Commontide
Anglican Commemoration
Martyrs
May 16 · d. 2011
also known as Martyrs of the Sudan
On 16 May 1983, a small number of Episcopal and Roman Catholic leaders in southern Sudan, clergy and laity together, declared publicly that they would not abandon God as they knew him. The war that followed ran two decades and cost the southern church more than can be counted. The martyrs of that war are almost entirely unnamed, and the church commemorates them as one body.
The Martyrs of the Sudan are remembered together, and almost none of them are remembered by name.
That is the first thing to know about them, and it is not a gap in the story; it is the story. In the spring of 1983 the government in Khartoum was pressing an Islamising programme on a country whose southern half was largely Christian, and everyone in the south could see what was coming. On 16 May a small number of Episcopal and Roman Catholic leaders, bishops and clergy and chiefs and ordinary lay people, said out loud what would cost them everything: they would not abandon God as they knew him. No transcript of that day survives. No one wrote down who spoke, or where they stood, or what the room looked like. All that came down to us is the sentence itself, carried in the church's memory and printed a generation later in the Episcopal Church's own book of commemorations.
What followed was a war of twenty-two years, ending only with the peace agreement of January 2005. The church's own texts put the dead at possibly over two million, most of them Christians; another official text says two and a half million. Up to four million southern Christians were driven from their homes and another million out of the country altogether. Twenty-two of the church's twenty-four dioceses moved their work into exile in Uganda and Kenya, and most of the clergy who lived went on serving without pay.
There were faces in that multitude, and the record has kept a few. Ezra Lawiri, a priest of that era who was translating the Bible into the Moru language, was asked in 1988 to leave Mundri for the safety of Juba with the rest of the college staff. He would not go, and he turned down a separate offer of exile in Kenya where he could have finished his work in peace. "Death is everywhere," he said. "Even if I go to Juba I will still die when my time comes." He was killed by artillery fire on Good Friday, 1991, on a forced march of civilians out of that same town; his daughter Cecilia died the next day. Lawiri is named in no liturgical text for this feast, and he stands here for the era rather than for the commemoration. Andrew Wheeler, an English mission partner who knew him across many years, remembered that whenever Lawiri told the long, painful story of the Sudanese church, he would break in with a self-deprecating smile: "But God is not defeated!"
The children of that war left something too, and theirs is the one voice the feast itself holds. Sudanese children in exile in Ethiopia made a hymn, and the Episcopal Church printed it inside the commemoration:
Look upon us, O Creator who has made us. God of all peoples, we are yearning for our land. Hear the prayer of our souls in the wilderness. Hear the prayer of our bones in the wilderness. Hear our prayer as we call out to you.
The church that made that declaration did not end. It went into the camps and kept preaching, and when the war stopped and South Sudan became its own country in 2011, it was still there. The prayer appointed for this day borrows a line the church has repeated since Tertullian, that the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church; the Sudanese church has been saying something smaller and steadier since, in Ezra Lawiri's own words, that God is not defeated.
You will not find these martyrs' names, and that is worth sitting with, because you may one day be asked to be faithful in a place where no one is keeping the list. The declaration of 16 May 1983 survives as a single sentence with no record of who said it; the church that made it lost two decades and more people than anyone can count, and then went on preaching in refugee camps. What the record keeps is not the identity of the faithful but the fact of the faithfulness. Ezra Lawiri, offered safety and a quiet place to finish his life's work, stayed where he was and said that death was everywhere anyway. Where in your own life are you waiting to be named before you are willing to be counted?
The historical record for this commemoration is unusual, and its shape should be stated before anything else: the event it rests on has no primary documentation. Every account of the 16 May 1983 declaration is a later retrospective, and the several published retellings use near-identical wording, which points to one common ancestor rather than to independent witnesses. No transcript, no named speaker, no venue, no meeting record, and no 1983 press account has been located. The best available text is the Episcopal Church's own A Great Cloud of Witnesses (2016), which reports that on that date "a small number of Episcopal and Roman Catholic clerical and lay leaders declared they 'would not abandon God as they knew him.'" The propers circulated by the American Friends of the Episcopal Church of the Sudans (revised April 2016) give substantially the same sentence and add chiefs, that is, civil leaders, to the company. Neither text cites a source. Treat the declaration's formula as a received summary rather than a documented quotation.
The surrounding history is far better attested. Anglican work in Sudan began in 1899 at Omdurman under the Gordon Memorial Sudan Mission, named for General Gordon, killed at Khartoum in 1885. Until 1974 the Sudanese diocese sat under the Anglican Archbishopric of Jerusalem and the Middle East. The first civil war ran from 1955 (the AFRECS propers say 1957) to the Addis Ababa Agreement of 1972. On 11 October 1976 the Episcopal Church of the Sudan was constituted a province in its own right with four dioceses, and Elinana J. Ngalamu was enthroned its first archbishop by Donald Coggan, Archbishop of Canterbury.
One point of chronology is commonly reported backwards and should be corrected. The devotional retellings, and the AFRECS propers, present Nimeiry's imposition of Sharia as coming first and the declaration as a response to it. The September Laws are September 1983; the declaration is May, four months earlier, in the same month as the Bor garrison mutiny that became the Sudan People's Liberation Army under John Garang de Mabior. The declaration met an Islamising programme underway and anticipated, not a law already on the books.
The casualty figures are contested even between the feast's own two official texts, and neither rests on a demographic study: A Great Cloud of Witnesses says "possibly over two million persons, most of them Christians," the AFRECS propers "2.5 million were killed, mostly Christian." Both are war-mortality estimates covering combat, war-induced famine, and disease across two decades, not counts of people individually put to the choice of recanting. Nothing here is evidence against the martyrdom; it is a reason to state the number as a range with its hedge and to keep the distinction visible. The same caution applies to the widely repeated claim that southern Sudan went from roughly five percent Christian to eighty-five or ninety percent across this period. The growth is real and independently documented; the reading of it as caused by the martyrs' blood is the church's confessional interpretation, and displacement into mission-run camps and the hardening of religious identity under a hostile state sit alongside it.
There is no tomb here, no relic, no shrine, and no pilgrimage. What formed instead was an observance of collective testimony, carried first inside the Sudanese and South Sudanese church and then kept as a dated commemoration by Anglican churches in North America, principally in parishes with companion relationships to Sudanese and South Sudanese dioceses. The appointed readings are Wisdom of Solomon 3:1-9, Psalm 116:10-17, Hebrews 10:32-39, and Matthew 24:9-14. Three collects circulate for the day rather than one: the proper from A Great Cloud of Witnesses, which asks that we too "be steadfast in our faith in Jesus Christ"; the 1979 Prayer Book's general Common of a Martyr, which circulates because that same entry's rubric authorises it for this day; and a third in the AFRECS propers, opening "O God, you will not be defeated." The AFRECS document is also the only official text for this feast that quotes Sudanese church leaders in their own voice, Bishop Paride Taban and Bishop Nathaniel Garang together: "we live only on the mercy of God...whether we live or die we are the Lord's...we have had nothing else but the grace of God and his guidance." One caution for readers: South Sudan's national Martyrs' Day falls on 30 July and is a civil holiday honouring John Garang and the liberation dead. It is not this feast.
A Great Cloud of Witnesses: A Calendar of Saints (Church Publishing, 2016), the May 16 entry at pp. 234-236, is the source for the declaration formula, the casualty and displacement figures, the hymn of the Sudanese children in exile, both rites of the proper collect, and the rubric authorising the Common of a Martyr for this day: https://www.episcopalchurch.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/lm_great_cloud_of_witnesses.pdf. The propers issued by the American Friends of the Episcopal Church of the Sudans (Jerry Drino, revised April 2016) supply the third collect, the higher casualty figure, the mention of chiefs among the declarers, and the Taban and Garang saying, which the document prints without a citation: https://www.afrecs.org/Propers_for_Martyrs_of_the_Sudan-South_Sudan.pdf. The Anglican Church in North America's Book of Common Prayer 2019 kalendar carries the optional commemoration and its "2011": https://bcp2019.anglicanchurch.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/tle328kalendar.pdf. For the commemoration's shifting canonical footing, compare Lesser Feasts and Fasts 2018 (https://extranet.generalconvention.org/staff/files/download/21034) with the 2022 edition (https://www.episcopalcommonprayer.org/uploads/1/2/9/8/129843103/lesser_feasts_and_fasts_2022_final.pdf). Ezra Lawiri's "Death is everywhere" is from the Dictionary of African Christian Biography entry by Oliver Meru Duku (2009), which draws on Scopas Magyar's Canon Ezra: My Best Friend in Sudan (1994): https://dacb.org/stories/south-sudan/lawiri-ezra/. Andrew C. Wheeler's report of Lawiri's refrain opens "'But God is not defeated!': Learning from the Sudanese Church," Anvil 19.1 (2002), p. 19: https://biblicalstudies.org.uk/pdf/anvil/19-1_019.pdf. Tertullian's "the blood of Christians is seed" stands in the penultimate paragraph of chapter L of the Apology, in S. Thelwall's translation for the Ante-Nicene Fathers (1885): https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Ante-Nicene_Fathers/Volume_III/Apologetic/Apology/Chapter_L. The institutional timeline draws on the Dictionary of African Christian Biography's entries for Elinana Ngalamu and Llewellyn Gwynne (https://dacb.org/stories/sudan/ngalamu-elinana/) and on the Wikipedia article "Province of the Episcopal Church of Sudan."
The commemoration's own status is likewise unsettled, and a reader comparing it to the Martyrs of Uganda will find something different. The documented trail runs: adoption into the provisional volume Holy Women, Holy Men (2010, pp. 370-71), attested only by the AFRECS propers' own note that it was "Adopted by General Convention, 2009"; then A Great Cloud of Witnesses (2016); then Lesser Feasts and Fasts 2018, where it appears only in the appendix of supplemental and local commemorations, with no biographical entry and no collect (which is not an anomaly: nothing in that appendix has one); then Lesser Feasts and Fasts 2022, from which it is absent entirely. A search of the Acts of Convention did not turn up a 2009 resolution placing it on the calendar, and AFRECS was still lobbying for formal inclusion in June 2022. The Anglican Church in North America's 2019 Book of Common Prayer kalendar carries it as an optional commemoration reading "The Martyrs of the Sudan, 2011." That 2011 is not a death year. It is the kalendar's ordinary comma-plus-year convention, and it points at South Sudan's independence on 9 July 2011, the year A Great Cloud of Witnesses itself uses to say why the martyrdom is ongoing rather than concluded in 2005. Print no single death year for this day.
The name has widened with the political geography: "The Martyrs of the Sudan" in the older form, now generally "The Martyrs of Sudan and South Sudan." Nothing suggests the commemoration was ever split; the 2011 independence, the internal northern province of 2013, and the full provincial separation of 2017 are divisions in church governance, not in the calendar. No source states a reason for the joint naming.
Almighty God, you gave your servants the Martyrs of the Sudan boldness to confess the Name of our Savior Jesus Christ before the rulers of this world, and courage to die for this faith: Grant that we may always be ready to give a reason for the hope that is in us, and to suffer gladly for the sake of our Lord Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Readings for a Martyr
Jeremiah 15:15–21Psalm 34Revelation 7:9–17Luke 12:4–12