ABOUT THE SUDAN PROJECT

The Sudan Project will report on news items from Southern Sudan as well as the work sponsored by Safe Harbor Church in Anacortes, Washington.

Project Leader Description

Louise Short is Missions Pastor at Safe Harbor and for the past 18 years has worked fulltime in management for the African Children’s Choir, an NGO helping children crisis in Africa. For 10 years she was the East Africa field coordinator, liaisoning between the ACC and its partner African NGOs. Because of her passion for the opportunity in Sudan, she now focuses her efforts fully on Sudan. She and her husband Gary have been leading teams to Sudan since 1998. They support a full time field person in south Sudan, Mark Warkentin, the first licensed US Foursquare minister in Sudan. Louise’s experience has given her wisdom in working in the African cultures, in long term ministry to war traumatized children, in the needs of the persecuted, in relief and development, and in church planting.

Project description

The project will impact a crucial area in southern Sudan with 14 villages and primary schools for one year starting November 2005. It combines the efforts of our full time field representative and Safe Harbor teams. This includes short term saturation events, i.e. leadership conferences in conjunction with community evangelistic outreaches, literature distribution, Jesus Film showings, Children’s evangelism, trauma care, and medical care. These will be followed by new convert foundational training events and Children’s ministry training events. We will plant a Foursquare church, and establish a temporary ministry institute in the strategic village of Liwolo, home of the south’s only Teachers Training College for primary school teachers. We will explore repeating this effort in Juba. This will at least triple our impact.

Follow Up and discipleship

Our follow up and discipleship is founded on encouraging and training experienced and emerging leaders. This is an expansion of work that has been ongoing since 1998. We will plant a Foursquare church in a strategic village where there is a teachers Training college two secondary schools and an effective local NGO. In this same location we will establish a Ministry Institute to train students from these schools as well as local leaders. We will expand our reading program for leaders that will strengthen them in the basics of Christian belief and leadership. We will conduct a series of Leadership conferences with teams made up of international, regional and local and emerging leaders. Our field representative will train local emerging leaders to follow up on new converts with a Foundations course which we have already developed. He will also Train church leaders to minister to children. Through this whole process we will be mentoring emerging leaders.

Leadership development

Emerging leaders are already involved in our Sudan ministry. Our training is based on the “teach it, demonstrate it, do it together, observe it, turn it over” model. Our field supervisor Mark will use this method in training emerging leaders to develop children’s workers in all the local churches in the County. We always include emerging leaders on our conference teams. We have been including young adults from Uganda who have grown up through the African Children’s Choir program on international teams, training them to minister cross-culturally and in evangelistic outreaches in Sudan. The emerging Sudanese leaders will also have the opportunity to be involved in the Ministry Institute and be on the church planting team.

Project best practices

We partner with NGOs with complimentary missions sharing resources and personnel. We include US and African emerging leaders on our teams to help develop cultural sensitivity early in the evangelism process in new areas. We preach the gospel along with meeting felt community needs. We also pray with every willing individual and group with whom we come in contact. We invite western pastors on teams to instill vision and support for future development in Sudan. We offer discipleship booklets to pastors and leaders to disseminate to larger community as well as new believers. Our teams concentrate on going to the same places and working with the same people for several years. We coordinate the work of our teams with that of our field representative. We combine leadership conferences with community evangelistic meetings. Our teams multitask doing leaders conferences, evangelistic outreach, medical relief and children’s ministry on the same teams maximizing community impact.