into the communities and run literacy classes for a season – a couple hours a day, a couple days a week. It is a slow and patient effort. But what may look to be a very simple process is in reality moving through many complex steps toward something that transcends the process: a man or woman who can read their own language for the first time.

Russ and Lyn moved back into Sudan in 2007, excited to begin the process again. This time God led them to the Lotuho people who have, in recent peaceful years, been returning to their homeland.

Next door to the Noble’s house on the AIC church compound in Torit is a small literacy office in mild disarray. Shelves and foot-lockers crammed with written materials. Pamphlets and booklets. Little readers in a dozen languages. Storyboards and blackboards. On Russ’ desk is an incomplete Bible story he’s working on with a translation helper. On Lyn’s is a scattering of Otuho letters on hand-printed index cards. On top of shelves and under tables in stacks are tattered boxes filled with copies of the Otuho New Testament.

In the Nobles’s front yard is a temporary classroom of poles and tarps. As many as twenty literacy teachers come for a two-week training course that may be their first or their fifth. They learn the techniques of teaching others to read and write. They practice reading aloud and writing legibly. Russ gives a lesson on what it feels like to be pre-literate. He invents a new way of writing English with strange symbols and stumps the class. The learners will need patient teachers, he explains.

“Many new learners do not even know how to open a book, turn a page, or hold a pencil.”

Each graduate of the course leaves wearing a bright new T-shirt with the Otuho alphabet printed on the back. Each new class they start in the community will get a footlocker full of reading material designed to take the learners from tracing letters to reading God’s Word.

Leaning against a tree in the village is a make-shift blackboard. And under the tree is an eager group of learners – mostly adults and mostly women. They sit in a semi-circle on woven mats in the dust and watch the teacher inscribe the symbols of their mother tongue with a stub of chalk. The teacher makes the sounds and the learners repeat them. They laugh at themselves and light up as connections are made between symbols and speech.

In a more advanced class, one learner holds a primer in her hands while an infant slings at her side. She stands at front and reads aloud to the group, stumbles once or twice, but ultimately triumphs. On the sidelines the Nobles are watching during one of their regular visits to encourage the class, and even Russ is excited about the progress. A year ago they were learning letters. In a year or two they will be reading the Bible – the one waiting since 1969 to be read.

In helping people access the Bible for themselves, Russ describes their ministry as “one piece to the puzzle in building the church in South Sudan.” But it is likely more than that. The whole process is itself a parable of patient love. It is a translator giving a lifetime to encode the Scriptures into a new and cumbersome language. It’s missionaries like Russ and Lyn making many returns to a war-torn nation in a tireless effort to train teachers and develop materials for the learners. It’s a literacy teacher, his hand wrapped around the hand of his sister and pressed against a blackboard as they, together, trace out the letters of the alphabet in Otuho or Dinka or Nuer. And it is God, who has promised that his Word will not return to Him empty, and who is infinitely patient in waiting.

As the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return to it without watering the earth and making it bud and flourish, so that it yields seed for the sower and bread for the eater, so is my word that goes out from my mouth: It will not return to me empty, but will accomplish what I desire.—Isaiah 55:10-11

by Mike Delorenzo

I have only one pair of good boots and I seldom get to use them. But they were the first thing I packed. For fifteen days I traveled through central Africa. Into the middle of the continent, and the middle of some of the worst humanitarian disasters in the world. Africa Inland Mission’s objective was to gauge the state of the church here, if there was one, and to learn how to re-engage these lands with a renewed missionary effort. What do you take on a trip like that? Good boots and a Bible. A notebook and an open mind. And, if you dare, an open heart.

Into Sudan, Congo, Chad, and the Central Africa Republic. Four countries with a combined land mass equal to two-thirds of the United States, but without the roads. So where the Land Rovers wouldn’t go, we traveled by air, motorcycle, dugout canoe, and foot – over thousands of miles of savanna, rain forest, mountain and desert. The landscapes were forbidding, and beautiful; giving way to sunlit villages of thatch and meandering footpaths, where smiling children and women carted the wares of life atop their heads.

But one has a sense, on a journey such as this, that there’s more to the story of the people and the land than you can catch at a glance. Where your boots meet the rich, red African soil, and where your itinerary makes time for a cup of tea and a conversation, you begin to see the real picture. It is largely a disheartening one. From the southern mountains of Sudan, all the way inland to Lake Chad, these four unique nations share one tragic history. Each gained independence from colonial rule somewhere around 1960. And each replaced one kind of oppression with another. What followed has been decades of human conflict and unfathomable suffering. Economies and communities were destroyed. Infrastructures crumbled. People scattered. The wicked prospered and the righteous lost their homes.

All four countries in recent years were listed among the ten least stable entities in the world. But those are only the political woes. For most of the people here, generations of spiritual darkness rooted in Animistic beliefs have led to a culture steeped in fatalism and fear. The “spirits” which they believe control their world are the most prominent and powerful forces in their lives. And the influence of Islam simply brings more fearful uncertainty.

My boots plodded through the thick elephant grass in the Datooga Mountains, tracing out a path up a hillside and back in time to an era when missionaries lived and worked here. Their house, like the Bible School they built, lay crumbling and bare, returning to the clay from which its bricks were cast. Sudan’s war in the 80’s drove them out and shut down the school. The Church scattered, but somehow, survived. Even grew.

How is that possible? It’s been said that “the local church is the hope of the world.” Jesus said as much. He told his disciples, “You are the salt of the earth, the light of the world.” And in central Africa, glimpses of that hope still remain. But they are like the courageous flickers of a lamp in danger of going out.

I sat and listened to James and John, two young Sudanese pastors aptly named, as they told the story of reclaiming a village for the Lord, and how they fought for it, literally, on their knees next to a slab of concrete that was once a whole church. I listened to a Zande choir rock their church, and my soul, with the sound of drums and voices lifted above the vaulted roof of a sanctuary built long ago, above a canopy of trees in the rainforest of C.A.R. I traveled down the Chari River with pastor Samuel, his face a mixture of uncommon humility and unpretentious humanity. We ventured onto the waters of lake Chad and prayed. Prayed, boldly it seemed, for the Gospel to one day take root this far inland. And for his little mud church upstream to simply stand. I saw Pastor Lalima praying over a thousand ravaged and displaced people in Adi. I saw the gleaming faces of the graduating class from the Bible Institute in Obo. I saw an old man, his life long ago transformed, rebuilding that old Bible school there in the Datooga Mountains.

The local church is the hope of the world. And it’s the hope for central Africa. It is God’s chosen instrument to transform lives and bring people into His Kingdom. It’s his instrument to preserve a community, a country, and the world from the debasement and destruction of sin. “But what if the salt loses it saltiness?” AIM’s Central Region coordinator simply looked north to answer the question. North Africa used to have a vibrant church. Today, it’s all but gone. He warned that this could happen here too. Are we a generation away? Less? The hard truth is that the Church in central Africa is but a remnant. Dealt a double blow from war and syncretism. It’s been scattered, persecuted, diluted. And, if you ask them, abandoned.

AIM’s initial missionary effort in these lands was not perfect. But the roots planted by those first pioneers somehow endured a forty-year absence. The danger now is that the “living stones” of the Body of Christ are looking much like the actual stones of many of the buildings. Crumbling. One wall where there should be four. Choked and overgrown with weeds. Over 124 million people live in these four nations. More than 220 unreached people groups. And a singular, impoverished church begging for help to reach them. It’s time AIM returned to central Africa.

Whatever the continued missionary effort looks like, it must be made of disciple-makers. All throughout this region, there are places where the church does not yet exist, and places where the church is barely holding on. And over countless hours in countless meetings with pastors and church leaders in the region, I heard their pleas. They ask for missionaries: people who love Jesus and are willing to share their lives and talents, to perhaps meet a practical need, while all along addressing the most important one – transformational discipleship.

It requires a coming-alongside to teach, speak courage, and ultimately go out together as One Church to the unreached. Central Africa’s transformation will begin here; in the hearts of people who are transformed into Christ’s likeness. Making more disciples who then make more. Is this vision for central Africa even possible? One thing is certain: we can no longer wait for it to become easy.

By day twelve on our fifteen-day trip I quit admiring my boots. I had grown to resent them, as well as the socks I had been wearing for three days straight. My feet were aching and slightly blistered. Gore Tex doesn’t really breathe when it’s 117 degrees. Some days prior, our pilot on the trip made a comment about feet that came to mind. I mentioned something about the “feet of those who bring good news” and he chuckled.

“Don’t know why they’re called beautiful,” he said. “The missionaries who have served here have trashed their feet. Only God could call them beautiful.”

This is a hard place. This is a hard calling. How do you live in a land of persistent instability? How do you minister to the spiritually oppressed and oppressive?  How do you learn the language, understand the culture, navigate the government abuse? How do you throw up your hands in frustration and embrace a friend at the same time? What do you do when the next war touches you, and it’s your turn to flee? What if you lose all your stuff? What if you lose more than just your stuff? What if it’s worth it?

I sat in the dark; in a semi-circle of Congolese pastors at Aru. They asked us, unashamedly, why the missionaries are not returning. “Because it’s hard” we told them. “Sometimes they hear the news of this place and are afraid.” And one of them said something I cannot forget.

“In the past there were missionaries who loved us… and they accepted to suffer with us.”

And I wondered if the past was just that. Past.

I don’t know what to do with this. God is calling me to something, but is it something this hard? I have these feet, and they can go. They are able, even if they are not experienced. But the question I’m asking is this: are they willing? Willing to walk some of the earth’s most beautiful and devastated lands? Willing to stand side by side with those of my African brothers and sisters? Willing to be trashed in the process, and one day be called beautiful? Are my feet willing to move against the fear?

I don’t know what to do with this. But one thing I know I can’t do anymore is walk away.

by Mike Delorenzo

One best moment?

Perhaps it was the other day when Ellen, our sweet little two-year-old neighbor, peaked in my room where I was shaking off a rough day, and crawled up in bed with me for a nap, nestling her head against my shoulder.

But then there are those few small moments that wouldn’t mean much to anyone else. When our neighbor Ibiong asked me to take in her laundry if it rained. Or when she dropped off her kids for us to watch while she fetched water. Or when two of the neighbor kids sought refuge at our house when their parents were fighting.

And, then again, there are those moments, under a twilight sky, as the day is leaving and the night is falling dark on the smoking thatched roofs and simple swept compounds, when I’m simply sitting together with my roommates and my neighbors. Maybe we’re talking about their children and the crazy tricks they pulled that day. Maybe we’re telling a story from our homes, in a world entirely unfamiliar to our friends. Maybe they’re laughing at me as I stumble through the language. Or maybe we’re cracking peanuts in silence, gazing thoughtfully off into the valley or watching the children dip into sleep.

Whatever the case, in those moments, we’re simply being together.

And I enjoy those moments more and more.

God has put a love in us for these people. It has been a process.

The crowding shadows of faces that bombarded us when we first came to Lopit have become our friends. The squealing, swollen-bellied children, our playmates. The village struggles and joys, our own.

I’m happy here, and I ache for the day when Christ claims his first among my group of friends.

So maybe these are the best moments. Moments like now, when I can reflect upon where we once were and where we are now. When I can honestly say, I love these people. When I can fight off hopelessness, and hope in God, that He’ll use our living witness to His glory in these far-off mountains of Lopitland.

by Andi Clinard

Home is a concept difficult for Panther to frame. He is one of Sudan’s “Lost Boys” – children separated from their parents or orphaned in the onslaught of Sudan’s civil war. These children fled their villages in small groups and eventually converged into an exodus of thousands. They ran for more than a decade, grew up in the bush as refugees, and were witness and victim to every kind of horror imaginable. Their story is both remarkable and terrifying. It has been publicized in books and articles through the years, and recently documented in a feature film by National Geographic entitled “God Grew Tired of Us.” The title seems fitting to describe these boys who became men without a home or family, without a country, and sometimes without a prayer.

A few hundred survivors eventually ended up in a refugee camp in Kenya’s northern wasteland, and from there, all over the world. Scores of them came to America, on invitation, to begin new lives. In some of the destination cities churches stepped in to “adopt” the boys, becoming a refuge in the purest sense of the word – taking in refugees – and in the act becoming unwitting ambassadors to the Sudan. After a decade of guiding the boys through the strange landscape of America, the roles would be reversed.

Settling in New York, Panther’s life had taken a turn toward the surreal. But he kept in close contact with some of his fellow “Lost Boys” and together they fostered a vision to go back to Sudan – to bless their people as they had been blessed. In the wake of this boyish, and contagious dream were a mixed assortment of Americans whose eyes had been opened to a world beyond the one they knew, and who were driven to follow these boys home, however reluctantly, by their restless hearts.

And so, as I steered the Caravan toward the coordinates handed to me on a scrap of paper, Panther wasn’t the only one peering out through the haze. Four middle aged men, engineers and builders from North America, strained to see. The nearest usable airstrip to Panther’s home sits at an abandoned outpost on the waterless Jongeli canal – a massive, unfinished project to bypass a length of the Nile river lost in the Sudd, one of the world’s largest swamps. The town and the impressive fleet of rusting, heavy equipment scattered throughout it are a telling picture of Sudan’s stunted growth. During the war, both national development and individual lives stopped moving forward, and in fact, began to move backward. Ironically, these “Lost Boys” were returning to a Sudan that, in some ways, predated their departure. We landed on a dusty strip set between a thatch village and a thousand grazing cattle. The men stepped from the plane and Panther, dressed in a new suit, melted into the waiting crowd.

I caught glimpses of him every few moments, bobbing in and out of a sea of excited people. His expression was sometimes joyous, sometimes pensive. But the instants of recognition or disbelief over the faces of his fellow Sudanese were the moments when I saw a man like Joseph. Panther, like Jacob’s favored son, was found, and he had a story to tell of God’s goodness and divine intervention – and a captive audience to hear it.

Panther Bior fled his home village when he was seven-years-old, naked, and afraid. He returned twenty years later in a modern airplane, a man with a miraculous story. The tale is wrought with danger and amazing good fortune. It carries legends of the big city and a new world in America. But it is also a story of a God who did not abandon him in his darkest days. Of all the elements in Panthers story, it is the grace of God he talks about most. For the myriad of people caught up in his remarkable life, from the First Presbyterian Church of Skaneateles, NY to the reunited family in southern Sudan, it will likely be an enduring theme.

He will undoubtedly tell his story many times over. The American missionaries along side him will build the new medical clinic they came to raise. And they will do what they can to encourage the church in that remote village. But as I watched Panther from my place crouched down at the rear cargo door, I believed that his greatest testimony would come from simply being there again. What men and wars and the harsh and heartless land of Sudan meant for evil, God meant for good.

by Mike Delorenzo