By late 1989, Nathaniel Garang Anyieth had been bishop of the Diocese of Bor in Sudan for five years—and for four of those years he had been almost entirely out of contact with anyone outside of his diocese. In 1985, the violence of Sudan’s civil war had forced him to flee from his see city and he took refuge in the vast rural areas controlled by the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA).
But in 1989, he was finally able to send a letter to a friend. He wrote, “God is now moving among the Dinka people. There is great change when I came among them. … What is going on among the people here in our country is a mystery to them, and it is unknown to the world. … You can see the cross everywhere. Many churches are being opened. Many new Christian songs are being composed in a great number, very, very spiritual songs.”
Bishop Nathaniel, as he was widely known, died on February 24 in Nairobi. His life began when Sudan was under British control. The church was run by members of the Church Missionary Society (CMS) and included multiple civil wars and a massive moment of religious change among his Dinka people. For many decades, Bishop Nathaniel was one of the standout leaders in making Anglicanism an indigenous faith among his people and forming the modern Episcopal Church of South Sudan.
Bishop Nathaniel was born in a cattle camp on the east bank of the Nile River in the late 1930s or 1940 and was his father’s third son. As was common at that time, Dinka men kept their oldest sons close to home to learn the traditions of cattle-keeping that were central to their agro-pastoralist lifestyle.
Anglican missionaries had struggled in their work with the Dinka and despaired at their resistance to the gospel. Nathaniel’s father was no different in his attitude toward Christianity. But by 1940s, younger sons were occasionally sent to missionary schools as a kind of insurance against the changes being wrought by colonialism. Nathaniel attended Rumbek Secondary School, a missionary institution, and, like many other students, was baptized as an Anglican.
It wasn’t until he was a young man and fighting, briefly, with the Anya-Nya rebel movement in Sudan’s first post-independence civil war and then living as a refugee in northern Uganda that his faith became his own and he committed himself to Christian ministry. Educated at Nairobi Pentecostal Bible College, in 1974 he became the first resident Anglican cleric in Bor, a small town and economic hub for the vast and remote flood plain on the Nile’s east bank, where Dinka people had been keeping cattle and living with the rhythm of the river for generations.
In 1984, Nathaniel became the first bishop of the new Diocese of Bor. Sudan’s second civil war had begun in 1983 and Bor and the east bank region were one focal point for violence. After fleeing Bor, Bishop Nathaniel began a multi-year itinerant ministry among his people, preaching, teaching, and baptizing, and bringing form and shape to his nascent diocese.
The catastrophic violence of civil war was causing many Dinka to reconsider their commitments to their traditional religion and finding in the religion of Jesus Christ compelling answers to their changed circumstances. For a time, a new prophet, Kon Ajith, rose to prominence and, unlike Dinka prophets of the past, preached that Dinka people should abandon the shrines and sacred objects of their existing religion and seek Christian baptism.
Kon was not educated and had little previous interaction with missionary Christianity. Bishop Nathaniel nonetheless baptized him and encouraged his clergy not to obstruct him, and Kon’s converts became part of Nathaniel’s growing church. Women, too, found in the Christian message a new source of hope and consolation. Nathaniel supported them as well, encouraging them to gather people together under trees or in other gathering spots and sing hymns and pray together.
Some of those women began to write their own hymns, notably Mary Alueel Garang (no relation), a young woman who poured forth new compositions that quickly circulated among these new Christian communities. When Bishop Nathaniel made contact with the world outside his diocese in late 1989 and 1990, one of the first things he asked for was writing paper so they could document these songs.
After a devastating split in the SPLA in 1991, Bishop Nathaniel worked closely with Paride Taban, the Roman Catholic bishop in the Diocese of Torit, to establish the New Sudan Council of Churches. It pressed for reconciliation among the warring SPLM factions and sought peace. Nathaniel also began to travel further afield, particularly to Kakuma Refugee Camp in northwestern Kenya.
Tens of thousands of Dinka and other south Sudanese had sought refuge there and established church communities in each of the different zones of the camp. Nathaniel visited to teach, confirm, and ordain, and connected the churches with his oversight as an extension of the Diocese of Bor. During a three-day service in 1993, he confirmed close to 10,000 people.
In the late 1990s, some of Kakuma’s residents were resettled in the United States, Canada, Australia, and elsewhere, where they became known as “Lost Boys.” Many joined Anglican and Episcopal churches, spurred on by the faith that Nathaniel had nurtured and overseen. Among the current generation of bishops in the Episcopal Church of South Sudan are a number of these former young refugees.
From the mid-1990s onward, Bishop Nathaniel’s ministry increasingly took him out of Bor. The leadership of the Episcopal Church of Sudan had been devastated by the civil war, and many bishops were in urban areas, rather than in rural areas where many people still lived. Nathaniel kept up his itinerant ministry, traveling among Dinka communities on the west bank of the Nile River and supporting church communities and ministry there as well.
Along with Bishop Taban and other leaders, he traveled widely in the world to draw attention to the conflict in Sudan, including a trip to the Vatican to meet with Pope John Paul II. He also helped oversee the production of a new Dinka hymnal to circulate the new compositions more widely. More than a third of the new hymns were by women, a striking number in a culture in which musical composition had long been dominated by men.
After the end of the second civil war in 2005, the Episcopal Church of Sudan began dividing Bor into several smaller dioceses to account for the wartime growth. This led to church conflict, at times debilitating, which continues in various forms to this day. Bishop Nathaniel helped re-establish the church in Bor—for a time, the pews in Bor’s cathedral were those that had been carted back from the churches in Kakuma—and paved the way for the election of his successor in 2011. In his retirement, he remained the senior spiritual leader of the Dinka church, continuing to travel and remaining connected to the many thousands of people he had encountered in his ministry.
Elsewhere in sub-Saharan Africa, indigenous Christian leaders like Nathaniel have had a complex relationship with their missionary forebears. In Bishop Nathaniel’s case, however, he frequently honored the pioneering work of Archibald Shaw, the first and longest-serving CMS missionary in South Sudan, whom Nathaniel had met as a child. European missionaries had been expelled by Sudan’s government in 1956, leaving space for indigenous leaders like Nathaniel to appropriate the Anglican legacy in the way they saw fit.
Though Nathaniel had been educated at a Pentecostal institution, he later studied at Sudan’s Anglican seminary and stayed within the church of his baptism. For Nathaniel, Anglicanism was about a tradition of liturgy and worship rooted in evangelical conviction but also a generous openness to the breadth of Christian expression. In 1992 and 1993, he coordinated visits by CMS head Diana Witts.
She recalled, “As we approached the church compound, the entire church community was lining the route. Bishop Nathaniel led the way with his hand on my shoulder—clearly the arrival of CMS was seen as being of historic significance.” Nathaniel valued the history and support of CMS, but it was also clear that this was a church with fully indigenous leadership, capable of making its own decisions and shaping its own future.
Bishop Nathaniel’s retirement came shortly before South Sudan’s independence from Sudan and just a few years before South Sudan became wrapped in a civil war, a further development of the splits in the SPLM from 1991. The east bank church that Nathaniel worked to build has likewise been the site of significant conflict over authority and position among Nathaniel’s successors.
I met Bishop Nathaniel only a handful of times while researching a book about the history of the church in South Sudan. I remember his gentleness and, as I had been told to expect, that he was somewhat shy and self-effacing in talking about his ministry. Nonetheless, he generously shared with me some of his memories.
I asked if he could estimate how many baptisms he had done in his life. He couldn’t, he told me. Instead, he said, “I count dioceses,” that is, the dioceses that had emerged from Bor and elsewhere as a result of his ministry. When I asked him why he hadn’t left his diocese for the relative safety of a city like Khartoum or Juba during the civil war, he looked at me with astonishment. “I was here with my people,” he replied. “If I left them, the church would not happen.”
Jesse Zink is the principal of Montreal Dio, an ecumenical theological college affiliated with McGill University. He is the author of Christianity and Catastrophe in South Sudan: Civil War, Migration, and the Making of Dinka Anglicanism (Baylor University Press, 2018). His most recent book is Faithful, Creative, Hopeful: Fifteen Theses for Christians in a Crisis-Shaped World (Church Publishing, 2024).
