Christ Church at crossroads: From a morale conscience enforcer to a criminal conscience enabler

By Deng Vanang, Juba, South Sudan

Sunday, April 17, 2022 (PW) — Since its long throwback inception, Church of Christ has universally been a proven refuge and fierce defender of the oppressed, powerless and voiceless poor signified in this week’s Easter holiday, marking Christ’s crucifixion at Golgotha in Calvary and resurrection from the dead in Jerusalem.Believers in deeper troubles beyond their human capacity can solve and bear find priceless consolation in God answered prayers’ maxim.Natural and man-made disasters such as wars and a depressing economy may at some point knock the downtrodden down to their knees; they in turn implore up on God through powerful prayers to lift them off their feet.

The most common problem that often makes believers reach out to God in prayer for help is an economic challenge, God at times mysteriously turns around by touching the hearts of anointed few and loosening misers’ tight fists to feet His penniless children wretched particularly by dire man-made conditions.For South Sudanese society perennially in successive troubles, Church has been a multi-purpose institution serving out as an initial source of spiritual guidance and later education and civilization whose unsettling effects have now turned out to haunt it.

From 1970s to 1990s the meteoric leap in faith was exceptionally at its utmost peak in S. Sudan’s evangelistic history as SPLA Western Upper Nile zonal commander, Dr. Riek Machar admitted to the author of the Nuer Dilemma: Coping with Money, war and the State, Sharon Hutchinson, nicknamed Nyarial in Nuer that Christianity was the only institution growing in lips and bonds as its secular counterparts irreversibly plunged.

In stated proselytization from paganism to Christianity the exclaimed God of peace has been ironically thriving in violence that chases people to Him in search for answers since the time of an independence war against Khartoum to date. In those hey days of bountiful harvest of surrendering souls the church was on the contrary too attracting first lane opportunists and potential social delinquents into its enlarging body of Holy communion.

Most of them became men of collar and deacons clad in and proud of flowing spiritual colorful gowns adorned with accessory crucifixes, Bibles clutched in hands and brandished in the air.Since the Church during such hard times was nearly the only single route to gainful employment and revered social status amidst abject poverty.

Everything associated with the Church was the envy of growing up and school going children aspiring to serve God in liberated parts of Southern Sudan then.The infectious bug didn’t stop with them, but also infected most politicians baptized in smaller denominations to flee to bigger ones in a rat race to vote-rich higher grounds.

Church’s unchallenged dominance was later to be brought down by unexpected rival it helped create in none other than Comprehensive Peace Agreement {CPA} heavily pregnant with tempting socio-economic dividends that brought it disdain from the new oiligarchs, its former loyal allies in the liberation struggle against an Afro-Arab rule.

It was party time over in the Church as gold diggers raced back to the world they rightly belong, now that it is greener and colder.A pretty number of whom swelled the ranks and files of political novices currently taking and pushing hardline positions of far-right ethno-nationalists in an ethnically polarized nation. Dragging along with them is respect for the Church they hurriedly left unannounced to supplant trained junior political cadres felt out of favor of top notch, shrewd and forward matching career politicians.

The remnants who withstood an erosive wave back to the world certainly got the reason to be thanked and showered with praises for having their faith anchored in Christ’s solid rock.However, the Church is not a house built on the hill and isolated from social pollution surrounding its environment.

It is a living spirit indebted to a lustful body more often desirous of evil than good.And resultantly God’s servants too feel deserving of a pie from the national cake state officials dangle in the eyes to be envied, thanks to the huge offerings and tithes passing off as both blessing and a curse. With the money the church physically grows, but more spiritually sinks deeper into hell with each penny ill-intentionally paid.

Such Judas Iscariot’s pieces of silver made the church a divided house against itself and openly engaged in bloody factional running battles over matters earthly like no other.In Bhar el Ghazel’s Rumbek, a losing Catholic Diocese faction had then Bishop elect Christian Carlassare fatally shot as alleged in April 2021.

In Equatoria’s Juba, the national capital, it took months in late 2019 for Bari congregation to accept a non-Bari newly appointed archbishop of metropolitan Catholic Archdiocese, Stephen Ameyu Martin Mulla by the pontiff, Pope Francis in the Vatican, Rome.In Upper Nile, Presbyterian Church of South Sudan and the Sudan, POCs in 2021 engaged in what had all the resembling features of an African Presidential election to elect Moderator, Reverence James Makuey Chol, eventually halving the church into two and with the losing faction crying foul.

Church’s line of defense to look the other way in this challenge confronting it has always been Mathew 7: Do not judge, or you will too be judged that sweeps the stinging rot under the thick carpet, with uncharacteristic indifference going on and encouraging lay men and women of means to offer more. That aside, some Churched have adopted good public relations strategies executed by well organized VIP escorts inviting in and accompanying out dignitaries, while seeking out and drawing in the affluent lost in the hustle and bustle of the world for sole purpose of paying offerings, gifts and tithes that unbind the churches once nurtured internal bonds.

The Church has now become the dumping ground in which the dirty money is cleaned by devilish, corrupt and thriving rich whose bad influence pollutes the simple minds of the ambitious youth and humble servants of God into advocates of prosperity Gospel. With front seats reserved for them, while still dinning and wining in their respective mansions as the choirs and youth groups warm up the church for the day. And up on arrival are extended the incentivized high-five greetings and long speeches to deliver to the congregation irrelevant to the day’s sermon punctuated by choir special music and ululations.

None entities on the other hand are cut short from narrating testimonies of deliverance from a truly working God, but regarded as something of no material value, a clearer message that faith does not pay, with them hankering down to their seats with a remorseful sense of betrayal filling their teary eyes to the cause of the Church’s economic growth program.

Unseating the ordinary members for the most senior members courtesy of traditional respect for elders and authority is another painful episode making the Church as an integral part of the world it is fighting and less of a social leveler for all that dwell in it.

Than giving offerings and tithes in return for God’s mercifulness, good health and wealth; the rich, powerful and arrogant congregants instead use them to influence and conquer Christ church for them and only themselves, depriving the poor and voiceless of the last remaining fortress they sought refuge from the ravaging excesses seen in recent chaos in Leer, Abyei, Maiwut and central Equatoria a simpler excommunication of alleged perpetrators from the church services could minimize, if not to be totally deterred.

Deng Vanang, Columnist and Author – dvanang@gmail.com

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