Sudan's 'Bull Elephant' Leaves for Home
Episcopal News Service. October 26, 1998 [98-2247]
Jerry Hames, Editor of Episcopal Life
(Episcopal Life) The man affectionately known as "thon akon," or bull elephant, by thousands of refugees throughout the Episcopal Church in Sudan has left forever the desolate region along the Kenyan border where he worked with those displaced by the 15-year Sudanese civil war.
The Rev. Marc Nikkel, the Episcopal Church's first missionary appointee to Sudan in 1981, returned to California Oct. 12 to spend his remaining days with his ailing father, Reuben, and his sister. Surgery in London in late September revealed that Nikkel has advanced stomach cancer; and further operations are not possible.
During a stopover in New York on his flight to California, Nikkel was hospitalized for five days with chest pains. He received blood transfusions and antibiotics to fight pneumonia in his right lung.
During the visit, he met with Presiding Bishop Frank T. Griswold and presented a 3-foot-high ebony cross ringed with bullet casings to the Episcopal Church Center. Symbolic of the crosses that hundreds of thousands of Sudanese carry to show their faith in perilous times, the cross will hang in the center's chapel.
Nikkel's biggest disappointment in the days to come will be the separation from his Sudanese friends, who had become family. "You are in my thoughts during the day and in my dreams at night," he told them in a letter written from London. "My heart is seldom far from you."
A tall, well-built man, Nikkel, 48, was a dominating presence among the Jeing, or Dinka, Sudan's largest ethnic group for nearly two decades. Almost single-handedly, he directed the Episcopal Church's concern in the region and worked with the expatriate community in Sudan to raise the level of international concern.
"Seeing Marc in refugee camps or in villages inside southern Sudan, I was struck by the love and respect they have for him," said Margaret Larom, on the staff of the Anglican and global relations office at the Episcopal Church Center, who led a church delegation to Sudan in February. "By serving them where they are, enduring hardships by their side, laughing, crying, working, always teaching, he has earned their undying affection."
Nikkel's missionary service has left a legacy to the Sudanese. In the most rapidly growing church in the Anglican Communion, he worked for years in isolation until recently, teaching, serving as adviser in theological education and training clergy, teachers and women's leaders.
His bond with Sudan was consolidated in 1985 when he was abducted with three other expatriates by the Sudanese People's Liberation Army, held for two months while trekking 150 miles, often mingling with the destitute and displaced. Throughout the civil war he documented the origins and development of Christianity among the Dinka, which earned him a doctoral degree at the University of Edinburgh in 1993.
Speaking with labored breath in a New York hospital, Nikkel credited Bishops David Birney and Heath Light with encouraging him to take the road that carried him halfway around the world from the Mennonite Brethren farming community in the San Joachim Valley, where he was raised.
Even before he entered Fuller Theological Seminary in 1980, he experienced African culture when, with his family, he visited western Zaire for a year, where he used his graphic arts skills to create books for illiterate people. At Fuller in California, he became a close friend to several Ugandan students when that church was under persecution by the dictator Idi Amin.
Nikkel said he became intensely interested in church martyrs and what it meant to live in a society in which Christians were being persecuted. He remembered the afternoon when Birney, former coordinator of overseas ministries at the church center and himself a former missionary in Uganda and Botswana, visited him at Fuller. Nikkel asked for an opportunity to go to Uganda.
"I told him the history of my Mennonite background, about our peoples being refugees for generations," Nikkel recalled from his hospital bed. "I told him I wanted to learn about the faith that someone is willing to die for."
Birney responded immediately, Nikkel said. "You want a suffering church," he said. "Then Sudan is the place for you."
Birney said he had been searching for a year for someone to be a tutor at Bishop Gwynne Theological College, the only pastoral-training center in Sudan. "I thought, dear Lord, I will never get anyone, particularly a Westerner, to go and live under such primitive conditions. Very frankly, I couldn't find anybody.
"The theological college was pretty well destroyed [from the civil war]; it was rural, primitive, shelled and bombed out. Marc has one of the richest inner lives of any person I have ever had the privilege to know.
"When I met him. I knew I was in the presence of a very unusual person where the lack of money and material possessions didn't matter as much to him as relationships with others."
Nikkel was at the college for a year when he met Bishop Heath Light, then bishop of the Diocese of Southwestern Virginia, who was at an Anglican Partners in Mission consultation in Sudan.
"I stayed at his house a couple of nights and traveled with him throughout the country from mission to mission," recalled Light, who said he was immediately impressed. "We talked with a view to ordination," said Nikkel.
The result began a companion relationship between Southwestern Virginia and Sudan that continues today. "He's a person who looks robust, but internally he has the heart and soul of a poet," said Light, who retired in 1996. "He has great ability with words and with his hands," he said, describing how Nikkel's descriptive letters and painted murals in the college chapel affected him.
Describing how he convinced his diocesan standing committee and commission on ministry to sponsor someone for ordination whom they had not yet met, Light admitted the diocese was "adventurous." Nikkel received a year's leave, studied at General Theological Seminary and wrote the General Ordination Exams. "He aced them," Light said; he ordained Nikkel to the diaconate in 1984.
A year later, Nikkel was ordained a priest under the hands of the Sudanese bishops on behalf of the Diocese of Southwestern Virginia, beginning a highly unusual relationship between the Church Missionary Society of England, which sponsors most work in that country, the Episcopal Church and southwestern Virginians.
Nikkel's years in Sudan have had what he calls "distant periods" in relation to the sponsoring bodies. "During those times I felt pretty well alone," he said. But, more recently, that has changed, he said. 'The last two years have been a period of consolidation, and grass-roots ties [with local congregations] have emerged."
Nancy Frank, an advocate for refugee work at St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Rochester, N.Y., is one of those about whom Nikkel talks. She went to Sudan with the Episcopal delegation and was at Nikkel's bedside in New York.
'We've given a lot of money, but more important has been the support," she said. 'We have taken on the education of a seminarian and his family... and now a second parish in the diocese has done the same."
She said Nikkel awakened the parish to mission during his visit two years ago with the Sudanese archbishop. "He makes a connection with refugees, Sudanese and faith. People listen hard to what he has to say and how he expresses the pain and joy of the people."
Nikkel recounted his Sudan experience. "I've been thinking a lot in recent days about death and resurrection," he said. "I've been thinking about the enormous power of these years to me."
Nikkel said much of his experience in Sudan has become part of his own roots. "It has been the melding of my own person, being accepted -- almost a rebirth -- within the indigenous culture."
His nickname, thon akon, followed a custom by which Sudanese honor foreigners. "It is a name that reflected their deep respect for me," Nikkel said. 'The Dinka have ways of forming you in their image [in a way] that says: 'You are our person and you will do well to us.' The Dinka formed me through every part of my person."
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