Sudanese Community Church

The Sudanese Community Church, a special congregation of the Diocese of Colorado, is hosted by Saint John's. The SCC is a center for Sudanese living in the Denver area, and offers a variety of classes and groups.

Sudanese worship is held weekly at Saint John's in Saint Martin's chapel at 1 pm, and all are welcome.

For information on how to support the Sudanese ministry, contact Canon Poulson Reed.

Sudanese Community Church welcomes new vicar

By Rebecca Jones

The Rev. Dr. Ayyoubawaga Bushara Gafour – known to his friends as “Oja” – had a critical decision to make last fall: Should he move to Colorado from his home in Toronto to take charge of the struggling Sudanese congregation in Denver, or should he accept a teaching position at a college in South Korea?
He had offers from both places, and both appealed to him.
The dilemma was much like one he had encountered many years earlier as a young man in his native Sudan, when he’d been given a full scholarship to study medicine in Moscow.
In the end, faith guided both decisions. Gafour turned down the Russian medical training because he feared Soviet political ideology would interfere with his desire to go to church. (“What’s the use of doing something and not involving God in it?” he asks.) And he accepted the vicar’s job in Denver rather than the professor’s job in South Korea.
“I came for the sake of faith,” Gafour says. “On that basis, I concluded in favor of this pastoral job. So that’s how I came here.”
On Jan. 11, Gafour was installed as vicar of the Sudanese Community Church, a special congregation of the Colorado diocese, which meets on Sunday afternoons in St. Martin’s Chapel of St. John’s Cathedral.
He replaces the Rev. Anderia Lual Arok, who left last year to lead a Sudanese congregation in Phoenix.
Gafour was born in the Nuba Mountains of Sudan, some 600 miles southwest of Khartoum. His father was both a farmer and a spirit-priest of the indigenous African traditional religion.
Growing up, Gafour was exposed to indigenous religion, Islam and Christianity. “The African traditional religion does not impose, it does not proselytize,” he says. “A person is free to choose whichever direction it is most comfortable for him or her to follow. In my own family, we are a multi-religious mixture. If there were a religious festival, like Christmas, the whole family would celebrate. If there were an Islamic festival, the whole family would celebrate. And the same for an African traditional festival. All would contribute willingly, whether you believed that way or not.”
Gafour says he went through several phases before embracing Christianity. As a young child, he leaned toward his father’s traditional religion. By the time he started to elementary school, he began learning Islam and how to practice it, but without conviction. By high school, he was attracted to Christianity. He began to recall the curious hymns he’d heard sung as a small child in his village, where a Church Missionary Society mission ran a hospital.
“I have an older brother who was an Anglican,” he says. “I observed the changes in his behavior, and that attracted me. That’s when I started out of curiosity to study the Bible.”
Gafour isn’t sure how old he is. Keeping track of chronological age is something new in his native region of Sudan. “What counts in the African traditional religion is that you are born healthy and you are ritually introduced into the community. We don’t celebrate birthdays,” he says. He estimates he’s in his late 40s, but figures he could just as easily be in his 50s or 60s.
Whatever age he is, Gafour’s resume glitters with enough achievements for several lifetimes.
After turning down that medical education in the Soviet Union, he later won the opportunity to study theology in Canada, and obtained both a bachelor’s degree in sociology from the University of Saskatchewan and Master of Divinity degree from the University of Emmanuel College in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, in 1981. He later earned a Master of Sacred Theology degree from the University of Toronto in 1986, and a doctorate from the University of Wales in 1999.
He was ordained a deacon in the Anglican Diocese of Calgary in Alberta, Canada, in 1981, but delayed his ordination to the priesthood until 2004.
In his native Sudan, he’s been a Church Missionary Society hospital administrator, run a church evening school and served in a variety of administrative roles for the Episcopal Church of the Sudan. He’s done extensive community service work, leading campaigns for international debt cancellation and amnesty for prisoners of conscience.
For the past eight years, he has supported himself primarily as a freelance book editor, and has also written two books. He is also proficient in a number of languages, including Amaa, Nubian, Arabic, English and some Welsh.
“From my experience in church administration, and hospital administration, and school administration, I learned time management,” he says. “That’s how I managed to earn two degrees – a B.A. and M.Div. – in just four and a half years.”
Gafour says that when he turned down the Soviet Union’s offer of a free medical education, he wasn’t sure what the future would hold for him. And he’s still not sure, but he’s confident it will work out well.
“I believed then – as I still do – that although I had no idea what would happen, God would find a way. When things are done that way, when people take God into account when making their decisions, it becomes a debt on God. Sooner or later, God will pay back – whether we are aware of it or not.”
Gafour knows that the Sudanese congregation faces difficulties. Internal disputes and misunderstandings have fractured the community in the past, but he believes church members are ready to put old disagreements behind them and move on.
“So far, it looks positive to me,” said Gafour, who arrived in Denver on Dec. 1. “The reconciliation, the forgiveness is taking shape. But I cannot take it for granted until it takes full-fledged shape. I cannot even say how large the congregation is until the wounds of disintegration are healed. This is the process we are in now.”
Although Gafour can’t say for certain how large the congregation is, he did note that between 180 and 200 worshippers participated in Christmas Eve services and at his installation on Jan. 11.