by Don Stilwell
12 July 2006

This morning in our church service, I looked up and saw the cross, the central feature in a stained glass window.

This reminded me of another church and another cross, some 7,000 miles away, where about 700 people were also meeting for worship. They gather in a bombed-out church building. The roof is gone. The inside is bare of any seating or furnishings. But the brick walls are still standing.

Just as in our church building, there is a cross there, painted on the plaster wall. The plaster on and around the cross is pockmarked from machine gun bullets, the result of 20 years of civil war. Those bullet holes symbolize the hate there is for the cross and for the people who love the Christ of the cross.

Returning Home

After over 19 years as refugees from the war, these believers have recently returned to their homeland. The United Nations (UN) hired cattle trucks to drive them several days with their bundles of simple possessions. The UN will be providing them with survival rations for the next several months, which will sustain them while they clear their old fields of years of wild growth and try to get a crop to carry them through the next year. Then, at harvest time, the UN help will end.

Knowing these people the way I do, they have probably gathered small tree trunks or bricks from other bombed-out buildings and brought them to the church to sit on. Despite the hardship they have faced and are facing, there is great rejoicing as they worship again in their "home church."

Rebuilding Sudan

This picture could be repeated scores of times across South Sudan. People are returning to the communities from which they fled for their lives many years ago. They are now in the midst of rebuilding their lives, but, for the most part, there are no schools, no teachers, and no medical facilities in these places where God used SIM to plant His Church in the past.

This is why SIM has started a huge program of church leadership development—including training for teachers, community health workers, and others—called Rebuilding Southern Sudan: Church and Nation. Already, workers from Nigeria and Ethiopia are setting up Basic Education Learning Centers (BELC) to train teachers. Project managers are also doing survey work for a medical clinic. The parts of the former SIM hospital still standing will be restored from an army barracks to a Community Health Center and training school for community health workers.

The cross that has been so denigrated is once again being lifted up in South Sudan.

Pray

Please pray for the missionaries serving in difficult conditions, and for all the Sudanese returning to their homeland.

Give

Please also consider a financial investment in the restoration of South Sudan by giving to project SD 98012. We are grateful for your partnership!

Go

SIM Sudan is praying for resilient, dedicated people to join them in Sudan Check out the opportunities list for Sudan