A Message from Bishop Gray

Dear Friends,

During the months of July and August I embarked on an extraordinary journey that opened to me a broader and deeper vision of our church than I had heretofore seen.

I began this journey in Uganda as the guest of the Bishop Masereka Christian Foundation. Accompanied by the Rev. William Ndishabandi of All Saints’, Jackson and Jackson State University, I traveled through Uganda absorbing her sights and sounds and witnessing the faith of a people tested by war, disease, and great poverty. Their love of Jesus Christ and their zeal for mission overwhelmed me. I was enormously impressed with the work of the Bishop Masereka Christian Foundation, the visionary work of the the Rt. Rev. Zebedee Masereka. This multifaceted ministry to the victims of the HIV/AIDS pandemic in their country – a medical clinic, educational and community resourcing and caring for the needs of an ever growing community of HIV/AIDS orphans – was a ministry to which I felt called to respond. Bishop Masereka visited us last fall to speak about his work. We will continue to build on that relationship.

After eight days in Uganda I traveled to England for the Lambeth Conference, the gathering of bishops every ten years from around the Anglican Communion. I have used a variety of settings and forms to report on the “business” of Lambeth. I will continue to be available to discuss, in as much detail as necessary, the work of Lambeth.

But at a very personal level it was an occasion of deep spiritual significance for me as I listened to the stories of people seeking to be faithful to the Lord of their lives in profoundly different cultural contexts. One of those contexts was the war torn region of southern Sudan. My personal interest in the Sudan flows from our relationship with the young Sudanese refugees who were resettled in Mississippi in 2000-2001. At Lambeth I continued a conversation with the Archbishop of the Sudan, the Most Rev. Daniel Deng Bul Yak, began a few months earlier about deepening the relationship between Mississippi and the Episcopal Church of the Sudan. Together we agree that a partnership between the Diocese of Mississippi and a newly emerging diocese in Sudan, Twic East, would be the gateway into that relationship.

Specific initiatives in these relationships as well as renewed commitments to our Companion Diocese of Panama and medical missions to the Diocese of Honduras will be, for me, the lasting legacy of Lambeth 2008. We are bound together in so many ways across the Anglican Communion. I have only begun to discover the depth of our common life.

I ask your prayers as we recommit ourselves to a broader vision of what it means to be One Church in Mission – Inviting, Transforming and Reconciling.

Faithfully,