As I was packing the last of my things this morning – ever tried packing for a trip to Sudan and a semester in Cambridge in the same suitcase? Don’t – I found myself thinking about how long I’ve wanted to visit south Sudan and the Episcopal Church there.

It’s been on my mind at least for three years and likely longer, I realized. I briefly thought of visiting fellow missionaries in Sudan rather than Uganda a few years back. (They were brief thoughts because of the cost of the tickets.)

Instead, I’ve contented myself with reading news from and about Sudan but that has only made me want to go more. And now I’m in the airport and about to begin my trip. It’s all a reminder of how blessed I am and how grateful I am for those blessings.

I’ll write as I am able while I am in Juba.

First, for those of you familiar with my past writings, you’ll understand that this is the wrong question to be asking me. (Wait, you asked it? How can it be wrong?)

But I understand the motivation behind the question. Here’s my best shot at an answer.

I’m going to Juba, Sudan to spend time at New Bishop Gwynne Theological College. They have a very good web site, which I will let speak for itself. The history section is particularly helpful.

The dean of Berkeley Divinity School, my academic home, was at Bishop Gwynne in March, visiting and exploring the idea of some kind of relationship between the two institutions. My visit is the next step in that process. I hope to spend as much time as possible with the students at Bishop Gwynne, many of whom were ordained during the civil war that prevented people from going to school and are now getting education to help them be more effective clergy.

In particular, I’m interested in how these future leaders of the church see their role and the church’s role in their country’s uncertain future. As I’ve noted, the Episcopal Church of Sudan has been an important witness and advocate for peace and reconciliation. In the U.S., we often talk about the intersection of religion and politics but these students and their church are living that intersection and taking great risks to do so.

I believe that an important way to build the unity for which Christ prayed is to emphasize story-listening, as opposed to just story-telling. Traditionally, however, people from the developing world in all walks of life – religious and not – have had very little opportunity to tell their stories. I intend to approach this trip as an exercise in story-listening and then share those stories as I am able when I return to the U.S.

Of course, I see my presence alone as one (very) small instance of that unity of the worldwide Body of Christ. I hope that both formally but primarily informally my fellow Anglican seminarians at Bishop Gwynne and I will be able to learn a little bit more about the particular context that shapes our respective future ministries and question what we have to learn from each other.

These are my plans. I well know that the best-laid plans have a way of being suddenly, shall we say, “transformed” upon contact with reality and I’m prepared (and excited) for that.

Beyond the links at the top of this post, there’s also this neat YouTube video of opening day:

Trevor and Tina Stubbs are missionaries helping oversee Bishop Gwynne and they have a blog. Robin Denney – a former YASC missionary – is now in Juba and affiliated with Bishop Gwynne. She has a blog as well.

Bishop Gwynne College is named after Llewellyn Henry Gwynne, one of the first Anglican missionaries in Sudan. The Dictionary of African Christian Biography has a good entry on him.

More of my own content about Sudan in the not-too-distant future but there’s a good column by Nicholas Kristof around all the issues I raised in the last post:

Yet these days, Mr. Obama is presiding over an incoherent, contradictory and apparently failing Sudan policy. There is a growing risk that Sudan will be the site of the world’s bloodiest war in 2011, and perhaps a new round of genocide as well. This isn’t America’s fault, but neither are we using all of our leverage to avert it….

Some 68 organizations have sent a joint letter to Mr. Obama, calling on him to work more energetically to prevent another round of war in Sudan. But so far he has been unengaged, and his administration has been less successful than the last Bush administration in getting Sudan to alter its behavior.

The upshot: Sudan’s on-and-off north-south civil war could resume soon. How bad could it be? Well, the last iteration of that war lasted about 20 years and killed some two million people. Mr. Obama’s former head of national intelligence, Dennis Blair, warned this year that the place facing the greatest risk of genocide or mass killing is southern Sudan…..

Southern Sudanese are expected to vote overwhelmingly to secede. But the region has most of the nation’s oil, and the north is determined not to lose the oil wells driving the nation’s economy…..

Most ominously, Sudan’s government has been stalling in preparations for the referendum in the south, and it may have been channeling weapons to disgruntled factions there. No one expects restraint from President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, who is facing charges of genocide from the International Criminal Court.

For all his faults, President Bush inherited a war in Sudan and managed to turn it into peace. Mr. Obama inherited a peace that could turn into the world’s bloodiest war next year.

So I’m going to Sudan – that might be news to some readers of this blog. In another post I’m going to write about why I’m going and what I’ll be doing. But for now, I want to offer a very short summary of why I think Sudan is important and worth visiting.

You’ve probably heard of Darfur. That’s a region in western Sudan where there has been a lot of violence. I’m headed to Juba, which is way in the far south of the country and a long way from Darfur. (Sudan is a big place – the largest country in Africa and about a quarter the size of the United States.)

But the southern part of Sudan has been involved in a conflict of its own that has been much longer and more destructive than what has happened in Darfur. There have been two long civil wars between the northern and southern parts of Sudan since independence. These are the wars that produced the Lost Boys of Sudan, who have been memorialized in books such as What is the What. I’m not going to pretend to be able to identify what caused the wars but they have basically been between the Arab and Muslim north and the Christian and black African south. There’s oil that runs along the dividing line between the two parts so that probably doesn’t help the cause of peace.

The second war ended with a peace agreement in 2005 that ended armed hostilities between north and south. But the south is still a fairly unstable place, especially in recent years and there are often reports of scores of people being killed. (It’s possible that some of these deaths are from a Ugandan rebel army that has migrated north but that’s a story for a whole other time.)

A key provision of the peace agreement was that the south would be able to hold a referendum on independence. That is scheduled for January 2011. If folks in the south were able to freely express their will, it seems likely that they’ll vote for independence. But there is much that is unknown and my understanding is that no one really knows what the future holds for the south.

The Episcopal Church of Sudan is primarily concentrated in the southern part of the country and it has a significant presence. There are almost twice as many Sudanese Episcopalians as there are American ones and they are a much higher percentage of the population. ECS, along with other church groups, has been a vocal and active witness for peace and reconciliation throughout the region and I have long followed their activities from afar. I’m grateful now I’ll have a chance to see this firsthand and learn more about my brothers and sisters in Christ in this part of the Anglican Communion.

So that’s that for now. More to come.

I had to read part of All Our Losses, All Our Griefs this summer. In talking about different kinds of loss, the authors used a new phrase: intrapsychic loss

Intrapsychic loss is the experience of losing an emotionally important image of oneself, losing the possibilities of “what might have been,” abandonment of plans for a particular future, the dying of a dream.

I experienced a version of this last week when I went to the Connecticut DMV and replaced my Alaska license with a Connecticut one. I didn’t realize it until my Alaska license was no more but that little card meant a lot to me and my identity. And even though I only got the new license because the old one was about to expire, there’s a sense in getting the Connecticut license that I am unlikely to be returning to Alaska in the near future.

And that’s kind of sad.

*kicks tires*

“Does this thing still work?”

*dusts off hood*

“Looks like it’s at least worth a shot.”

OK, so it’s been a little while since I last wrote here. I guess you can call it an unannounced sabbatical.

In my (limited) defense, however, I was spending my writing energies seeking other avenues for publication. And I’m delighted to report that I’ve found some.

In June, I presented a paper at the Tri-History Conference in Raleigh, NC. It was a conference of historians, organized by the Historical Society of the Episcopal Church, National Episcopal Historians and Archivists, and the Episcopal Women’s History Project, but somehow they let me in to present a paper that was more missiological in nature titled “Local Control vs. Noblesse Oblige: Reconciling Conflicting Mission Values in Mthatha,South Africa.” As the title no doubt reveals, it stemmed from my time in Mthatha.

Earlier this month, I received my copy of a book of a handful of essays from youth around the world in commemoration of the Edinburgh 2010 mission conference. The book is called Edinburgh 2010: Youth Perspectives, ed. Kirk Sandvig (William Carey, Pasadena, CA). My contribution is entitled, “‘The Word Became Flesh and Lived Among Us:’ The Missiological Implications of an Incarnational Christology.” (The winner of this worldwide contest was my fellow YASC alum Andrew Thompson for an essay on the Anglican missionary Roland Allen.)

And I’ve just learned that a paper of mine about Stephen Bayne and “Mutual Responsibility and Interdependence” will be published in the Anglican Theological Review next year. (Bishop Bayne was the subject of my most recent blog post.)

So… I hope you’ll forgive me my absence.

I’m gearing up for a trip to Bishop Gwynne Theological College in Juba, Sudan in September. More on that in another post, which I promise will not be too far distant.

One of the great things about studying history is the realization that the questions we are dealing with now have been questions that have been asked for hundreds and thousands of years. That’s what I learned when I was a Classics major. And it’s what I’m learning in a course on American religious history I am required to take this this term. The term project for the class has given me the opportunity to explore some Episcopal mission history.

I’m looking particularly closely at some writings from Bishop Stephen Bayne, who was the first executive officer of the Anglican Communion in the 1960s. Prior to that, he was a bishop in the U.S. (and prior to that he was rector of St. John’s, Northampton, Massachusetts, a parish of no slight significance to me).

I just read an address Bishop Bayne gave to the Overseas Mission Society in February 1961. He suggests there are “four notes” of mission. It was the fourth that really took my breath away:

The final note about mission is that basically mission is not about things that we do as much as it is about what we are. The mission of the Church is not, first of all, to do something but to be something.

In our world, broken and divided by the barriers between nations, it is very hard sometimes for us to do very much… I am not sure that measuring how little we can do or have done means too much because in our world it may be very difficult for us to do things.

I go in the Orient or to Africa, and look at the great benefactions of time past when it was possible for great hospitals and universities and school systems to be built out of the munificence of churches. This kind of things cannot happen any more in many parts of the world. We cannot give these things; we cannot send vast numbers of people; we cannot overawe and impress with our riches. Therefore, we are being forced back on being something, and the essence of being something is in the little cluster of ideas which is the only precious and irreplaceable treasure at the heart of the Christian body.

I almost gasped aloud when I read that because it reminded me so strongly of a similar conclusion I reached in South Africa.

Everything old is new again.

One reason I’ve done well in school in the past is that the traditional way in which students are graded – tests, term papers, presentations, etc. – is a form at which I excel. If I was graded based on my ability to compose original music or paint or sculpt I would not be as good a student.

As the archetype of normativity in American society (white, male, educated, etc.), I don’t often have to think about non-dominant forms of intellectual production in school. People conform to what I know and share their thinking in ways I can understand. I was thinking about this in my trip to Ecuador when we met with representatives of the Latin American Council of Churches and they showed up with PowerPoint presentations. I’m pretty sure PowerPoint is not a traditional Ecuadorian form of communication but they implicitly knew that if they wanted to be taken seriously by us that’s what they needed. My heart sank, as it always does when I see PowerPoint, but I was also gratified because I knew what to expect.

Anyway, I’m taking a class this term in which the form of my intellectual production is a little different. The final project, on which the entire grade depends, requires me to get involved with and learn about a local social service and/or religious agency in town. I almost didn’t take the class when I realized this. What? No term paper? You mean I can’t do well in class by spending several hours in the library and putting together my research? I have to – gasp! – get out in the world?

It’s turned out to be a really delightful project and actually led me to learn more about New Haven and get involved in some of the really neat, non-Yale things that go on in this city. I find that often happens when I stretch the bounds of what counts as normal and usual.

One of the advantages of a place like Yale is, naturally, the library, or, rather, libraries. In particularly, the divinity library has a wealth of mission-related materials – mission theology, mission history, mission memoirs. (A couple of the memoirs are in the rare books library, which makes me feel super-important when I go read those.) I have been taking full advantage of these resources while here. Perhaps too much advantage. Here’s the stack of library books on my desk at the moment. (When the pile starts falling over, then I’ll start returning them.)

Here’s a fun fact for those of you from the Diocese of Western Massachusetts. Stephen Bayne, a former rector of St. John’s, Northampton (which now has a parlour named after him), went on to be the first executive officer of the Anglican Communion in the 1960s and was really critical as the Communion started growing in the post-colonial era. And to think I’ve preached in the same pulpit as him!

One problem is that if you spend your time reading these books all the time, you don’t have any time left for the books you have to read for class. That might explain why I am pathologically behind on my school reading.