[October 8] We decided to do “something unique,” said Bishop Paul Marshall of the Episcopal Diocese of Bethlehem, “a capital campaign for others. We intend to raise significant funds in order to give them away.”
The campaign is New Hope for a New Sudan and the Needy in Pennsylvania.
“Some 75% of the
$3.6 million goal will help the destitute in Sudan,” he said. “25% will provide
grants to enable parishes in our diocese to expand projects and develop new
initiatives to serve the poor among us, visible and invisible. Our diocese,
institutionally, will not benefit from this effort. That by itself sets this
effort apart.”
The advance gifts phase of the campaign began a few months ago. Parishes throughout the 14-county northeastern Pennsylvania diocese launched New Hope’s general phase during late September. More than $2 million has already been raised.
Five years ago,
Bishop Marshall asked Charlie Barebo to help develop a capital campaign for a
camp and conference center for the local Episcopal diocese. “A funny thing
happened,” said Barebo. “I woke up one morning [in January 2007] in the Sudan."
A parishioner at St. Anne’s Episcopal Church, Trexlertown, and global traveler as CEO of Otterbine Barebo, Inc., in eastern Pennsylvania, Barebo said it was a “life-changing event that has deepened my faith and forever altered my outlook on this world.”
A few months later, he accepted the bishop's invitation to lead the New Hope capital campaign.
Kajo Keji County is 7,000 miles away in
southernmost Sudan
on the northern Ugandan border, roughly one-third the geographical size of the Diocese of Bethlehem.
“We are
responding to the request of the Diocese of Kajo Keji for assistance in
building the educational and organizational centers that will allow them to
provide for their own future,” said the bishop. “Through revolving micro-finance
funds, enterprising individuals, largely women, will be able to make a new
start in a war-torn country.”
Funds from the New Hope campaign for Kajo Keji have been
designated generally as follows, in line with priorities and requests developed
by the leadership there:
$1.1 million to build
and support a theological college in Kajo Keji that will feature a seminary and
a teachers’ college as well as teach business and vocational skills.
$1.1 million to build
five and support eight primary schools and one secondary school in Kajo Keji,
touching the lives of more than 2,000 young Sudanese each year.
$250,000 to fund a
micro-finance program to help kick start a failed economy in Kajo Keji.
Micro-finance programs make small loans to families and have resulted in
success stories around the globe in developing countries.
$250,000 to help hire
an administrator in Kajo Keji to audit and insure financial propriety.
Additionally, $900,000 has been
designated to seed social ministry projects in parishes, starting with a
homeless shelter in Scranton.
The Diocesan Trustees will publish a
grant procedure and distribute it to the Diocese of Kajo Keji and the parishes
of the Diocese of Bethlehem.
The campaign will extend over a
five-year period.
“I was describing my enthusiasm for and commitment to
the New Hope campaign recently,” Bishop Marshall said, “when someone said to
me, ‘Well, of course, that’s your job,’”
“The fact is, it isn’t my job, but it is my passion. My
transformation in this matter has required the re-ordering of personal and
professional priorities. My financial commitment to the project means, among
other things, that I will need to postpone my planned retirement date by two
years and that we will have altered our standard of living. That is how seriously
we take this effort at our house.”
Marshall’s passion was sparked in 2000 when he visited Africa for the fist time.
"I have always known, intellectually," he
said upon returning, "of the disparity between what we Americans take for
granted and how most of the world actually lives. Seeing it produced a jumble
of thoughts and feelings. I was grateful, embarrassed, a little sick, but
mostly convinced that it is not possible for a Christian to see this much
suffering and not lower his own standard of living in order to help brothers
and sisters. I came back with the determination never again to let myself be
gulled by our culture into feeling deprived."
In 2005, the bishop and his wife, Diana, spent an
intensive five days with sisters and brothers in Kajo Keji. They addressed 17 gatherings. The bishop
preached at least three times each day, observing the local minimum of 45
minutes, and was invited to ordain 34 African deacons and three priests for the
war-torn diocese.
“Diana
and I baked in a bus for 14 hours in the Ugandan sun,” he told delegates of the
October 2006 diocesan convention. “Finally, you just give up wiping your
face. As we became increasingly caked with red dirt and the overcrowded bus
grew hotter and hotter, I found myself baking in a holy and creative sense: I
knew God wanted my attention.”
Marshall abandoned “some of my bricks-and-mortar dreams for our own
diocese in order to see what God would have us do for others.”
“A
question has intrigued me,” he continued. “Could we dare to have a
capital fund drive where we didn't get the money?”
A
few months later, four missioners from the Diocese of Bethlehem began to
explore that question in the Sudan.
During
January 2007, they
immersed themselves
in the life of Kajo Keji, visiting six schools, an orphanage, a displacement
camp, the site of the proposed center of the diocese which will house the
cathedral, the theological college, the bishop’s house, an agricultural center
and a primary and secondary school. They met with local officials and clergy,
teachers, representatives of the Mothers’ Union and heard them talk about their priorities and dreams.
They were Howard Stringfellow, archdeacon of the Diocese of Bethlehem, Jo Trepagnier, member of the diocesan World Mission committee and the Cathedral Church of the Nativity, Bethlehem, Randall Fegley, professor of political science at Penn State, expert in African studies, member of Christ Church, Reading, and member of the diocesan World Mission committee, and Charlie Barebo.
“When we accept Jesus' discipline of looking
beyond ourselves, we change,” Marshall
said. “When each of us sees ourselves as having a part in Christ's mission in
life, much around us changes. Our diocesan family has affected its neighbors
unforgettably. In the last six years, our relatively tiny diocese has given
over $800,000 to relief for Africa, for
tsunami victims and for hurricane relief. And that is just the money we know
about because it flowed through us to Episcopal Relief and Development.
Certainly there has been more.”
Over the past few years, the people and churches of the Diocese of Bethlehem have raised and contributed more than $400,000 to fund scholarships, buy agricultural tools and oxen, adopt schools and stave off starvation in Kajo Keji.
During the late summer of 2004, in response to Marshall's emergency call too local congregations, the Diocese of Behlehem quickly raised $80,000 to have food delivered by trucks to some 157,000 starving refugees. "What the Diocese of Bethlehem has done," wrote a correspondent in Sudan at that time, "will enter the history books of Kajo Keji. Their actions have given our people hope that they are not alone."
The Diocese of Bethlehem has had a partnership
relationship with the Diocese of Kajo Keji for the past seven years. Ten missioners
have been deeply affected by their visits with sisters and brothers in southern Sudan.
“Since 2000, I and others from our diocese have gone to Africa several times to seek a vision for Bethlehem among the suffering and those who care for them, in a place where the Holy Spirit can work,” said Bishop Marshall..
Archdeacon Howard Stringfellow was one of
four, including Barebo, who woke up one morning in January 2007 in the Sudan. “While I have
known people in my native Tennessee and in rural South Carolina who had not either running water or electricity, I have never lived in those
circumstances before this trip,” said Stringfellow. “The people of Kajo Keji do
not have those benefits or any that accompany them in first- and second-world
countries, such as means of communication and transport.”
Rick Cluett, the former archdeacon of Bethlehem, a resident of Allentown, has been to Kajo Keji several times. “Their life has changed my life,” he said. “Their faith has changed my faith.”
Cluett says most of his life has been lived in a ghetto of comfort and privilege. “I have forayed from time to time into places and times of poverty – deep deprivation of wealth, opportunity, spirit – in urban and rural America, affecting people who are white-, black-, brown- and red-skinned. I thought I knew how hard life could be. I had no idea.”
Mrs. Connie
Fegley, a member of Christ Episcopal Church, Reading,
and chair of the diocesan World Mission committee, visited with Kajo Keji
refugees in Adjumani in northern Uganda in 2000.
“I was
physically uncomfortable,” she said, “but my spirit was soaring in that
spiritually alive place.”
In July 2007, she and Cluett represented the Diocese of
Bethlehem at the enthronement of Bishop Anthony Poggo as Bishop of Kajo Keji.
“The people are trying so hard under circumstances I fear would flatten me,”
she said. “I was struck time and again by how hopeful they are about the future
and how lacking in bitterness and the desire for revenge they appear to be
regarding all these many years of destruction of their homeland. They really only
seem interested in getting on with things, rather than wallowing in the past.”
Bishop Poggo will visit with delegates of the Bethlehem
Diocesan Convention this Friday and Saturday (Oct. 12-13) and with parishioners
in Wilkes-Bare on Sunday. He will preach at the 8:30 a.m. Saturday celebration of Holy
Eucharist in the Cathedral Church of the Nativity, 321 Wyandotte Street, Bethlehem. He will preach also at the 10:30
a.m. Eucharist at St. Stephen’s Pro-Cathedral, 35 South Franklin Street, Wilkes-Barre.
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