wfn.org | Sudanese pastor endures hardship for faith

[NewsDesk@UMCOM.UMC.ORG]

March 14, 2001        News media contact: Linda Bloom·(212)870-3803·New York
10-31-71B{129}

By Darlene Slack*

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. (UMNS) -- Eight-year-old Munir Tutu leans against his
father in a shared easy chair, his small hand on the elder Tutu's knee, as
he hears again his father's story of torture and escape.

His father's legs bear scars branded by a burning stick, one of many
attempts to force the Rev. Botrous Tutu, a Protestant pastor from the Nuba
Mountains of Sudan, to renounce his faith.

"Botrous," the Sudanese prison guards told him, "if you just say you don't
believe in Jesus, we'll let you go."

Recently resettled with his wife and two children in Knoxville, under the
sponsorship of Cokesbury United Methodist Church. Tutu remains a "wanted
man" in Sudan. With mingled grief for the persecution of his people and joy
for their love of Jesus, he shares his story.

"American people do not know what is happening in Sudan and Nuba Mountains,"
he says. "Many Christians have died there. No one knows how many."

The National Islamic Front government has forbidden Sudanese to talk about
Jesus and to build churches, Sunday schools or any Christian-affiliated
school, and it has destroyed churches, Tutu says. Reports of genocide have
emerged from southern Sudan and the centrally located Nuba Mountains, where
mostly Christians and followers of traditional religions live.

Tutu, like church officials and human rights groups, describes such
atrocities as the poisoning of village wells, relief food withheld from
famine victims, crop burnings, arbitrary arrests and torture, mass killings
and burials, and the abduction of children who are given Muslim names and
placed in Islamic families, sometimes as slaves.

Sudanese also suffer from an 18-year civil war between Arab Muslim
northerners who control the government and black African southerners who
support the Sudanese People's Liberation Movement. An estimated 2 million
have died from war-related causes, and another 4 million have been forced
from their homes, creating the largest uprooted population in the world,
according to the U.S. Committee for Refugees. The government has bombed
relief, health and school facilities and used helicopter gunships to push
people from oil-rich territories, the committee reports.

Tutu was preaching when government officials arrested him. Despite two
previous warnings, he continued to preach and establish Protestant churches
in Nuba Mountains -- "churches" meaning gatherings beneath a tree or a
simple thatched roof.

His usually direct gaze drops to the floor and his voice thins to a painful
whisper as he tells, in limited English, how "very bad" he felt when people
who tried to prevent his arrest were shot, some of them fatally wounded.

Imprisoned in 1995 for a year and a half in his home area of Kadugele, he
had no visitation rights. He was tied hands-to-feet and hung from the
ceiling, deprived of food and water, beaten, burned and cut. His captors
demanded renunciation of his faith; he preached the gospel to fellow
prisoners. "It is my work," he explains with a smile.

Praying day and night, he meditated on other stories of persecution: Jesus
on the cross, Peter and Paul in prison. And he remembered Jesus' words:
"Love your neighbor," and "Father, forgive them because they don't know what
they are doing."

One night, the guards loaded some 45 prisoners on a truck, supposedly to
transport them to another facility. The truck stopped in a forest, where
soldiers started shooting at the prisoners. Tutu jumped off the truck and
ran, expecting to be hit any moment. 

"Behind me I could hear people crying," he says. "But I am not able to look
behind me. There was no time. And I was afraid."

After traveling through the forest on foot for three days, he took a donkey
from a farm, and then journeyed another three days, surviving on seeds and
fruit. An old woman tended his burned and cut legs and hid him in a truck
carrying gold to the capital, Khartoum. A friend bought him a passport with
a fake identity, and after a year of hiding, Tutu flew to Jordan in 1998.
His wife Muna and son Munir joined him there a year later, and a second son,
Samuel, was born in 2000.

The Tutus resettled in Tennessee in January, along with four other Sudanese
families, through the United Methodist Committee on Relief and Bridge
Services, a refugee resettlement agency in East Tennessee.

Shortly before the Tutus' arrival, the Rev. Gwong Son, the international
pastor at Cokesbury United Methodist Church, approached his senior pastor
about sponsoring a refugee family. It had been several years since Cokesbury
had done so, and they decided to pray about it.

Son shared the idea with a lay member, who donated $2,000 for sponsorship.
Also at that time, Bridge Services had a Sudanese family coming in two weeks
whose sponsors had withdrawn. That family was the Tutus.

The Rev. Steve Sallee, Cokesbury's senior pastor, says this experience has
had two major impacts on his congregation. "It has helped our church gain
some perspective about our lives -- we've realized how blessed we are. It
also has caused an unrest among us. Our faith teaches us if other people
aren't all right, then we aren't all right."  He expects that Cokesbury
Church will sponsor more refugees next year.

More than 100 members attended Tutu's first presentation at the church and
were deeply moved by a story that is incomprehensible to most American
Christians: risking one's life for one's faith.

Although educated as a mechanical engineer and a pastor, Tutu eagerly
accepted a job in which, Son says, "he carries boxes all day" in a local
company's distribution center. Tutu wants to send money to help ease others'
hardships in Sudan. He worries about his relatives and congregation.

"I am feeling how can I help the other people there. I hope and pray for God
to change the government and the Islamic law."

His dream is to help build churches in Sudan, if and when he can return
safely to his homeland.

During his first visit to the Smoky Mountains, Tutu marveled at the familiar
beauty. The steep inclines, huge rocks and trees reminded him of his Nuba
Mountains. He smiles when he describes the scenery, but the word for his
feelings that day is "sad."

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*Slack is a free-lance writer who lives in Cardington, Ohio.

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United Methodist News Service
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