A new training center for Sudanese pastors will open in the northwestern Uganda city of Arua in January 2004, bringing the hope of more trained church leaders for one of the Seventh-day Adventist Church's fastest-growing regions.
A new training center for Sudanese pastors will open in the northwestern Uganda city of Arua in January 2004, bringing the hope of more trained church leaders for one of the Seventh-day Adventist Church’s fastest-growing regions. Pastor Michael Porter, president of the Adventist Church in the Middle East, ordained four new pastors for the country Nov. 1, as recognition of the growing needs of the church.
A thousand people join the Seventh-day Adventist Church in the Sudan every year, an average of 2.75 per day. Until recently, however, there was only one trained Sudanese pastor to serve 6,000 church members.
“The pastors here really do some wonderful work,” says Porter. “Most all of them are displaced people from the southern part of Sudan who grew up in shanty refugee-type housing. I met one of the new pastors at his home. He lives with his three children in a small mud-brick structure where they must carry water for their family use.”
According to Homer Trecartin, secretary-treasurer of the church in the Middle East region, the life of a pastor in Sudan is harsh and exhausting. “These men travel long distances, sometimes for weeks or even months into desolate and dangerous regions of the country. They will come back telling of the dozens or hundreds who had been prepared for baptism, and were waiting their arrival. They have sacrificed much and certainly demonstrated a deep sense of their calling to the ministry.”
Along with the pastoral shortage, local conditions present their own challenges: “Due to the 20-year ongoing civil war [in Sudan], formal education usually stops at the elementary school level,” says Beat Odermatt, who heads the church in South Sudan.
“There is not a seminary in the world which is inexpensive enough for a Southern Sudanese to enroll in,” says Alex Elmadjian, church communication director in the Middle East. “The alternative is to pay comparatively exorbitant fees to send a potential pastor to Middle East University or Newbold College,” the latter located near London, England.
“The curriculum [of the new center] is contextualized to meet the unique needs of South Sudan,” Odermatt adds. “In a few years Southern Sudan will have a good number of trained pastors where currently there are none.”
On the same day as the ordination, Porter introduced three new officers to the gathered congregation. The church in Sudan has been without a full leadership team for over a year, resulting in some organizational challenges. The new leaders are: Dr. Itamar DePaiva (administrator), Paul Yithak (secretary), and Bassam Asmar (treasurer). DePaiva, a Brazilian, was a lecturer at Montemorelos Adventist University in Mexico. Yithak is Sudanese, and has given valuable leadership for many years as a departmental director at the church headquarters in Khartoum. Asmar is from Lebanon and has been working for many years at the church’s Middle East headquarters in Cyprus as part of the accounting team.
