Stephen is a contact person in Sudan. I want you to know his story. ( Stephen is the person on your right).My name is Stephen Reech. I was born in 1964 in Kolmarek village, Bor town Southern Sudan. I was raised in a polygamous family, the family of a chief. My family is from the Dinka tribe. Within the tribe, the office of chief is inherited.
My great-grandfather was named Akuak. He is remembered to this day by the Abordit community because of his bravery during the colonial period. When the Turks & Arabs tried to arrest the Africans to be sold into slavery, Akuak resisted and defended his people. The merchants were so annoyed by the chief’s stand that they killed him within the Biong forest. The Arabs attempted to take the Africans to be slaves, but the spirit of resistance had been planted hence they did not succeed. Out of respect for Akuak’s great service, the community carried his body to bury him within his compound. Because Akuak had given his life to save the Abordit people, the community compensated his family with cows and erected a shrine at his gravesite. The shrine was a place of worship and prayer. Each year, the Dinka would visit Akuak’s shrine to offer the sacrifice of the first harvest to be used by Akuak’s children and any first born sons in the lineage of Akuak. The descendents of Akuak offered the sacrifice of a white cow each year to ask for rain and success for the community.
When I was growing up, my family believed Akuak was alive in spirit and was concerned with the welfare of the living people. The sons, daughters and grandchildren could invite him during the ceremony of slaughtering the white cow. It was believed that Akuak’s spirit could speak through an honest person whose ways were upright before the gods and would assure them of rain, peace and a goof harvest.
In 1979, while in primary school, I was saved and abandoned the worship of the spirits and many gods. I believed Jesus Christ to be my redeemer- not Akuak. As a young boy, my family did not realize the seriousness and the implications of my new belief to the family, which was viewed the representative of the redeemer Akuak. I attended church with my cousin brother, Daniel Reech, for five years without any challenges from our extended family which were deeply rooted in the Akuak cult. In 1984, I heard the call from God to serve him as a pastor, but I tried to avoid this because I feared the elderly would not take me seriously. I was a young man, and my family was deeply rooted in idolatry. But there was a gentle voice telling me not to fear for He would be with me- I only needed to be faithful & obedient. This was the beginning of a new chapter in my life: a life of rejection, faith, perseverance, and success.
My cousin Daniel and I decided to start preaching the Good News to our family members first, which was viewed as a family of priesthood for the Abordit community. The message we carried was that God was the provider of rain, peace and good harvests. We preached that prosperity did not come from straining to please the spirit of Akuak; but rather, they should trust in God through Jesus Christ who died and resurrected to redeem the world. This message was rejected by many of our family members and the community at large. The family, and all of the community, opposed our teachings. They claimed that we were going against the spirit of Akuak and believed this would bring disaster to our family as well as to the whole community. They resolved that we should be excommunicated from the society by sending us away so that the community could evade destruction from the spirits and gods. Even our friends and relatives, believed that something bad would happen to us and deserted us. This opposition and rejection drew us closer to God in prayer and worship.
Our families thought that we were mad and others said we had bad luck and needed to be cleansed. We denied all these claims and told them boldly that the problem was that they did not understand the word of God. In an attempt to stop us from preaching the Good News, which they termed as heresy, the elders reported to the S.P.L.A. commander that, by preaching a new religion and a new redeemer called Jesus, we were a danger to the peace of the society. Due to this, they requested the military leaders to enroll us in the military to remove us from the village and to so that we could die in the war. Praise is to God because S.P.L.A. was a military movement in opposition to the imposing of Islamic beliefs to the people of Southern Sudan. The S.P.L.A. preferred Christian beliefs and disagreed with the elders. The community leaders kept insisting that we join the military because we were young and a nuisance to the society. Eventually when the S.P.L.A. chose young men to join the military, Daniel and I were chosen. Because of illness, I was released but Daniel went to the military training camp. The elders did not accept this and convinced one military captain to beat me so that I would change my mind and rejoin the military. I was beaten almost to the point of death; and when I was set free, I was bleeding and urinating blood. People thought that I would die; to their surprise, I was up in two weeks time. God had healed me.
The healing I received from God made me preach the gospel more courageously without fear or doubt that God was with me. I knew this was His mission. This is a time I witnessed many people coming to Christ. People said, “If Stephen did not die, for sure his God is Able.”
A small church started; and when we prayed for the sick with faith, God did miracles to heal them. One startling incident occurred when the son of my uncle, the man who was in charge of the Akuak shrine, became very sick. After trying in vain to treat him through praying to their gods for healing, my aunt brought the young boy to the church. I led the church in a prayer of faith and instructed the mother to take the child home to rest because God had healed him. The next day, my aunt reported that there was great improvement in the health of my nephew John. John’s healing made his parents and many others to believe in Jesus. John’s parents burned the idols erected within their home but spared the Akuak shrine because it belonged to the community. They moved from the site of the shrine to another place. The boy is called John Mathung. The word mathung means “the grave” because the people believed he escaped the grave. After witnessing the power of God, several of my relatives including my brothers and their wives were saved. However, even after witnessing that our God is Able, my elder brothers refused to believe in Christ because they feared the community as leaders of the priesthood family.
One day when my mother was sick, the campaign to destroy the idols began. I woke up and went to my mother’s house to see how to help; upon arriving there, the spirit of God told me to pray only after the idols in the house had been destroyed. Immediately I started destroying and burning the idols which had been erected in the house and the compound. Then I prayed for my mother, and the next morning she was well and made the decision to follow Christ. Because, by prayer, God had healed my mother; 2 of my step-mothers, 2 of my sisters and 2 of my aunts confessed Jesus as their Savior in the course of the month.
By 1990, I had destroyed many idols in our extended family, but the Akuak shrine remained. One night, God revealed to me that the Akuak shrine was the stronghold for idolatry in our community. Upon realizing this, I set the shrine on fire that night. When the people awoke the next morning and discovered that the shrine was in ashes, they assembled at the site. I anticipated that I would be killed, but praise is to God for I am still alive to write this and to preach the gospel to many. That day, the women brought food to please Akuak’s spirit, and the men decided to go to the commissioner to report the incident. The soldiers arrested me and locked me in the Kolmarek jail for one week until the case would be heard.
At the hearing, the commissioner and other senior officials of the S.P.L.A. movement were present. The believers of Akuak came with objects signifying their beliefs, and the Christians came with flags bearing the cross. The Christians sang songs in praise of Jesus while the other group sang songs in praise of Akuak as well as to the other gods. When the community leaders explained their accusations against me, God gave me the wisdom to defend my actions. I argued that, since the land where Akuak’s shrine was erected belonged to my family and my uncle who was in charge as the last born son of my grandfather had been saved, it was wise to destroy the shrine. I said that if anyone wanted to erect the shrine it should be in their own land. The commissioner and his panel ruled in my favor saying that it was against the policies of the S.P.L.A. to force an individual or family to worship or to have a shrine that is contrary to their beliefs. The commissioner advised the leaders to erect the shrine within the same location, and I was instructed not to interfere. I was advised to build a church 100 meters away from the shrine. The leaders agreed to rebuild the shrine and insisted that I pay a cow to be sacrificed, but the panel passed that the community leaders would have to give their own cow for the sacrifice. The Christians were not to be forced to participate. After being released, I went back to Kolmarek and served as the pastor of 3 churches within our village. This was not the end of the war between the community leaders and myself. They insisted that I join the military and leave them in peace to worship their gods.
In October of 1990, the leaders succeeded to convince one military commander to take me to the military camp. It was very unfortunate, because I had been married to my wife Elizabeth for only one month. When I was taken to the military camp, my wife moved to Torit which is approximately 20 miles away from the military camp in which I was staying. At the military camp, the leader learned that I was forced to join the military in order to stop me from preaching the Gospel. Because the leader believed in Christ Jesus, he set me free. Upon being released from the military camp, I traveled to Torit to see my wife; from there, I traveled to Bor to assess the situation before taking my wife back to Kolmarek. When I arrived in Bor, the Arabs and other S.P.L.A. opponents had attacked the region. They had killed thousands of civilians, looted property, stolen cows and burned the houses. I quickly ran back to safety in Torit and remained there 2 more days until the S.P.L.A. had repulsed the Arabs.
In 1991, I worked as the pastor in charge of the Bor Pentecostal churches. Since the Arabs had destroyed all of the property and food, famine struck and many people lost their lives. In search of safety and food, thousands traveled to Uganda, Kenya, and Ethiopia. To save our lives, my wife and I lived along the the Nile River for a period of 8 months. We ate fish to survive.
In December of 1992, we traveled by foot for 1 ½ months to the border of Uganda. Along the way, we ate leaves and wild fruits. In Uganda, we lived in the Koboko refugee camp. Within the camp, I preached and worked as the chairman of the Dinka community. While in the camp, due to disease, we lost 2 sons. In 1995, my wife and I moved to Kenya. My wife lived in the Kakuma refugee camp while I attended Bible School. At Kakuma refugee camp, I mobilized Sudanese Christians to fellowship together which grew to be the Sudan Pentecostal Church. Our son Mayen was born in Kakuma. He was very sick; and if it were not for God, we would have lost him too. When I see Mayen playing with his sister Mercy, it reminds me that: GOD IS SO GOOD- ALL OF THE TIME!!! Elizabeth, my wife, stayed in Kakuma for 2 years and was blessed to receive a scholarship to study dressmaking and tailoring near the Bible school I was attending. We faced many challenges, but God provided for our needs. We were able to complete our studies.
In 2000, we had planned to return to Sudan, but God blessed us with a farm in the government forest where my family was able to live and farm for 1 year. The harvest provided enough food to last for 2 years. In 2003, I joined the African Inland Church missionary college. The community development course was of utmost interest to me. Within it, I learned ways to break the cycles of poverty in our churches and communities back in Sudan. I had a vision to initiate programs to train people on spiritual and physical matters to break cycles of poverty amongst pastors, believers, and the community. To accomplish this vision, I registered the Upper Nile Christian Development Organization with the aim of training our communities with new skills of farming, new technologies and with spiritual development to encourage those coming back to Sudan to move beyond the past and to start a new life of love and forgiveness between Christians and Muslims.
My community development teacher, Samuel Temugue, introduced me to Empowering Lives International a mission’s organization that already had the same vision as mine. We agreed to partner together as Empowering Lives Sudan to better the lives of the people of Sudan in this period of peace.
After 13 years of exile, in January of 2005, the peace treaty was being signed; and I returned home to Sudan to visit. I was very sad and broken when I witnessed the suffering of my people. The children are naked, hungry and many are sick. I traveled with a Kenyan named Micah, and he was shocked by the sights he was seeing. After 3 months, with the partnership of Empowering Lives, I returned to Sudan to start the rebuilding process. I built 2 small huts and fenced 7 acres that will be used to build the training center and a demonstration farm. Also, I planted 24 mango trees in the farm and raised a nursery bed to be able to plant indigenous trees. In the future, it is my prayer and plan to build a mission clinic at the site where the Akuak shrine once was situated.
