On Saturday 8th November 2008 the Episcopal Church of the Sudan (ECS) reburied the remains of its first Archbishop, the late Most Rev. Elinana J. Ngalamu, in a grave behind All Saints’ Cathedral, Juba, Southern Sudan. The first Archbishop’s coffin, originally buried in Khartoum in October 1992 following his death there on 29th September 1992, was exhumed on Thursday 6th November 2008 and flown to Juba with an accompanying delegation on Friday 7th.
On the morning of Saturday 8th a brief burial ceremony was conducted by the current Archbishop, the Most Rev. Dr. Daniel Deng Bul, accompanied by the bishops of Khartoum, Rokon, Lainya, Rumbek, Ibba, Rejaf, Mundri and Lui, the assistant bishops of Torit, Bor and Juba, and the retired bishop of Mundri. Archbishop Daniel, sighting Moses’ reburial of Joseph’s bones in Canaan after his return to the Promised Land from exile in Egypt, prayed that Archbishop Elinana’s “homecoming” be symbolic in the hearts of Sudanese Anglicans in all marginalised areas as a final homecoming. He pleaded that never again should the Church have to flee from these areas as Archbishop Elinana fled from Juba to Khartoum in the 1980s to die in exile in 1992. He thanked God for the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) that ended the 21-year civil war in 2005 and allowed the homecoming of the first Archbishop.
Thanks, Kendall, for posting this news. It’s all too easy to forget the unimaginable suffering of our brave brothers and sisters in Christ in Sudan, the place where we Anglicans have suffered the worst and most prolonged persecution in recent times. ++Daniel Deng Bul’s allusion to the bringing of Joseph’s bone out of Egypt to be buried in the Promised Land is a very apt analogy, I think.
There are many places in our world today where people suffer terribly under the tyrannical rule of cruel dictators (as, for example, in Zimbabe or North Korea). But as far as I’m concerned the man who has the dubious distinction of being the absolute worst ruler on earth is Sudan’s infamous despot, Omar al-Bashir. “New Sudan,” the name that the southern part calls their not yet independent nation, has a long, long way to go to achieve the security and peace they so richly deserve after being so horribly and inexcusably mistreated by their Muslim overlords, but this is a positive step along the way.
David Handy+