letter from Ethiopia
Historically, the Anglican presence in Ethiopia has been tiny, with over half the country’s 110million people owing allegiance to the ancient Ethiopian Orthodox Church, while a significant but growing Protestant minority belong overwhelmingly to Pentecostal and Evangelical churches.
But there is a different story in Gambella, a town and region in the westernmost part of Ethiopia bordering South Sudan which I was privileged to visit recently. Here, there are some 150,000 Anglicans, predominantly ethnically Sudanese Ethiopians whose numbers have been swollen in recent years by South Sudanese refugees. The strength of this church has been recognised by the formation of the Diocese of Gambella as one of the four constituent dioceses of the new Anglican Province of Alexandria launched in October 2021.
The great need of this new diocese is for the training of catechists (lay ministers) to keep pace with rapid growth, and a three-year programme has just begun based at St Frumentius Theological College in Gambella to train 120 catechists.
