Our April Charity – Gombe Diocese
The Anglican church in Nigeria has been prominent in the news in the past few weeks. Headlines have pronounced that the Anglican church world-wide ‘is splitting,’ and claimed that the cause of this has been a group of African countries, prominent among them is Nigeria. over the past 15 or more years we have regularly supported the northern diocese of Gombe there. Whether those high level decisions should affect that support is a question we may need to discuss. But it is time once again for Gombe to be our charity of the month.
We have been concerned for Gombe for good reasons. Firstly it is one of the poorer states in Nigeria. It doesn’t have access to the possible oil wealth of the southeastern part of the country and its climate is not as beneficial to farming as is the tropical centre of the country. Gombe state is in the position where Nigerian begins to be affected by proximity to the Sahara Desert. Politically it has been deeply troubled by inter-religious strife: the terror group Boko Haram has bequeathed to the state a legacy of criminar behaviour that affects all communities: for example, the kidnapping of school children with demands to their parents that ransoms be paid for the children’s release.
The church has been a target for some of this criminality and the previous bishop could tell stories of how he has been physically attacked and his house invaded. Some of the Anglican Churches’ congregations have lost significant numbers, as those able to have moved to the south of the country.
We began to support Gombe Diocese because the former bishop, Henry Ndukubah, had been a personal fiend of Dan and Perrin Hardy, since he was Dan’s student at Durham university. We were impressed by Henry’s vision for the Anglican church to have a positive effect on the social and economic development of the area. The local congregations had an enabling vision for projects that benefitted their communities. This motivation came from their faith in what it meant to be living as servants of God in that place and at this time. I well remember on a visit to Gombe that we called into the site of a growing secondary school and, though it was a bank holiday, we met the Head Teacher and two of his colleagues digging the foundations of a planned extra classroom! Fifteen years later that school is now a busy secondary school serving the south of the state. A project that is in progress at present is the creation of a long-desired College of Nursing and Midwifery, also in the south of the state.
Communications with Gombe became more problematic when we lost Stuart Lingard, but thanks to the hard work of Sarah Squire and Xanthe Langley we are hoping that better communications have now been re-established. There is no doubt that our relationship with Nigeria has left its mark here. The people of Gombe are genuinely grateful for the support we have given them and they have written to us with thanks and enthusiasm. Two gifts of Nigerian leatherwork hang in the church as a token of this. We have also benefitted from their prayers for us and the relationship is a mark of our identity as members of the world-wide church.
About Charity of the Month at St Mark’s
Charity of the Month was created as a way of coming together as a church community to raise money for good causes. The scheme provides ongoing support to certain organisations, and each year members of our congregation are also invited to suggest charities that they would like to promote.
St Mark's, Newnham 