Maybe—but rhetoric and reality may differ.

Joseph Kassab, general secretary of the Presbyterian Synod of Syria and Lebanon, told Christianity Today that some Christian leaders had defended the Assad regime as a bulwark of stability against jihadist rebels backed by regional governments.

Given rebel leader Golani’s past, Christians have reason for concern. Golani was affiliated with al-Qaeda in 2003 and has a $10 million bounty on his head as a US and United Nations designated terrorist. Though in 2013 he refused to integrate his militia into the caliphate-seeking Islamic State (ISIS), he said Syria must be ruled according to sharia law.

In 2016, Golani cut ties with al-Qaeda and the following year rebranded his group as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, which in Arabic translates as “the organization for the liberation of Syria.” While Russia and Iran helped Assad stay in power and the US fought ISIS from its bases in the Kurdish northeast, affiliated rebel groups controlled only Idlib near the Syrian border with Turkey.

Golani violently consolidated power and then traded his military persona for a business suit. He told an American journalist in 2021 that his movement, if successful, posed no threat to the West. Golani has offered assurances to Christians in Syria, and yesterday churches were open. Many had decreased attendance.

Kassab said Syrian Christians focused on being productive citizens and promoting education, seeking to influence their nation slowly through ethical living and the demonstration of biblical values. Some joined the regime, he said, and benefited like all the others who supported it. “It is not the best way to live,” Kassab said, “but it was the best available.”

In Damascus, rebel leader Golani’s first public act was to enter the courtyard of the eighth-century Umayyad Mosque and declare his triumph a “victory for the Islamic nation.” In one neighborhood of winding alleys, The New York Times described Bab Sharqi as home to many Assad-supporting Christians, including how “Victor Dawli, 59, stood in his apartment’s entryway, a cigarette in hand. As a truck carrying Syrian rebels passed, Mr. Dawli waved. One fighter, clutching his rifle and hunched over in the bed of the truck, nodded in response.”  

Times reporters Christina Goldbaum and Hwaida Saad noted “a sense of unease in the neighborhood, as people here walked a tightrope. Some have kept their heads down and stayed inside their homes. Others like Mr. Dawli say they have secretly supported the rebels from the start of their offensive. … When one neighbor passed by, Mr. Dawli shouted to him: ‘Good morning, congratulations!’ The man gave him a blank stare, then hurried down a nearby alleyway.”

Harout Selimian, president of the Armenian Protestant Churches in Syria, is uneasy. He told Christianity Today, “Any reduction in violence is a welcome step forward, but there is a lack of clarity over the opposition agenda.”

Yes, Syria’s 14-year-old civil war, which killed half a million people and displaced half of Syria’s population of 23 million, seems over. But who will emerge triumphant?

Presbyterian leader Kassab fears a Libya scenario, in which rival rebel factions fail in efforts to “share the cake” of their success and reignite an internal conflict. In 2011, Libya, like Syria, saw peaceful protests morph into a military struggle. But while Assad survived, Libyans killed Muammar Gaddafi and then turned on each other in civil war. Libya has been geographically divided in half ever since, with regional powers like Turkey and Egypt backing their favored parties.

The post After Assad: Jihad or Liberty? appeared first on Christianity Today.

Back on July 31, already fearing an escalation of violence, the embassy was discouraging would-be tourists with its highest of four alert levels: Do Not Travel. For those inside Lebanon, it urged: The best time to leave a country is before a crisis, if at all possible. Major airlines had already canceled flights to and from Beirut, leaving only the national carrier to facilitate evacuation—and its outbound flights were booked weeks in advance.

Ever since Hezbollah—a Shiite Muslim militia designated by the US as a terrorist entity—launched missiles across the border in support of Hamas’s attack last October, foreigners have lived under a cloud of uncertainty that Israel might eventually bomb the airport, as it did in the month-long war in 2006 that left many expats stranded. Americans would have little hope of leaving through Syria, and Lebanon has no official relationship with Israel to permit crossing the southern border.

And then Hezbollah pagers exploded throughout the country.

With dozens dead and thousands injured, the next day, September 18, the embassy warned of a reduction in routine care at hospitals. On September 21, it told citizens the Lebanese government could not ensure their safety, mentioning the possibility of increased crime, sectarian violence, or targeted kidnapping.

And on September 28, one day after a massive Israeli airstrike killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, the embassy sent its nonessential personnel home and opened registration for US citizens to request assistance in leaving.

Several US citizens paid thousands of dollars to place their families on private yachts to nearby Cyprus. Others frantically called Middle East Airlines (MEA) to secure embassy-reserved seats to anywhere else. And among the missionary community, the chatter was incessant: Are you leaving? What are your contingency plans? Will your organization make you go?

Some decided to stay.

CT interviewed four Christian foreigners to learn how they made the decision to remain in times of war.

Each had already endured the constant hum of Israeli drones hovering over their neighborhoods. They learned to distinguish between the noise of warplanes deliberately breaking the sound barrier and the similarly ear-popping sound of a missile strike bringing down a Beirut apartment complex. And some have wondered if they might become a target of random Shiite anger or if the Islamist kidnappings of foreigners during Lebanon’s civil war decades earlier could be repeated.

The sources represent different categories of Christian workers.

A Swiss family living in the foothills outside Beirut believes that angels closed their ears of their children at night, allowing for consistent sleep even when explosions—slightly muffled by the distance—woke the parents consistently at 3 a.m. An Egyptian with Canadian citizenship said the blasts were so loud he sometimes thought they had happened just across the street—only to look out the window and see smoke plumes rising across the valley two miles away, not far from his church outside Beirut.

An American married to a Lebanese woman said that while the bombings did not threaten him directly, he was deeply troubled as each missile resulted in more deaths and displaced families. And a single American woman raised in urban poverty amid gang warfare stated casually, “I grew up rough, but gunshots and bombs are not the same thing.”

A Shared Resilience

This woman, a Black millennial from Ohio, has been granted anonymity because her organization works in other Middle East nations where witnessing to Muslims is illegal. But she was eager to tell her story as an “anomaly” in the missions world.

Her agency, she said, prefers to stay put during a crisis—and pray.

She had been in Lebanon for only six months when the war in Gaza began. Within her circle of 30 foreign Christian friends, only she and her teammates, a couple with two young children, did not evacuate. Most returned to Lebanon, as the war did not initially expand beyond the southern border, and perhaps the time away helped to induce greater calm. Amid the current escalation, several still remain.

Her work is to promote a “tent of praise” movement in collaboration with local churches, emphasizing prayer and worship. But as the violence increased, she bought just-in-case plane tickets for October 15 and remained in daily communication with her organizational leaders in the US. A few days before that date, as MEA shuttled thousands to safety, her American mentors boarded a nearly empty plane to Lebanon to check in on her. The visit strengthened her commitment, which solidified further as she joined 200 Lebanese in worship during a 50-hour vigil. Some spoke in tongues; others, exhausted from dancing, banner waving, and intercessory prayer fell asleep in the pews. 

The theme, planned months in advance, was “Rise up, Esther.” And it was “for such a time as this,” she realized, that she was in Lebanon, to stand with the people and petition the King for an end to the war. Inspired by their resilience, she identified with the struggles of the Lebanese—a people exploited by regional powers and valued only for their role in advancing a political agenda. The situation resonated with her Black experience, as she recalled that the history of transatlantic slavery gave her people a similar ability to endure difficult circumstances and yet find hope.

But she stated that many get this war wrong.

“Gen Z is almost completely pro-Palestinian,” she said. “And in Lebanon, I’ve never seen such hatred toward Israel that people will not even speak its name.”

As a child of 9/11, she is amazed at how quickly US attitudes have flipped: One generation was overtly anti-Muslim, the next widely receptive to Palestinian propaganda. Few of her friends in America know that Israel is saving civilian lives by issuing evacuation orders for most of the buildings it then bombs. And fewer, she contended, understand the eschatological place of the Jews in God’s end-times agenda.

Israel is not a godly nation, she said, and God will judge it for its excessive violence in Gaza and Lebanon. But the love of Gentile Christians for Jews must provoke them to jealousy, per Romans 11, for their coming salvation and the peace of Israel.

“Lebanon is entering a new season,” she said. “But my view is not common among believers here.”

Fix What Is Broken

More in line with Lebanese sentiment, another American also remains.

“Israeli aggression threatens our well-being,” said Brent Hamoud, programs officer at Tahaddi, a community-based organization engaged in poverty alleviation. “They will not force us to leave, and staying is a small act of resistance.”

He never even looked up flight schedules.

Tahaddi is located on the edge of Dahieh, the Shiite-majority southern suburb of Beirut where Hezbollah held political and social control. The Israeli bombing campaign targeting militant leaders and infrastructure disrupted the charity’s operations, though its network continues to serve the neighborhood and those displaced from it with food and medical aid.

But Hamoud’s commitment to Lebanon runs much deeper than solidarity and service. His grandparents were missionaries at the evangelical Dar El Awlad orphanage for over three decades, and his father was raised in its care. Hamoud returned in 2007 to follow in their legacy, serving at-risk children for the next 12 years. And Ruth, his Lebanese wife, whom he married in 2012, made it known early in their friendship that her future was in Lebanon.

By 2019, Hamoud felt uncomfortable with the traditional missions model and broke ties with his sending agency. Taking on a local salary was not difficult, as the value of the Lebanese lira enabled a middle-class lifestyle not very different from that in America.

But only a few months later, the failed Lebanese popular revolution against a corrupt political class was followed by the near total depreciation of the currency. Ruth effectively lost her life savings as the lira crashed and banks prohibited the withdrawal of funds. After that, they navigated COVID-19, the 2020 Beirut blast at the nation’s main harbor, and shortages of medicine, fuel, and electricity.

When the bombs dropped across Lebanon, the couple asked themselves, What is one more crisis to endure?

Friends and family back home in Minnesota worried about them, and Hamoud and Ruth took these concerns to heart. But their core needs were provided for, and their children, ages 7 and 9, were emotionally stable. Had the children been experiencing severe trauma, that would have forced them to consider leaving more seriously.

“Our kids know that explosions happen here while there is ice cream in every freezer in America,” Hamoud said. “But we discuss the situation and why this is home, and where God wants us to be.”

Ruth is additionally tied to another 250 children as the early childhood education coordinator for Beirut Baptist School, overseeing dozens of teachers and staff. Their departure from Lebanon would impact many beyond themselves.

Yet the impact of the war is substantial. Hamoud applied the words of Jesus to militant groups anywhere in the Middle East—those who live by the sword die by the sword (Matt. 26:52)—and noted the sabers and AK-47s on their various emblems. He has little sympathy for their plight.

A ceasefire in Gaza, he believes, would have kept the war out of Lebanon—and foreigners here. Prior to the war, neither Hezbollah nor other local actors made their evacuation necessary.

“Stop the fighting,” Hamoud said. “It will open up pathways to fix what is broken—which characterizes so much in the region.”

This Is Our Home

Amid such brokenness, Emad Botros said, is the freedom of Lebanon.

As an Egyptian, Botros values the nation’s open spirit and religious liberty, in comparison to the land of his birth. Much of it rests on what he called the “Christian culture” anchored by historic Christian presence. Botros fears it will be lost if the chaos of war further stimulates Christian emigration; instead, he will stay to strengthen the church.

But as a Canadian citizen, his first impulse was to evacuate.

“Better to leave for six months and come back than to risk the trauma that might prevent you from ever returning,” said Botros, a global staff worker with Canadian Baptist Ministries. “God wants us to serve here but not to be a martyr.”

Botros first came to Lebanon in 2000 as a student at Arab Baptist Theological Seminary (ABTS), where he met Almess, his Iraqi wife. They married in 2004 and spent two years together in Egypt. Over the next decade, they emigrated to Canada when Almess was granted refugee status, they had two children, and they ministered among the local Arab population.

In 2014, Botros returned to ABTS and today is an assistant professor of Old Testament. But in 2020, the seminary transitioned primarily to online education; he could do his job remotely. Botros thought of Almess, who had lived through the Iran-Iraq war and US invasions, and feared another conflict experience might incapacitate her. His teenage sons might suffer long-term trauma. The family spent a few weeks this summer in Egypt just to rest from the stress and sound barrier reverberations.

His older son hated being away. The family returned to Lebanon before the full outbreak of violence, but he yearned to be back with his friends. It would be shameful to leave, the 19-year-old told his father, reflecting a Middle Eastern mentality. We have to show solidarity, said the younger son, a social justice–oriented 17-year-old. Over the past ten years, each had merged their various identities ever more closely with Lebanon.

His wife’s voice was decisive.

“Almess told me Lebanon is our home,” said Botros. “I realized she was right. It was no longer just a mission field—friends were now family, and you don’t leave your family in times of trouble.”

ABTS has since welcomed over 150 displaced individuals onsite, a mix of Christians and Muslims known to its community. Botros’s apartment is a five-minute walk from campus, and he regularly wanders through its gardens, interacting with and encouraging those who have lost their homes.

Many of these are from Resurrection Church of Beirut, where he serves on the pastoral staff. Its building is near the line dividing the Christian and Shiite sections of Hadat, separating Dahieh from the presidential palace. Although the church is undamaged, bombing in the Muslim area has been intense.

“The war is terrible,” Botros said. “I have little mental capacity to work.”

His dissertation on Jonah has fallen by the wayside. But three weeks ago, Botros preached on the wayward prophet, whose preferred solution to the evil of Nineveh was its destruction. God, however, wanted its repentance. Similarly, rival parties in the Middle East speak of wiping each other out. A more biblical perspective, he said, seeks justice with mercy and forgiveness of sins.

“Hamas and Hezbollah militants are still human beings, even though we condemn them—and Israeli actions as well,” Botros said. “Continued destruction will only create a new generation of enemies.”

The Country We Love

Daniel Suter, a missionary from Switzerland, encounters both sides. His Lebanese friends blame Israel for every bad thing that happens; his friends in the West reflexively support everything Israel does. But with tears in his eyes, he said that 2,350 Lebanese had died since the war began, some of whom were relatives of his close friends.

“It breaks my heart,” Suter said. “This is the country we love. It hurts.”

The Youth With A Mission (YWAM) building he served in—until the roads became too dangerous for the 30-minute drive from his home—displays a sign proclaiming Jesus in English and Arabic, with a picture of a cross and a heart in between. It is located in Damour, a Christian village on the coastal highway from Beirut to Sidon, yet every route he could use to get there has been bombed.

Damour was the site of an infamous massacre by Palestinians during the Lebanese civil war. The next village over is still home to some Palestinian refugees, and few Christians will ever set foot there, Suter said. Syrian migrants work the banana groves that stretch from the road to the seashore, resented for receiving aid from international agencies that is less forthcoming for disadvantaged citizens.

YWAM’s community center somehow brings everyone together.

When the war in Gaza began, the YWAM Lebanese leader asked Suter, Is this where God called you? If so, stay. Another foreign missionary left abruptly, citing the mental health of his children. Don’t Lebanese have kids, too? one staffer retorted. The challenging conversations strengthened Suter’s commitment, and he said his local friends were “chill.” They had lived through war before.

His wife Bettina, however, was tightly integrated in the Christian expat community and its constant conversations about whether to stay or leave. They had moved to Lebanon in 2015 and had lived through its many crises with their three young children already. But war was different—I didn’t come to Lebanon to die, she said—and the worry was paralyzing her.

Prayers for guidance brought no clear word from God for either of them, Suter said. So the couple agreed to separate temporarily, as Bettina and the children returned to Switzerland. As the situation stabilized with war concentrated in the south, they came back three weeks later.

Ministry continued normally, and the family spent this past summer in Switzerland for ordinary church visits and vacation. But while they were away, Israel assassinated two adversaries: a top-level Hezbollah militant in Beirut on July 30 and the leader of Hamas as he visited Iran the next day.

Their sending church urged the family to delay their return by a month.

It was a month well spent. Bettina had an encounter with God, Suter said, who asked if she was willing to surrender everything. The experience was gut-wrenching but profound—and it made her ready to return.

Suter also realized he had been rash. He had sent his family away with naive optimism that the airport would not be bombed. Looking back, he said he would not have managed well a separation of months or longer. Contingency planning was necessary, and he prayerfully engaged in it in consultation with Swiss leaders.

The pager attack, one week before their return, only strengthened their resolve. And as they waited at the airport gate on September 23, they received reports that the widespread Israeli bombing had begun. Hundreds of thousands of Lebanese were displaced, now also from Tyre, the Bekaa Valley, and the southern suburbs of Beirut. The war was no longer only in the south.

The family moved into guest housing at the Damour center and joined in caring for the 300 people taking shelter at the village school. Their kids worked as hard as the parents, Suter said, learning the impact of war while still sleeping soundly at night. But when school started, they received the local YWAM office’s blessing to return home and shift their service to another center in Burj Hammoud, a Christian neighborhood in the capital city with many Syrian refugees and displaced Shiites.

And in consultation with their church, they adjusted their evacuation trigger. When Israel began its ground invasion of Lebanon on October 1, local analysis suggested they would remain safe in their home in the foothills; however, if Israeli forces headed north toward Beirut, then the Suters would evacuate to Switzerland.

“Now, I am assessing risk; before, I was ignoring it,” said Suter. “You can cowardly leave or cowardly stay. I want to be here for the right reasons, not the thrill of adventure or fear of boredom back home.”

He hopes his story will encourage prayer for Lebanon, perhaps inspiring others to come and serve. Meanwhile, the missionary from Ohio anticipates the arrival of three new teammates who are already preparing to join her. Hamoud wants Gaza’s Palestinians to have their basic right to life restored. Botros wants concerned Christians, instead of just sending funds for emergency aid, to address the root cause of displacement and lobby their governments to end the war.

None saw themselves as heroes, nor did they blame anyone for leaving.

“The old missions paradigm was to move overseas and die there—I loved that as a youth, and it inspired me to serve,” said Suter. “But staying does not automatically bring God glory. What matters most is faithfulness to God’s leading. There can be phases in our calling.”

The post Meet the Evangelical Expats Staying in Lebanon appeared first on Christianity Today.

Tradition indicates that Armenia became the world’s first Christian nation in AD 301. The church design reflects features resembling similar building styles in ancient eastern Mediterranean civilizations, previously unknown in the Caucasus region. The ruins were found in Artaxata, once the capital of the Kingdom of Armenia, which means “the joy of truth” in the original Indo-Iranian language.

But Christina Maranci, an Armenian professor of art and architecture at Harvard University, said the joy of these discoveries is outweighed by alarm at the destruction of Armenian heritage sites in the neighboring country of Azerbaijan. The Muslim-majority nation initiated fighting that displaced its Armenian residents from a disputed region and is now accused of systematically removing the remaining evidence of their ethnic historical presence.

“This is their long-term plan,” she said. “The intent is to erase evidence of our existence, which they do not admit anyway.”

In a 44-day war with Armenia in 2020, Muslim-majority Azerbaijan reclaimed most of its internationally recognized territory in Nagorno-Karabakh, a mountainous enclave then populated by ethnic Armenians who had proclaimed themselves a breakaway republic they called Artsakh.

And last month marked the one-year anniversary of a lightning Azerbaijani offensive to capture the remaining pockets of land, which resulted in their near depopulation as 100,000 refugees fled to Armenia. Furthermore, beyond the geopolitical dispute and humanitarian crisis, critics see new evidence that Azerbaijan continues to demolish signs of the region’s historical Armenian presence.

recommended

Armenia Struggles to Aid 100,000 Artsakh Refugees After War

Jayson Casper

Maranci is one of several academics employing scientific and technological advances to demonstrate claims of antiquity. Her expertise includes the study of spolia, remnants of ancient structures repurposed in modern construction.

As an example, Manci cited two monasteries from the 14th and 15th century that were destroyed—twice. In the 1950s, Soviet authorities leveled the structures and haphazardly incorporated the medieval stones into the building materials for two public schools. Children could daydream, Maranci said, while looking at randomly placed images of crosses, saints, and angels.

Until Azerbaijan bulldozed the schools to make way for new roads.

Though the spolia in the schools were clearly visible, Azerbaijani officials may have not bothered to notice them, as they removed outdated structures in favor of modern housing developments. Intentional or not, Maranci said the disregard for Armenia’s religious heritage fits into a wider pattern of cultural erasure.

Satellite Imagery Documents Erasure of Armenian Christian Heritage

Full Screen

1 of 2

©️CHW 2024. Used by permission.

Full Screen

2 of 2

©️CHW 2024. Used by permission.

Log in or subscribe to view the slideshow.

Her work is referenced by Caucasus Heritage Watch (CHW), a Cornell and Purdue University initiative founded in 2020 that documents both Armenian and Azerbaijani historical sites. After the fall of the Soviet Union, a six-year war between the two nations resulted in Armenian control of Nagorno-Karabakh and its surrounding territory. Many Azerbaijani villages were looted and leveled.

Out of 63 mosques, CHW found that Armenians had destroyed 8 and inflicted major damage on another 31.

The accusation of Azerbaijani erasure, however, has not been limited to Nagorno-Karabakh. In a report released earlier this month, CHW used satellite imagery to confirm the destruction of 108 monasteries, churches, and cemeteries—98 percent of the sites the organization had located—in the noncontiguous Azerbaijani territory of Nakhchivan, which borders Turkey and Armenia.

CHW increased its geolocation of cultural heritage during Azerbaijan’s 2023 blockade of Nagorno-Karabakh, and then again following the Armenian exodus. With over 2,000 sites in its database, 436 are actively monitored at the time of writing.

In its first post-displacement report, CHW noted the destruction of the 19th-century St. John the Baptist Church, known locally as “Kanach Zham,” and an 18th-century cemetery. Four other sites were destroyed, with an additional nine newly threatened. This group includes two 13th-century churches, the only historic structures left standing in a village that was leveled to prepare for a new housing development.

“Azerbaijan knows it is being monitored,” Maranci said. “I don’t know what games are being played, but they are destroying centuries of history, faith, and identity. I wish it would stop.”

In 2021, the International Court of Justice warned Azerbaijan not to allow the destruction of cultural heritage. But three months later, the minister of culture announced a plan to remove Armenian inscriptions from churches, labeling them “forgery.” Azerbaijan follows an internationally discredited theory that claims most of these structures belonged originally to an ancient Christian people called Caucasian Albanians.

Satellite Imagery Documents Erasure of Armenian Christian Heritage

Full Screen

1 of 3

©️CHW 2024. Used by permission.

Full Screen

2 of 3

©️CHW 2024. Used by permission.

Full Screen

3 of 3

©️CHW 2024. Used by permission.

Log in or subscribe to view the slideshow.

The evangelical minority in Azerbaijan pays little attention to the claims and counterclaims regarding Armenian heritage sites.

“The issue of cultural heritage is not something we think about,” said one church leader, granted anonymity to speak freely on a sensitive topic. “But the government’s development of this area is legitimate.”

Azerbaijan is rated “not free” in Freedom House’s annual survey of political rights. And for the first time, the US State Department included Azerbaijan in its most recent designation of violators of religious freedom.

The church leader stated that most Azerbaijani evangelicals come from a Muslim background and are not actively persecuted by the state. But their churches tend to be far from Nagorno-Karabakh and prioritize local witness and social acceptance.

recommended

Azerbaijan Evangelicals: Conflict with Armenians Is Not a Religious War

Jayson Casper

This leader said his own church has already engaged in evangelism among the few Azerbaijanis within the reclaimed lands. He found the development work taking place impressive and professional, acknowledging that progress thus far is only a small part of what is planned. Left fallow for decades, the regions bordering Nagorno-Karabakh acted as a buffer zone and were treated by Armenians as a negotiating pawn while they sought local self-rule.

The Azerbaijani government designated the region as a “green energy zone,” and is now facilitating the voluntary return of citizens displaced 30 years ago. Critics have stated the construction contracts are awarded to figures with close ties to the president’s family.

Yet despite his positive assessment of state land development, the evangelical leader said that the destruction of area churches is likely even greater than what groups like CHW are documenting. He said the church buildings should be given instead to “living churches” like his own so that spiritual life can continue therein.

Unless Azerbaijan concludes a peace treaty that would facilitate the return of Armenian refugees, he said. Then these churches, including the downtown cathedral in the capital city of Baku, could be restored to the historic Armenian Orthodox church.

Peace negotiations have been an on-again, off-again process. In hopes of improving the prospects for peace, last December Armenia dropped its bid to host this year’s COP29 global environmental summit and backed Azerbaijan’s successful candidacy, thereby securing the release of 30 prisoners of war. (COP29 will take place in Baku on November 11–22.) In July, Azerbaijan stated that 90 percent of a proposed peace treaty text had been agreed upon. And in August, it dropped its demand for a land corridor through Armenia to connect Nakhchivan with the main part of the country.

Azerbaijan is insisting that Armenia adopt constitutional language forswearing any claim on Nagorno-Karabakh—a domestically polarizing issue. But while Armenia expressed hope that a peace treaty could be finalized before the start of COP29, Azerbaijan countered that the current Armenian proposal was “unrealistic.”

Aren Deyirmenjian, Armenia representative for the evangelical Armenian Missionary Association of America, said he believes his government has made it clear that Armenia has no claim on Artsakh. It has offered paths toward peace, which Azerbaijan has rejected. He wonders what more they can want.

But he acknowledged the source of their popular anti-Armenian sentiment.

“I have heard terrible stories about Armenians doing very similar things to what Azerbaijan is doing now,” said Deyirmenjian. “Somehow, that makes you understand why there is so much hatred in the Azeris’ hearts.”

However difficult, apologizing is the Armenian “biblical duty,” he said. It should then be reciprocated, which may seem highly unlikely. Yet if Armenia is indeed the world’s first Christian nation, its actions must be different from those of the Azerbaijani enemy. Apologies would demonstrate the humility, he said, that is essential for eventual reconciliation.

Until then, evangelical hearts are pained by the cultural destruction.

“There is clear intent to erase our heritage,” Deyirmenjian said. “While the world is busy, Azerbaijan wants to get rid of all evidence that Armenians are native to these lands.”

The post Satellite Imagery Documents Erasure of Armenian Christian Heritage appeared first on Christianity Today.

The path normally takes two hours.

Mustafa, and thousands like him, were frantically fleeing Israeli bombs aimed at Hezbollah, the Shiite militia designated by the US government as a terrorist organization. Until that moment, he and his brother had been agricultural workers in a farm outside the city, living in a spartan two-bedroom apartment provided by his employers.

CT agreed to withhold his family name for security reasons. Mustafa is a Christian originally from Afrin, a Kurdish area in northwest Syria. Asked if he shared his brother’s faith, Hussein said, “Not yet.”

Their home nation does not recognize converts from Islam. And while Lebanon is the only Arab nation to grant freedom of conversion, Tyre is a socially conservative Shiite city under the political sway of Hezbollah.

This was Mustafa’s second displacement. In 2013, he and his brother fled the Syrian civil war. But over the past five years, as poverty rates tripled in Lebanon, the nominal Sunni Muslims found support from a local Christian ministry offering aid.

Eighteen months ago, Mustafa professed faith in Christ.

“I follow Jesus,” he said. “He saved me.”

When Israel began its ground invasion of Lebanon, it issued evacuation orders to both Muslim and Christian villages in the south. But the large majority of the displaced come from Shiite areas suspected of housing weapons depots and underground tunnels—where resident Shiites may or may not align with Hezbollah’s Islamist ideology.

According to a survey conducted in early 2024, while 78 percent of Shiites viewed positively the militia’s role in regional affairs, only 39 percent said they felt closest to Hezbollah among Lebanon’s political parties, compared to 37 percent of Shiites who felt closest to none.

Only 6 percent of Christians had “a lot of trust” in the Shiite militia.

Within these realities, Christians are eager—and cautious—to help. Gospel commitments and national solidarity require hospitality. Sectarian guardedness encourages suspicion. And Israel’s bombing campaign creates fear that welcoming the displaced might make them a target. 

Many are helping anyway.

Mustafa and Hussein found shelter in living quarters offered by an evangelical church in the mixed Muslim-Christian village where they sought refuge. A plastic rug covered half of the cement floor in their private allotment, with thin mattresses pressed up against the walls. Blankets and pillows strewn about were evidence of their children’s fitful night of sleep.

“This is our message: to show love in action as we lead people to Christ,” the church’s pastor said. (CT is granting him anonymity due to the uncertain political situation in Lebanon.) “As they receive, we teach them to give.”

His congregation currently hosts about 100 people, displaced from their homes in the south and in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley. More than half are from neighboring Syria; the rest are primarily Lebanese Shiites. The pastor said 60 percent of the total are believers in Jesus. Others, like Hussein, are their relatives or Muslims already closely connected to churches in their original area.

They all pitched in to prepare 500 tuna sandwiches for local distribution.

Not Just Talk

Hezbollah’s current conflict with Israel began last year on October 8, one day after Hamas invaded from Gaza and killed approximately 1,200 Israelis, taking 250 hostages. The Lebanese militia initiated what it called a “support front” for Hamas, launching missiles that caused 80,000 Israelis to flee from villages near the border.

A similar number of Lebanese also fled from Israel’s retaliation, and for 11 months the two sides had kept their missile exchange relatively contained, aiming to avoid a larger and perhaps regional conflict with Iran, which backs both Hamas and Hezbollah as proxy forces.

That status quo held despite the deaths of 12 Druze children, hit by a Hezbollah missile in the Golan Heights, and Israel’s increased targeting of militia leaders inside Lebanon, Syria, and Iran. US-led negotiations to de-escalate or stop the fighting failed to overcome Hezbollah’s insistence on a simultaneous ceasefire in Gaza. And on September 17, Israel included the return of northern citizens to their homes as an official war goal.

Hours later, an attack of exploding pagers, and, the next day, of walkie-talkies—widely suspected to be conducted by Israel despite its official denial—killed tens and wounded thousands of militia members and affiliated medical personnel in Lebanon and Syria. Six days later, the bombing campaign began. Israeli officials reportedly stated their policy was “de-escalation through escalation.”

Lebanon estimates that the fighting has displaced 1.2 million of its 6 million residents. More than 950 public schools, warehouses, and other facilities now serve as shelters. Ninety percent of the displaced, nearly half of whom are children, are unable to meet their basic needs.

The above-mentioned mountain village pastor secured permission from the Muslim-led municipality to provide aid alongside several other relief groups in coordination with a local ministry run by a church elder.

One local assistance coordinator, a member of the heterodox Druze Muslim community, said “the church is number one” in providing help, while some other groups “say they are helping but are mostly just talk.”

But with classrooms throughout the country filled with families seeking refuge, he laments that his three children have nowhere to go for school.

The last Israeli-Hezbollah conflict, in 2006, sent 900,000 people from their homes. Then, churches and citizens of all sects rallied to help, but today, the resources are far fewer.

Many are reluctant to rent their apartments to displaced Shiites, afraid the refuge seekers cannot—or will not—continue to pay. Hyperinflation and a 98 percent currency devaluation had many Lebanese already scurrying simply to provide for themselves. Political gridlock has kept the nation without a president for two years, while the prime minister works in a caretaker capacity.

Who to Blame?

Many people blame Hezbollah.

“I am against Shiites in politics, but in humanity we can’t refuse to help them,” said the Druze assistance coordinator. “We suffered from Syria; we suffered from Iran. Maybe we are waiting for America to help.”

American and French diplomats attempted to broker a three-week ceasefire in Lebanon, and the Lebanese foreign minister stated that Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah had agreed. Days later, an Israeli airstrike using bunker-buster bombs leveled four residential apartment buildings and killed Nasrallah in his underground quarters. US officials denied knowledge of Nasrallah’s approval.

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly agreed to ceasefire negotiations, then backtracked. Israel stated its war is against Hezbollah, not Lebanon. Netanyahu, addressing the Lebanese, referenced the campaign against Hamas.

“You have an opportunity to save Lebanon before it falls into the abyss of a long war that will lead to destruction and suffering like we see in Gaza,” he stated. “Free your country from Hezbollah so that this war can end.”

Lebanon has long officially supported implementation of UN resolution 1701, adopted to end the 2006 war. It calls for the disarmament of all militias and the withdrawal of Hezbollah beyond the Litani River, about 18 miles north of the Israeli border. But Lebanon’s 2008 effort to dismantle the militia’s private communication network failed after Hezbollah’s armed show of force in Beirut.

The United States is reportedly pushing now for Lebanese politicians to elect a president, who, under an unwritten but 80-year-old agreement, must be a Maronite Christian. Members of the Lebanese parliament, divided equally between Muslims and Christians, elect the head of state.

But Christians are divided into two main political parties and other smaller ones, some of which ally with Hezbollah as a political entity to win support from the Shiite electorate. Prior to the Israeli escalation, leading Shiite politicians repeatedly blocked completion of the voting process for the Christian president, insisting on a candidate sympathetic to Hezbollah’s cause.

But the two primary Christian party heads are understood to nurture presidential ambitions and have failed to work together consistently to represent their community.

“I blame Christian leaders—they work for their own interests, not the interests of our country,” the mountain village pastor said. “If you give the space to others, you can’t blame them when they take it.”

In 2000, Hezbollah won widespread social favor, even from many Christians, by compelling Israel to end its 18-year occupation of southern Lebanon, originally intended to impose a buffer zone against incursions of Palestinian militants. Since then, the militia squandered Sunni Muslim support by entering the civil war in Syria on behalf of Bashar al-Assad, publicly confirmed in 2013. Ordinary Christians joined many in disenchantment when Hezbollah sided with sectarian leaders against the 2019 popular revolution, ushering in the past five years of economic decline.

The militia’s support for Hamas prompted “We Don’t Want War” posters throughout Beirut.

Offering Christian Love

“We are angry. Without any consultation with the government, Hezbollah dragged Lebanon to war,” said Joseph Kassab, president of the Supreme Council of the Evangelical Community in Syria and Lebanon, who said no lasting peace can come through violence. “Many Christians feel that Israel has no restrictions in war, and the militia was wrong to provoke its enemy.”

The winds of change are blowing, however, said Jihad Haddad, pastor of True Vine Church in Zahle, a Christian town in the Bekaa Valley, as he modified a Chinese proverb: Some build walls to resist the wind; windmills would better serve ministry. Since Christians have no political voice in the current conflict, he is directing his efforts to support the displaced.

The relief center at the church already distributed 2,000 food parcels a month before the current escalation, with much grown on its own farmland. To care for the many now sheltering in schools, the church has adapted the parcels so they provide nutrition without requiring cooking. The displaced also face a shortage of blankets, but the church has already emptied its warehouse.

Haddad sees a revival on the horizon, but it is not easy. Lebanon, he said, is stuck between the “hammer” of Israel and the “anvil” of Hezbollah. Missiles have hit one mile from his home and, in the other direction, one mile from the church.

Perceptions of Gaza create poignant fear.

“We are very cautious about welcoming families we don’t know,” Haddad said. “Where Israel finds militants, they bomb them.”

The people of Zahle, he said, carefully check Shiites for affiliation with Hezbollah. True Vine has provided shelter in church apartments for 17 families connected to the congregation, as believers and others seek out what they hope is safety in a Christian location. But Haddad also fears that if the church were to become overwhelmed by housing all those seeking refuge, it could not provide services to everyone.

Church-based help across denominations has made a strong impression.

“If there had been no Christians in Lebanon, we would have been devoured,” stated Mohamed al-Hajj Hassan, a Shiite sheikh known for his opposition to Hezbollah, in a widely shared video clip of his television interview. “They are the ones who protected us and helped those who roam the streets. They are the ones who took in our women and children.”

Christians could have sided with Israel, he said. Shiites must now “reexamine our conscience and think about whether we may have wronged our partners in the country.”

Thimar / Edits by CT

Such appreciation, however, does not make it any easier for evangelicals to open the doors of their institutions, said Nabil Costa, head of the Association of Evangelical Schools in Lebanon. Its 35 schools serve 20,000 students, a mix of Christians and Muslims. Lebanon’s government compelled a Seventh-day Adventist school in a Shiite neighborhood in downtown Beirut to provide shelter for the displaced.

Costa said evangelicals will be willing to open their schools once the government decides all private school facilities are needed to help. This can include discussion of how to cooperate with the education ministry to provide supplementary instruction for public school children forced from their classrooms.

The war has displaced 40 percent of Lebanon’s 1.25 million students. 

Costa also heads Thimar, the local Baptist social service organization overseeing Beirut Baptist School (BBS), which negotiated with the government to transform its campus into a distribution center for the displaced. Located three miles north of the densely populated Dahiyeh area of Beirut, where Nasrallah was killed, the school’s vicinity is not currently threatened by Israeli airstrikes. But amid the ferocious echo of regular bombing, BBS assists seven nearby public and private institutions that host the displaced, providing 700 daily meals. Additional aid is provided to mountain churches.

“We have no right to reject refugees,” Costa said. But he cautioned the government, “Do not take advantage of our Christian love.”

Open Our Hearts

Some, even among the displaced themselves, are offering it freely.

On Monday, September 23, Laya Yamout woke at 6:30 a.m. to the sound of Israeli airstrikes. A registered nurse serving with Horizons International, she also volunteers at Tyre Church, founded by her now-deceased father 14 years ago as a church plant in the Shiite city. She had already curtailed her local movements as precision drone strikes targeted Hezbollah militants riding their motorbikes. Best not to be caught behind one, she said, in case they miss.

But this attack felt different. Four hours later, Yamout was visiting an elderly patient with dementia when another blast hit nearby. She rushed home, packed her bags, and drove 55 miles north to Beirut with her dog by her side. The 50 people in her congregation—nearly all Muslim-background believers in Jesus—eventually found their way to scattered locations, sheltering in schools, churches, or with family members. One returned to Iraq.

Yamout stayed with a friend in a Christian neighborhood of the capital.

“Honestly, it is safer,” she said. “I don’t want to have to flee again.”

The next morning, Yamout rose to volunteer at a clinic connected with a large Kurdish church in Beirut. On Wednesday, she went back to Tyre with two others, hoping to volunteer with the Red Cross.

After taking seven hours to reach Beirut two days earlier, it took little more than an hour to return home amid the “apocalyptic” scenes of stalled-out cars abandoned on the side of the road and a half-dozen smoldering buildings to the right and the left.

Almost immediately, she turned around. Tyre resembled a ghost town, with no water, electricity, or cell phone reception. The streets were emptied of nearly everyone but Hezbollah militants, but she was not intrinsically afraid of the environment.

Her father was jailed twice for his evangelism, and church property repeatedly vandalized. But over the years, Yamout said, Tyre Church won the begrudging respect of its community, and the road it is on became popularly known as “Church Street.”

Yet it was not safe to remain. Two believers slept on the beach in fear that their apartments would be hit. Yamout filled a 15-passenger van to return to the capital with the church families that were unable to find earlier transportation to safety.

On Thursday, she was back serving a clinic in a Christian town 50 miles north of Beirut that has received many people displaced from the Bekaa Valley. Each day on average she treated 150 people.

“Now is the time to open our hearts,” Yamout said. “We may never get this chance again.”

Lebanon has Christian content on the airwaves and churches throughout the country, but many Lebanese villages of all sects self-isolate from other communities. Ordinary southern Shiites who know few Christians now find themselves sheltering in Christian areas. They are deeply traumatized, Yamout said, but they light up with a smile when she tells them she is also from Tyre and takes time to listen to their stories.

At each school, Yamout works with the local church to follow up with any who show openness to the gospel. She advocates caution when extending hospitality since some militia members are likely to slip in. But while most are now fighting the Israeli ground invasion on the border, believers might show love to militants’ wives and children. Alongside them are thousands of Lebanese Shiites, unrelated to Hezbollah, who are meeting Christians for the first time.

Meanwhile, at the mountain village church where Mustafa, Hussein, and other “not yet” Christians shelter, they and their families eat around long plastic tables set up in the church parking lot. Mustafa hopes to return to Tyre but not to his hometown in Syria—it is too dangerous there. Despite the uncertainties of an indefinitely temporary residence, he is at peace in Lebanon.

“We don’t know what to do next,” he said. “Only God does, and we trust him.”

The post Lebanon Evangelicals Serve Shiites Displaced by Hezbollah-Israel War appeared first on Christianity Today.

Sitting on a pine-covered ridge about ten miles west of Jerusalem, the Yad HaShmona community has lived in steady tension over the past year of war with Hamas in Gaza—now extended against Hezbollah in Lebanon. Thirty members of the community have served with the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) on both fronts, severely disrupting their families’ lives.

Yad HaShmona’s sirens did not sound on April 14, when Iran first launched drones and missiles at Israel, because the projectiles did not come within range of the village. But Bar-David, a financial manager who has lived at Yad HaShmona since she was seven years old, took cover in her bomb shelter anyway. Intelligence reports indicated that the unprecedented Iranian attack would arrive at night, so she decided to play it safe. She slept in the shelter attached to her home—an enclave with thick cement walls and a heavy metal door—and all the while, surrendering herself to God’s sovereign care.

“A bomb can ruin my whole house—not only this room,” she said. “I really believe that God is here and will protect me—and if not, it will be his decision, not a mistake.”  

Since October 7, members of the moshav—a community resembling a kibbutz but with more individual autonomy—have had to make similar decisions over and over again: how to act quickly while trusting God.

At 6:30 a.m. that morning, Ayelet Ronen, chair of Yad HaShmona’s management committee, turned on the radio and heard the initial reports of a security breach on the border with Gaza. One of her sons, a member of IDF, wanted to ride her husband’s motorcycle south to help. Ronen and her husband convinced him to stay, but two hours later, he and around two dozen others from the community were officially called up to serve.     

That was a Saturday, the morning after the moshav celebrated the end of Sukkot, the Jewish Festival of Booths. As a leader in the village, Ronen worked to soothe shock and panic in those who remained. While older men patrolled the village’s perimeter, she and the staff of the moshav’s Logos Hotel started to receive calls from Israelis fleeing the towns and kibbutzim near the Gaza Strip.

“By Tuesday we were fully booked,” Ronen recalled. “To all of them, we just said, ‘Come, we’ll figure out the funds later.’”

Yad HaShmona—which in Hebrew means “memory of the eight”—was founded in 1971 by a group of Finnish Christians who wanted to atone for the sins of their country in a tangible way; during World War II, Finland had surrendered to the Nazis eight Jews, seven of whom died in Auschwitz. Miraculously, Israel granted land to this group of Gentiles, who envisioned building up the Jewish state alongside Jewish believers in Jesus, known in Hebrew as Yeshua.

Fifty years later, Yad HaShmona is home to around 60 families. A member of the moshav must be a believer in Jesus, an Israeli citizen for at least 10 years, and willing to serve beyond his or her immediate family for the collective success of the village. 

“Yad HaShmona has played an essential role in the formation of the Messianic community’s identity in Israel,” said Danny Kopp, general secretary of Evangelical Alliance Israel. Not only does the moshav host national gatherings for believers, he elaborated, but also it models communal life while remaining integrated with the broader society. 

Within a week after Hamas’s attack on Israel, Yad HaShmona had welcomed around 200 evacuees—a fraction of the 200,000 Israelis displaced in the conflict’s early months. Since evacuees were housed in small hotel rooms without kitchens, the moshav’s management decided to convert a large hall into a common area for them. Between piles of donated clothes and toys, observant Jews gathered to pray. Sometimes men of the moshav would join them to make a minyan—the quorum of ten Jewish men needed for prayer.

“The religious people didn’t want to talk about [faith],” Ronen says, “but whenever we had an opportunity, we would tell them.”

Evacuees learned about the Christian organizations that helped pay for their room and board before Israeli government aid kicked in, a month and a half after the start of the conflict. And as they were able, moshav residents testified to their belief in Yeshua as Messiah.

Ronen recounted the story of an ultra-Orthodox woman who was driving to stay at Yad HaShmona when she received a phone call.

“Don’t go there,” her caller warned. “Those people are dangerous; they will change your faith.”

She immediately purposed to reverse her course. But Highway 1, a major road between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, had no place for a U-Turn. She ended up at the moshav, and sometime during her stay, expressed her appreciation for the community’s welcoming members.

“You’re nothing like what people told me,” Ronen said the woman concluded.

Historically, Israel’s Messianic community has been maligned, especially by ultra-Orthodox Jews, who are estimated at 10 percent of Israel’s Jewish population. But with conservative estimates of 30,000 believers in Israel worshiping in at least 75 congregations, Ronen thinks secular Israelis increasingly consider Messianic Jews an acceptable stream of society. 

When the first group of evacuees was able to return to their homes after a three-month stay at Yad HaShmona, the moshav received a new group of 25 families, who stayed in temporary housing until the end of August. And since Israel’s offensive in Lebanon began in late September, in response to near-daily rocket exchanges with Hezbollah, more than a dozen families from northern towns have taken refuge at Yad HaShmona.

Mona Pelled, a guide with the Messianic Jewish travel agency Sar-El Tours, has lived at Yad HaShmona since 2017. Last fall, she interacted with her displaced neighbors at a sandwich bar opened in the moshav parking lot by the Christian Broadcasting Network. When anyone asked questions about Jesus, she shared the gospel in ways appropriate to each person’s background.

“We need to respect everyone,” Pelled said, “and if they see Yeshua in you, they will discover the truth.”

Pelled’s friendships extend beyond her Jewish circles as well. For 12 years, she has regularly met with Arab Israeli Christian women for fellowship and prayer. Most of these women are pacifists, she said, and she wishes she could be one too. But her parents and grandparents were Libyan Jews sent to a work camp in Italy at the end of World War II. As a Jew living in a state facing hostile extremist groups, her instinct for self-protection runs high.

Hamas’s massacre was a mini-Holocaust, she said. Though Israel must maintain a strong military because of its many outspoken enemies, she lamented the isolation Jews feel now that international opinion has turned against them.

“People in the world do not understand that this is the only land we have,” Pelled said.

Ronen’s background also informs her position on politics; in 1948, her grandfather came to Palestine during the British Mandate with an Auschwitz ID tattooed on his arm. Within a month, he enlisted with the Haganah—the early Jewish paramilitary organization—to fight for Israel’s independence.

Since October 7, Ronen said the people of Yad HaShmona have spent many hours studying the Bible and considering the meaning, in light of their new reality, of the Messiah’s command to love one’s enemies—a complex discussion, she admits. Distinguishing between armed militants and Palestinian civilians who are suffering the consequences of war, her community agrees that Hamas is not the enemy Jesus meant for them to love. 

Believers are called to love enemies in close proximity to them, Ronen said, individuals who spitefully use and hate them. Jesus commanded love and prayer for these because he knows it is human nature to despise people who wrong them. To these people, she said, Jesus’ followers are called to “turn to them the other cheek” (Matt. 5:39), to do good (Rom. 12:20), and to share God’s transforming message of salvation.

But as an evil organization that opposes God’s plan for the Jewish people in their covenant land, Ronen said, Hamas differs from these individual, personal enemies. Citing Psalm 83:1–4, she said that any group set on Israel’s annihilation is in fact an enemy of God. As such, war can be waged against these groups without transgressing Jesus’ command.

“You can actually fight an enemy—fight a just war—and not develop hatred in your heart for the individual person before you,” Ronen said.  

In agreement, Pelled added that Jesus does not intend for believers to love the “demonic,” which is how she characterizes Hamas.

“If the enemy comes against you, you have to protect yourself,” Pelled said. “It doesn’t mean I don’t love them or that I don’t pray for them. We do pray for them … we pray for the Gazan people, for those that are innocent. We pray for the children. We pray for a future for them.”

Nirit Bar-David also mentioned wicked spiritual forces at work, calling Hamas’s animosity toward Israelis “the work of the devil.” But even in the face of attacks against her people, she said she turns to God and prays that everyone—including her nation’s enemies—will find salvation in Jesus. Their repentance is necessary, she said, to halt the evil Hamas perpetuates.

“We need this change,” Bar-David said. “And having this attitude which Hamas has toward Israel, I think it comes from a very deep, wrong place that really needs healing—if they would choose that.”

The post How Messianic Jews Are Serving Israelis Displaced by Hamas and Hezbollah appeared first on Christianity Today.

But Jesus foresaw even greater opposition than rejection, according to Matthew 10. His disciples would be dragged before councils, flogged in the synagogues, and betrayed to death by their own brothers, he warned. “I am sending you out like sheep among wolves.”

Christian discourse on the Holy Land conflict is often similarly contentious.

“A conversation is needed,” said Darrell Bock, senior research professor of New Testament at Dallas Theological Seminary (DTS). “People talk at each other, not to each other. But with the emotion and distance between the two positions, is it even possible to try?”

Not from what another Bible scholar witnessed when each camp gathers alone.

“Their conferences only preach to the choir,” said Rob Dalrymple, course instructor of New Testament and biblical interpretation at the Flourish Institute, the seminary for evangelical Presbyterians in the ECO denomination. “Nothing changes; it only reinforces how bad the other side is.”

Each academic belongs to a community traditionally associated with one or the other side of the Israel-Palestine conflict. DTS teaches dispensationalism, which anticipates the restoration of Jews to the Promised Land before the return of Christ. Presbyterians adhere to covenant theology, which interprets the promises given to Israel—including the land—as fulfilled in Christ.

The Jews of Jesus’ day also had factions. But while “shake the dust off” was the instruction given to disciples in the face of opposition to the gospel, to all who believed in him he gave a very different message in the Sermon on the Mount:

Take the log out of your own eye first.

One group of Bible scholars, Christians in Conversation on the Middle East (CCME), has “emphasized self-critique from the very beginning,” said Alicia Jackson, associate professor of Old Testament at Vanguard University, which is affiliated with a Pentecostal movement that is often pro-Israel. “And the heart of the group is to love each other despite our differences.”

But the challenge is immense—and sensitive in their communities. CCME had originally pledged to be private.

“I heartily agree on the need for introspection,” said Bruce Fisk, who is a former professor of New Testament at Westmont College and is married to a Palestinian with origins from Bethlehem. “But why would anyone advertise doubts, lingering questions, and ‘logs’ when they feel under siege? Trust is lacking; fear abounds.”

And thus CCME members strove to get to know one another first.

Discussions began between Dalrymple and Fisk in 2018, with Bock joining a year later. They recruited others with the same desire for healthy conversations and met for the first time at the Society for Biblical Literature (SBL) convention in San Diego, discussing how to expand the initiative. Candidates wrote a statement on how they viewed the conflict, but more importantly they told personal stories about how they came to care. Zoom meetings ensued, and each prospective participant endured the “hot seat” as they introduced themselves.

Eventually they discussed the issues in the Middle East.

COVID-19 caused the emerging group to cancel its planned in-person gathering in 2020. But the evangelical Institute for Biblical Research (IBR) approved their formation of a specialty research group the following year, called Scripture, Hermeneutics, and the Middle East. Seeking to connect biblical interpretation with Holy Land realities, CCME members made a three-year commitment to host a seminar at each annual SBL gathering, starting with Denver in 2022.

Once there, they first had lunch together to move budding online relationships toward face-to-face friendships. The session then proceeded in typical academic fashion, with interested colleagues listening to papers presented on the theme—“Israel Then and Now”—and the formal responses.

And they forged a Christian bond—until October 7 put everything to the test.

Theology: A Contact Sport

Forty days later in San Antonio, CCME’s 2023 SBL session packed out the room.

The theme was “Israel and the Church,” which included hermeneutical topics such as whether the now mostly Gentile body of Christ completes, fulfills, or supersedes the promises for Jews in God’s plan. But the theme was also political, asking if New Testament authors envisioned possession of land for ethnic Israel and whether the modern nation-state either implements or benefits from the Old Testament promises.

It was still an academic gathering—but one preceded by extensive email anguish.

The Hamas terrorist attack and subsequent Israel Defense Forces response had sent CCME communication into overdrive. Ordinary seminar planning gave way to multipage missives that took hours to write and read. Zoom meetings stopped as members became too involved with responses within their own networks, each trying to make sense of what happened, why, and what followed.

Fisk believed the Israeli response, strengthened by American evangelical support, was “wildly disproportionate and indiscriminate.” Bock spoke of urban warfare within an underground tunnel network and Iran’s role in provoking “masses of people who want to wipe Israel from the face of the earth.”

The conversation was heated, but participants’ commitments held. They offered apologies when language went too far and graciously thanked each other for their honesty. No one proposed canceling the seminar.

“This was the test,” Dalrymple said. “In light of what we were trying to do, we had to continue to love and respect each other.”

God was their glue.

“Prayer is so important when emotions are running high,” Jackson said. “We don’t reduce people to positions but sit together and validate each other’s pain.”

But after the conference, the pain continued. As the world debated casualty counts, cease-fires, and settler-colonialism, some CCME scholars confessed to being exhausted and depressed. Despite maintaining mutual esteem, they could not bridge the issues—as children perished in the rubble of Gaza and antisemitism seeped into popular discourse.

“Theology,” one said, “is apparently a contact sport.”

And it wore them out. Since January, apart from basic academic business to plan for the 2024 conference, communication has waned. Some lamented that everyone went back to their rhetorical corners. Others sensed progress and felt the discussion was more important than ever. They did not pretend they could solve the conflict, nor change each other.

But after once hoping to model a difficult conversation, they paused.

Wise by Human Standards

Jesus’ disciples often quarreled. Each time, he countered by emphasizing the importance of service—even to demonstrate by washing their feet.

But bickering is not these scholars’ problem, as they have honored each other consistently. Bock facilitated an article by Fisk in the DTS academic journal. Dalrymple invited Bock onto his Determinetruth website’s livestream, where he encourages the church to live up to its gospel calling. And Jackson commended her male colleagues for the warm welcome they gave her, which some women fail to experience in some evangelical academic contexts.

But prior to taking up the towel, Jesus stated in John 12 that unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it cannot produce much fruit. In reference primarily to his crucifixion, the comment was prompted—appropriately enough—by a Gentile request for an audience with the Jewish Messiah.

The CCME kernel of hope has not died, but conversation has hit an impasse. Shifting metaphors to the parable of the sower, has their seemingly buried seed of initiative found rocky soil, a scorching sun, or a dormant harvest yet to come?

Yet as first-century controversies swirled and believers feared being ostracized by their communities—the original reason for CCME’s privacy—Jesus told them to keep walking in the light, lest the darkness overtake them. And while he assured his listeners that he did not come to judge those who did not keep his word, failure to do so would condemn them on the Last Day (John 12:48).

These words include the Matthew 7 command to find the log in one’s own eye first.

A different spirit animated the church in Corinth, as members touted their favored theologians. Not much is known about the factions that backed Apollos or Peter, but Paul rebuked them by calling attention to their past: “Not many of you were wise by human standards” (1 Cor. 1:26). Similarly, CCME scholars remember that they were once far less informed about the issues than they are today.

Bock did not even know about his own Jewish heritage until age 13.

His parents had left Judaism, but his uncle would take him to synagogue when he visited his cousins in Oklahoma. Bock became a Christian in college and thereafter dedicated himself to studying the Jewish background of the Bible and the Second Temple Judaism of Jesus’ day.

During his doctoral studies in Scotland, he forged a friendship with Gary Burge, a leading US evangelical voice for the Palestinians. For the 40 years since then, they have discussed the conflict, and Bock—despite criticism—has spoken at the Christ at the Checkpoint conference, led by Palestinian evangelicals at Bethlehem Bible College (BBC). Yet his Zionist convictions are clear, and in 2018, Bock wrote Israel, the Church, and the Middle East: A Biblical Response to the Current Conflict.

Jackson, meanwhile, “can’t remember a time in my life when I didn’t care about Israel.” Her father taught her about the Holocaust as she imbibed A Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Boom. His message was never political, but growing up in a Jewish community in Portland, Oregon, the family showed solidarity with the local synagogue to commemorate together the genocide against Jews.

Her heart was broken further by a visit to Israel in 2010 led by BBC’s Jack Sara, where she met Palestinian Christians and saw firsthand some of the challenges they face. Some of the evangelical leaders and their Messianic Jewish counterparts working for reconciliation remain her heroes today. Jackson, nonetheless, is a committed Zionist, believing the Jews’ covenantal connection to the land is eternal, with the prophecies foretelling a permanent restoration. But within this, she clarified that “God’s heart is never for violence.”

Such violence drove her colleagues from their original support of Israel.

Dalrymple grew up Southern Baptist, memorized dispensational end-times charts, and attended graduate school at the conservative Liberty University. Like many, he viewed the 1948 establishment of Israel as fulfillment of prophecy and its victory in the Six-Day War of 1967 as a miracle. Academic study moved him away from Christian Zionist theology, but it was not until a 2003 trip to Israel that he even discovered Christians existed in Palestine.

A second trip to Israel in 2008 introduced him to evangelicals at BBC, and their testimony of the realities of occupation brought him to tears. He witnessed firsthand how checkpoints constricted local movement, how the separation wall cut through family farms, and how Jewish settlements steadily confiscated West Bank territory—and he felt terribly guilty.

“This is because of people like me, who say God will bless those who bless Israel,” Dalrymple said of his thoughts at the time. “We are contributing to the oppression of the Palestinian people.”

There was no exact aha moment for Fisk, who also grew up dispensationalist. But his repeated travels to Israel since the early 2000s introduced him to the diversity of the people, though he went there simply to strengthen his lectures in New Testament geography. And as he developed concern for Jews and Gentiles alike, he aligned primarily with Palestinians in describing the conflict as “asymmetric and unjust.” 

With Dalrymple and other founding members, in 2018 Fisk launched the Network of Evangelicals for the Middle East to help Americans discover the “best voices on both sides.” Under its auspices, he is near completion of an eight-volume curriculum for an irenic introduction to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The Dividing Wall

Background matters. “Wounds from a friend can be trusted,” states Proverbs 27:6, so only those with a known history of advocacy might dare to find the logs in the eyes of their own communities. And the scholars were cautious: No one wanted to speak on behalf of those in the land.

“Self-criticism is difficult because it is seen as a defection, and with stakes as high as they are, this is dangerous,” said Bock. “But as Christians, we are almost compelled to do it.”

The almost is purposeful. Since issues are complex, the word compelled may risk mobilization without the requisite humility. But with these caveats in place, “iron sharpens iron” as the Proverbs chapter continues.

Hearing other voices is critical, said Dalrymple, as feedback helped him discover a flawed attitude in his book These Brothers of Mine: A Biblical Theology of Land and Family and a Response to Christian Zionism, published in 2015. His critique at the time was that those of a dispensationalist perspective who view the land separately from other promises fulfilled in Christ betray a not-high-enough view of Jesus. 

“I didn’t mean it quite like that, but I wrote it,” Dalrymple said. “It was not fair.”

Jackson said that the Book of Ephesians anchors her in these difficult self-reflective conversations. Paul, unlike in his other letters, is not addressing a particular conflict but is calling believers into a deeper Christian life. Applied to the discourse on Israel and Palestine, Jackson cited the apostle’s emphasis on unity, the dividing wall of hostility, and the reality of a spiritual battle.

“My prayer is for the Holy Spirit to convict me of any attitude not in line with the love of Christ,” she said. “We have to be aware of the enemy at work while anchoring ourselves in Jesus’ victory on the cross.”

Both sides are reluctant to identify fault in their allies, said Fisk. But in Christ, both sides are still part of his spiritual family. His grand vision is to help everyone become less absolute in their assessment of the conflict, even as he struggles when his original side remains in staunch support of Israel. Rather than identifying logs in eyes, however, he said an easier task might simply be to forge common ground upon what each has learned from the other.

Conversation has helped Fisk recognize how much the specter of antisemitism haunts both Messianic Jews and Christian Zionists. Descriptions of the multiethnic nature of the body of Christ can risk downplaying the ethnically distinct role of the Jews. And while he maintains his position that Old Testament promises of land are fulfilled in Jesus, he has come to see a “handful of texts” in the New Testament that hint at territorial restoration.

But another problem with “logs” is the necessity of specifics.

“Many insist that they are willing to criticize Israel,” said Fisk, continuing with deliberate emphasis, “But. Never. Do.”

Legitimate Questions

For his own part, Fisk said that he is not studied enough in Islamic theology to comment specifically on the compatibility of Jewish and Muslim perspectives on the land. And he defended Christian Palestinians who, despite their long-standing commitment to nonviolence and denunciations of terrorism, grow frustrated when asked afresh to condemn—with specifics—each new atrocity.

But detailed critiques without firsthand experience—even from those who are highly invested—are difficult amid contested media narratives, Jackson said. She recognizes the desire for precision is legitimate and is not trying to evade it. But with settler violence, for example, the facts of what truly happened in any given reported event are sometimes hard to determine.

Yet the settlement issue helps identify logs in eyes, she said. Some Christian Zionists can label any criticism of Israeli government policies as lack of support for the Jews. Settlement expansion may not be a good idea, an attitude not uncommon among Israelis. And many who are pro-Israel tend to ignore or minimize Palestinian suffering. Though Jackson was previously aware of the disputed politics, dialogue with CCME colleagues increased her already deep compassion for both Jews and Palestinians and her burden to encourage Christians to love them equally.

Jackson’s biblical interpretation leads her to a unique position on the founding of Israel. In her view, God’s promised restoration of Jews to the land was not envisioned by the prophets as a conquest like the one in the time of Joshua, where inhabitants were removed from the land. But the horrors of war led to Palestinian displacement, and perhaps relations today would be much improved if Israel—or the surrounding Arab states—had facilitated their resettlement with citizenship rights.

Yet she reads the “dry bones” passage of Ezekiel 36–39 with consideration of how God often works in stages. The physical restoration of God’s people to the promised land precedes their spiritual restoration in the Messiah—land first, reform second. To Jackson, what is happening may be the beginning of a revival, for while Israel in 1948 included only a handful of Messianic Jews, today an estimated 30,000 live there. God regathered Jews and is now drawing more to faith in Yeshua.

“God’s heart is for Israel to dwell with the nations, for the blessing of the nations,” Jackson said. “What we see now is not the full expression of that vision, though it may be an initial phase.”

Bock also recognized how God’s shalom will eventually fulfill the Isaiah 19 prophecy of peace with a highway connecting Israel with Egypt and Assyria (modern-day Iraq) as joint peoples of God. In the interim, Israel’s existential fear is real and legitimate; while in a region that lives by “eye for an eye,” it is hard to ask for restraint. And the Bible does give clear examples of how God worked to remove entirely a source of antisemitic evil—see the commanded extermination of Amalek.

Nonetheless, Bock said Israel has not done enough to care for noncombatants, limiting food and humanitarian aid. The extent of destruction has been excessive, with not enough protection for civilian life. He said the overall policy of disproportionate deterrence, while understandable, contributes to a cycle of perpetual violence and deepens mutual animosity.

Such logs in eyes will not help Israel in the long run.

“The Christian contribution must be to pursue peace while balancing different biblical themes,” Bock said. “Our group tries to do so, for without understanding where people are in their perspectives, all moral appeals will fall on deaf ears.”

Dalrymple has seen such failures and sought to adjust. Like Fisk, he has come to appreciate how Jews experience antisemitism and Christian Zionists fear its spread. Advocating forcefully against systemic injustice can unwittingly trigger such feelings. He acknowledges some antisemitism in the pro-Palestinian camp.

And the argument that Israel has no right to exist remains, as a minority voice, believes Dalrymple. Though not a scholar on the subject, he said that settler-colonialist discourse painting Israel as the political or theological project of Europe is incorrect. It is “problematic” to deny Judaism’s historic sense of the land, as it is to overlook that Jews lived in Palestine before the Israeli state—others came subsequently as refugees, not resource-seekers.

“Too often we debate issues by setting up straw men,” Dalrymple said. “But with real people you learn to nuance and discover where something is heard as offensive. It sparks a response of ‘Ah, I see.’”

Does this mean that settler-colonialism language is a log in the Palestinian eye? Like the accusation of genocide, Fisk said, this is a question for lawyers—not biblical scholars. But after years of Palestinian believers exerting “heroic energy” to invite theologically like-minded evangelicals to hear their perspective—and largely failing—they have grown closer to politically like-minded allies among liberation theologians and in the anticolonial Global South.

“Time will tell if they come to regret these alliances,” said Fisk. “But they ask, ‘How can they see what the followers of Jesus cannot?’”

Soils of Response

It is a question both sides can ask—and repeatedly do. During Passion Week, in the John 12 passage Jesus quoted Isaiah 6 to say that God had blinded the eyes of his people. But while discussing the soils of response to his early ministry, in Matthew 13 Jesus referred to the Septuagint rendering of the same prophetic passage to say that from a calloused heart, the people had closed their own eyes.

Willful or otherwise, the popular gap on Israel and Palestine remains.

But most damning is Jesus’ warning to the Pharisees in John 9:41—“If you were blind, you would not be guilty of sin; but now that you claim you can see, your guilt remains.” One would think a log would be obvious; human nature reveals it is not.

Isaiah’s commission, in fact, was to preach in such a manner that this guilt was laid bare—“otherwise, they might see with their eyes” (6:10). Understandably frustrated, the prophet asked, “How long, Lord?” (v. 11).

God’s response evokes images from Gaza and the border communities of Galilee and Lebanon, now including parts of Beirut:

“Until the cities lie ruined and without inhabitant, until the houses are left deserted and the fields ruined and ravaged, until the Lord has sent everyone far away and the land is utterly forsaken” (vv. 11–12).

And the scholars of CCME—from different perspectives—continue their lament.

They have resumed planning for the 2024 SBL conference in San Diego, with participants including a Palestinian Christian and a Messianic Jewish rabbi. Jackson’s heart is for reconciliation. Fisk is confident his colleagues will defend him if he is mischaracterized, and he would do the same for them. Bock says that discussion is a success in itself. And Dalrymple finds hope that despite their distress, CCME extended its fellowship for an additional three years.

“The war in Gaza may end,” he said. “But the issues will not go away.”

The post Gaza War Strains Bible Scholars’ Model of Christian Conversation appeared first on Christianity Today.

Officially founded in 1932 but with origins dating back to the 19th-century missionary movement, the Near East School of Theology (NEST) is operated by the Presbyterian, Anglican, Lutheran, and Armenian Evangelical denominations.

Installed this week, its 11th president is a nondenominational Lebanese evangelical.

Martin Accad, formerly academic dean at Arab Baptist Theological Seminary (ABTS), was installed on Sunday at the historic institution’s Beirut campus. He graduated from NEST in 1996 with a bachelor of theology degree, eventually earning his PhD from the University of Oxford. Awarded scholarships by the World Council of Churches and the evangelical Langham Partnership, Accad is a locally controversial theologian who, like NEST, straddles the liberal-conservative dichotomy.

Author of Sacred Misinterpretation: Reaching Across the Christian-Muslim Divide, Accad has urged believers to approach Islam in a manner that avoids the twin pitfalls of syncretism and polemics. But before joining NEST he resigned his prior academic position at ABTS to apply his biblical convictions within Lebanon’s contested political scene. Creating a research center, his last four years have been spent in pursuit of reconciliation between Lebanon’s often-divided sectarian communities.

Accad will now bring his vision to a new generation of Middle East seminarians.

Although doing public theology is novel for the institution, NEST has long sought, with some struggle, to balance the two streams of its early predecessors’ commitments to evangelistic outreach and service-oriented witness. Its founding in 1932 resulted from a merger of two programs, each with its own distinctives.

One stream of NEST’s roots dates to 1856, when American missionaries began what Accad describes as a discipleship training program in the mountains of Lebanon. Along with providing pastoral development, it functioned as a mission station for sharing the gospel in local villages with non-Protestant Christians and diverse Muslim communities. Its remote location was also designed to isolate these early “seminarians” from the corruption of city life in Beirut.

American outreach to Armenians and Arabs in the Ottoman Empire (modern-day Turkey) led to the creation of similar schools beginning in 1839. After the Armenian genocide in World War I, these efforts relocated to Athens where they coalesced into a seminary that adopted an ecumenical, Enlightenment-informed model, emphasizing the importance of social service. This was especially true in its approach to Islam—sympathetic and comparative with an eye toward reconciliation.

The merger of these two programs created NEST, which eventually settled in the cosmopolitan Hamra neighborhood of Lebanon’s capital. Although it is situated near three historic Protestant liberal arts colleges—now known as the American University of Beirut (AUB), the Lebanese American University (LAU), and the Armenian-led Haigazian University—early cooperation was shattered by the Lebanese civil war in 1975 and has not been re-established.

Accad wants to restore this collaboration and embody an integration of scholarship and discipleship. CT spoke with him about Protestant distinctives, “electric shock” pedagogy, and how to understand the mainline-evangelical divide in the Middle East.

Why does serving as president of NEST appeal to you?

We need to rethink what it means to be a seminary student today. This question is a key issue globally, but especially in the Middle East. Ideally, the seminary leads the church to be relevant in society. This requires beginning with society and determining its needs. And then the seminary addresses the church—what does the pastor need? Finally, it works backward and designs a program to fit this profile.

Historically, NEST has been an ordination track. This is the traditional model, and it is still necessary if the church believes that it is. But I want to explore with the churches their vision for seminary training, for congregational service, and for regional witness—and how NEST can help prepare leaders to implement this vision.

How do you plan to prepare leaders to serve the church?

Nontraditional, focused tracks are becoming the way people want to learn. Accrediting bodies speak of micro-credentials that may contribute toward academic goals but have value in and of themselves and fit into the bigger puzzle of what students want to do with their lives.

But this system of training should not be only for evangelicals. I want NEST to attract Catholic and Orthodox students also, to think together about how to impact the reality around us. And as we design our programs, I will engage civil society and political activists, where the conversation might be challenging. Many of these people have been turned off by religion due to the sectarian religious landscape of Lebanon, so my interactions with them will be an act of witness.

I can testify on behalf of NEST that God, the church, and theological education are not just internal affairs within the boundaries of our community. No, the church is in society and serves society, and if it is not leading the process of societal change, then it is not following its calling.

How do nonevangelicals fit into a Protestant seminary?

NEST will always be a place of theology and religious studies. I don’t see NEST starting a program in business. But I would like us to reflect on theologies of poverty, just economics, and corruption. These are real problems in Lebanon and the surrounding region, and more Lebanese should be equipped to address them at the spiritual level.

Courtesy of Near East School of Theology

We have students in our churches getting degrees in liberal arts at local universities who do not know how this education fits within a larger calling. They have grown up in the church or experienced a heart conversion as an adult, and while they want to serve God, they don’t see themselves as pastors.

Catholic and Orthodox students are similar, devoted to God in their contemplative practices but not knowing how to integrate this strength into secular life. These students should have the opportunity to take classes at NEST to think more deeply about their degrees in business, engineering, or history.

How will this integration develop?

I will have dialogues with AUB, LAU, and Haigazian about cross-registration and joint institutional credits. Though we have a shared history, many professors at these universities do not know that NEST exists.

At some point, Protestants divided university education into separate tracks for liberal arts and seminary study, as in the American Ivy League. Some of this was due to tensions between evangelism and the social gospel, which contributed to a dichotomy between mainline and evangelical churches.

But in light of God’s overarching sovereignty, it is biblical to combine them into a coherent whole so that public theology can become the life of the church. And as evangelicals seek to repair this breach—as in the Lausanne Covenant—our modern world no longer has a need for these separate paradigms.

What nags at me locally, however, is that while higher education institutions in Lebanon and the Middle East have done a wonderful job forming global citizens and experts in specific fields, they take pride when graduates become dual citizens and succeed abroad. I feel that this is a loss. I want graduates to stay here and explore their calling in their home country.

This is vocation—to make your career count in God’s perspective.

Will NEST remain a Protestant institution?

The vision I spelled out is very Protestant. It is about social transformation. There have been many different and opposing voices in our tradition about how much of our toe to dip into society, politics, and current affairs. But for me, it is theology that sets the framework for this engagement.

NEST is the only evangelical body in the Levant that belongs to the Association of Theological Institutes in the Middle East (ATIME). I hope to hire qualified Catholic and Orthodox professors. But while we will offer a broadly Christian education, other denominations will still consider us Protestant, which in our essence we will remain.

I am nonsectarian, so this is a difficult question for me. Lebanese Protestants take pride in how they have contributed to Lebanon by building hospitals and schools and in how they demonstrate an ethic of love and honest work. We aim to care for the whole person.

But these contributions no longer distinguish us from the rest of society. Nor do we want to pine for our past glories. Protestantism, for me, is about reformation, a countercurrent that improves upon what has become ineffective. It then impacts society and contributes to human well-being and the common good.

Ideally, our denominational heritage also leads to personal transformation as a disciple of Jesus. This is the church’s responsibility, and Christian involvement in society is one of the strongest testimonies to the power of Christ.

Among local evangelicals, NEST has a reputation as a liberal institution.

This is true, even within its four denominations. Some students have entered NEST excited to study and left with serious skepticism about matters of faith. My experience is that NEST has been a mixed bag of theology. It receives faculty sent by mainline partners in the West, and sometimes the vetting could have been more thorough. While many professors have been conservative, others have been quite liberal.

How are “liberal” and “conservative” defined in the Lebanese context?

Academic theologians read all the same books and think very much alike on core issues. The difference is in pedagogy—how they communicate knowledge, not the knowledge that they have.

Many professors teach as if they must communicate everything to first-year students on day one. They act as if the purpose of theological education is to give budding seminarians an electric shock, provoking an existential crisis that will hopefully lead to greater maturity. I have heard faculty members talking in the coffee room about how students are having doubts in their faith, as if this is something to be proud of.

Pedagogy should be about helping people grow and mature, to make them better citizens and Christian leaders. It is a process of walking alongside someone.

But neither is conservative indoctrination the point.

Over the years, evangelicals have started other seminaries in response to NEST, which were then critiqued similarly. On the whole, it is impossible to do serious theology for very long without the risk of being viewed as too liberal by local churches, unless an institution works very hard to stay connected to them.

Pedagogy is important, but so is content.

No one theological position has categorized NEST, which is not problematic in itself. But when one is hiring professors who do not all come from a single confessional background, an agreed-upon framework is necessary to ensure consistency in the formation of students.

I want to recruit faculty members who fit within our classical Reformed heritage. We believe in the Nicene doctrines of Jesus’ divinity, virgin birth, physical resurrection, and second coming. Concerning the authority of Scripture, Lebanese Protestants are quite conservative but sometimes too literalist.

NEST has an open evangelical position in terms of how to interpret literary genres, keeping some questions unanswered—for example, understanding the violence of God in the Bible. Women’s ordination is a matter where the mainline denominations here have made more progress than the more conservative streams of evangelicalism.

I’m excited about this side of NEST, which it pioneered in the Middle East.

On other issues, such as gender and sexual orientation, we all still have quite conservative views that reflect our conservative social boundaries. We must honor our church community with great sensitivity and with a faithful biblical hermeneutic. But we also need to better familiarize ourselves with all sides of current social and scientific research rather than rallying for any specific interpretation of a cultural cause.

How do you fit personally into the evangelical church community?

Within the mainline Protestant churches of Lebanon, I am viewed as quite conservative. Among Baptists I’ve been perceived—unjustly I would say—as too liberal. These communities are more alike than different, with much overlap in their Venn diagrams. But I won’t be an “odd fish” at NEST.

Those who are considered liberal Protestants in the Middle East are more akin to the conservative-leaning mainline churches in America. I am more concerned about NEST’s pedagogical framework than about its position on the conservative-liberal spectrum. For me, it is most important to determine how to help students get to an understanding that builds their faith and their ability to be pastors and leaders who serve their communities.

One wing of the Middle East church is said to be ecumenical, the other evangelistic. Is this fair?

These are characterizations. Mainline Protestants here care about witnessing to Jesus. Not everyone will actually evangelize, just as not every Baptist will. And the traditional evangelical approach of trying to convert everyone who “doesn’t look like me” is becoming increasingly less common.

It disturbs me when someone says, “I met this priest or monk, and I preached the gospel to him.” What arrogance toward someone who is dedicated to God’s calling. The nonecumenical approach is disastrous. Christian maturity is to preach the gospel in a way that introduces people to Jesus while journeying with them—not simply winning converts to one’s own tradition.

How will you implement this spirit at NEST?

I look for three things when searching for a church: vibrant worship, biblical teaching, and outreach in the community. A seminary should not be different.

Intellectual learning is dry; this becomes problematic if not accompanied by a life of worship, prayer, and application. Solid biblical theology is born not from discussion over what is conservative or liberal but by a devotional practice that feeds into transformation of the community.

If worship and witness result from theology, then it is a theology that works, protected from the two extremes.

The post Can a Lebanese Seminary Move Beyond the Liberal-Conservative Impasse? appeared first on Christianity Today.

Nevertheless, the church’s activity in this region is about much more than war and persecution, as the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) chapter of the Lausanne Movement’s State of the Great Commission report shows. For example, congregations have cared for refugees, and online ministries have expanded.

One notable development is the numerical growth of Muslim-background believers (MBBs).

The report provides an ominous description of Christianity in the MENA region: “The outlook for all Christian communities is negative.” Yet the section on MBBs concludes with hope amid the devastation, predicting that “a new church, from among the majority people, will rise up from the ashes of the traditional structures.”

CT spoke with Rafik Barsoum—coauthor of the MENA chapter, president of Message to All Nations, and pastor of a digital church initiative launched in 2022—to elaborate on key ideas in the report. He described the difficulties faced by MBBs and Christian-background believers (CBBs) alike, the witness offered by both, and why he dislikes the distinction between them.

Why did the report begin with a negative assessment?

Iraq, for example, is nearly bereft of Christians. The region is experiencing war, famine, terrorism, poverty, instability, and turmoil in every way. And with any turmoil anywhere, minorities are the first to be affected. In nearly every nation, if they are not facing outright persecution, struggles such as these pressure believers to leave the region.

Ancient churches are losing their people. The Middle East was once the beacon of Christian history; now it is at risk of losing its Christian presence.

But these struggles do not suggest a gloomy picture as concerns the work of Christ. We have seen signs of revival in the last decade like never before. But a price has been paid for it that is not often covered by the news or political analysis. We do not want this persecution to continue, but new signs of hope are emerging.

One of these signs of hope is the MBB community, which the report calls a “movement.”

The word movement is a missiological term describing an intangible awareness that God is drawing people to himself in ways we cannot explain, beyond the work of any one church or organization. It is as Jesus told Nicodemus: The wind blows where it will, and we see its effects in the wave that is forming. People are coming to know the truth through dreams and visions, the work of missionaries, the testimony of the church, and online media ministry.

Amid political turmoil, people are challenging taboos and delusions of the past—independently of this movement, but also as they witness Christian love in action. God is doing something unique.

Yet the report calls this movement “small.” How should it be measured?

The MBB movement is small compared to our aspirations.

We want to see more even as we cannot grasp its true size; only eternity will reveal it. We love to assess numbers for encouragement and evaluation. But while we do our due diligence, we should err on the side of caution in any calculations. After all, Jesus compared the kingdom to a mustard seed, small in appearance but great in significance.  

But I have a more serious concern to raise about MBB and CBB terminology.

I come from a family in Egypt that traces its roots back to the time of Christ. And we were among the first evangelicals when missionaries came from the West. But classifying believers based on what background they come from is not healthy in the long term.

We all have different backgrounds—except for our shared experience of sin and death. Without Christ we are lost, and with him we are saved unto abundant life. We acknowledge that the MBB community has distinct features, but we strongly encourage people not to divide the body of Christ into categories. In the past 15 centuries, the Muslim world has never seen so many testimonies emerging as now. Yet our report does not intend to isolate them from the broader Christian scene; they are implicitly recognized in every description.

Our role as CBBs especially is to de-label us all as we emphasize unity.

Many MBBs worship separately from other Christians. Is this appropriate?

It depends on the circumstances.

In many places, separate worship is necessary due to security concerns, familial and social pressures, or prejudice from either side. In other settings, it is possible for MBBs and CBBs to meet together. But in all cases, we are one in Christ and united in heaven. We cannot advise against separate MBB meetings, but we emphasize our ontological solidarity.

Joint fellowship can be decided only at the local level. We do not live in an ideal world, but biblically speaking, there is no Jew or Gentile, no MBB or CBB. I want our ecclesiology to be correct in principle, but I would allow for different expressions, as we have to do what’s possible when the ideal is elusive.

I challenge both MBBs and CBBs to think of one another as beloved peers. We are building the kingdom of God together, united forever in eternity. We might as well dissolve our differences now.

How else is life challenging for MBBs?

The Muslim world is very diverse, from strict fundamentalist contexts with high persecution to more modern and secular contexts that allow for more variation—at least in theory. Persecution exists on a scale.

Many MBBs have lost their jobs, property, and inheritance. They face family dissolution. Their children get assigned to Islamic rather than Christian education in school when their family names indicate their Muslim background. Women are often more affected, as they have less social protection.

But there is also a challenge that comes from MBBs’ understanding of identity. Faith is intertwined with who they are, not just a system of belief as in many Western countries. In the Eastern mentality, I am because we are. It is not just a matter of changing their religion but of being detached from their roots. It is a major psychological challenge to come to Christ, and this factor is not easily addressed.

I admire the courage of our MBB friends and rejoice in the grace God gives them. Many are maturing in their faith and assuming servant-leadership roles in the church.

The report also cited their courage, specifically regarding MBBs’ “public embrace” of faith. Amid persecution, is it necessary for them to proclaim their Christianity?

This is a contentious issue in missions circles. But Jesus said, “Whoever acknowledges me before others, I will also acknowledge before my Father in heaven” (Matt. 10:32). And Jesus said the same about denial. Following Christ comes with a cost. He was rejected, and we will be rejected, but he has overcome the world.

I cannot speak on behalf of MBBs because I am from a context where I can declare my faith in Christ. How to do it wisely is a different question, and there is no general answer. If new Christians are to grow in Christ, they must be surrounded by a wise group of mature believers who walk the journey with them. This is the role of the body of Christ. Those in the church understand the context and are the ones God uses to provide advice.

But each new believer must get to a place where they confess Christ publicly.

The report celebrates that CBBs are also bold in sharing their faith.

Their witness goes beyond direct evangelizing. This last decade witnessed the martyrdom of Egyptian Coptic Christians in Libya who refused to renounce their faith under ISIS. And when the Muslim Brotherhood regime was overthrown in Egypt, the church responded in love and forgiveness as it stood for the truth. It is good to be bold, yet we must be wise as serpents and innocent as doves.

The church faces clear evidence of opposition.

What is happening now is a continuation of one of the main contributions of Christians from the MENA region to the global body of Christ. Local believers have been standing with Jesus since the apostles started the church. Athanasius, a fourth-century bishop from Alexandria, was told, “The whole world is against you.” He replied, “Yes, but I am against the world.”

We have our blemishes, but we have withstood persecution.

How likely is it that one who shares their faith will be persecuted?

It is certainly possible. We have to stress wisdom, wise counsel, and accountability to the local church—especially for foreign missionaries, who, if working independently, can sometimes do more harm than good. In some places, witnessing will be overlooked. In others, it may result in questioning by the state police. Social discrimination is possible. So are surveillance and imprisonment.

People in the MENA region take religion very seriously.

But we are seeing that if Arab believers live a Christlike example and describe how their way of life stems from their personal faith, people want to ask them more. This pattern of inviting inquiry removes many social barriers and gives Christians near immunity from security services. And most importantly, it paves the way for the gospel to be understood and relevant.

Another positive trend in the report celebrates greater cooperation between Christian denominations.

Cooperation is definitely improving. Christians of different denominations can sit together and listen to each other, whereas we used to build animosity upon assumptions. My prayer is that this growing communication will develop further into understanding each other and working together. One sign of hope is that several leaders have demonstrated love to one another.

Evangelicals have long been seen by people in the Catholic and Orthodox denominations as infidels or as wolves who steal sheep. But now that we are in communication, they see that we love Christ and want to serve his kingdom—not destroy their churches. This alone is a great result.

MBBs are a sign of revival. Might all Middle Eastern churches rise again?

Beyond those of a Muslim background, we see new expressions of faith in the digital church. And mature believers are emerging from all demographics, young and old, liturgical and charismatic. But the essentials are love for Christ, love for truth, and love for holiness—amid all that we witness in our world today. Unless the church stands on these pillars, all hope is superficial.

There is so much to anticipate for our region, built on the foundation of those who have gone before. The outlook does not have to stay negative.

The post Middle East Muslims are Finding Jesus. Can They Fit Within a Weakened Church? appeared first on Christianity Today.

 Almost six months have passed since Issa Saliba boarded a bus in Gaza with 15 other Christians to seek safety in Egypt. But he still relishes how they sang, clapped, and danced as they escaped devastation.

The air conditioning cooled his nerves, frayed from the harrowing journey to the border. Later that day, the wayside stop provided his first full meal.

As 1.9 million Palestinians—90 percent of Gaza’s population—remain internally displaced, less known is that 100,000 have managed to take refuge in Egypt. Saliba, allowed to depart because he is enrolled at the American University of Madaba in Jordan, left behind his father, two younger brothers, and the hundreds of other Christians remaining in the war-torn Mediterranean strip.

Saliba’s trip in April took him south along the damaged, dusty coastal road through Israeli checkpoints to the Rafah crossing. Then came a six-hour ride to Cairo. Saliba got out just in time: In May, Israel took control of Rafah’s Philadelphi Corridor and closed the border. The 8-mile-long strip of land remains a key sticking point in current negotiations over a ceasefire.

But from the first days of the Israel-Hamas war, the Egyptian government has resisted overtures to resettle displaced Palestinians in the adjacent Sinai Peninsula. Wary of terrorist infiltration but also fearful Israel will permanently refuse refugee reentry to Gaza, Egypt limited entry to people with medical emergencies, the financial means to pay up to thousands of dollars in fees, and international educational connections, like Saliba.

Evangelicals, though, are becoming known for giving food and supplies to refugees, whether Christian or Muslim. The Egyptian church, partnering with like-minded Palestinians, has even sent aid into Gaza for the believers huddled for safety in churches, as well as thousands of others displaced from their homes in makeshift camp communities.

“We show the love of God to everyone,” said Samuel Adel, chairman of the pastoral, outreach, and missions council of the Evangelical Presbyterian Church of Egypt, also called Synod of the Nile. “When people ask why, we tell them it comes from our love of Jesus.”

Soon after the Israel-Hamas war began on October 7, aid to refugees began under the leadership of Hanna Maher, an Egyptian Presbyterian pastor who formerly led Gaza Baptist Church. While most Palestinian Christians traveled onward to Cairo, Muslims settled primarily in the Mediterranean towns in and around Arish, about 30 miles west of Rafah.

The synod is displaying Christian charity by giving weekly food parcels to 50 Muslim families. An additional 20 families received fans with which to endure the oppressive heat. Seven families received essential household supplies like refrigerators, washing machines, and cooking equipment. And the synod gave eight wheelchairs to government hospitals to ease transport of the wounded to specialized medical centers in the humanitarian area designated for Palestinians.

Sinai was once a hotbed for terrorism—100 Christian families fled in 2017.

But some Muslims’ attitudes have changed. Maher’s local Muslim driver, impressed that the church has done so much to help, doesn’t charge Maher for rides. The driver has told several new families: These are Christians, coming to help you.

And sometimes Maher is invited into discussion about whom to blame for the devastation of Gaza—Israel or Hamas. He replies with what Jesus said in the Gospel of John about a man who was born blind. When asked if the sin that caused the blindness came from the man or his parents, Jesus answered, “neither;” the blindness was so “the works of God might be displayed in him” (9:3).

But Maher struggles to know how to further counsel the Gazan displaced.

“We pray for peace, but I don’t know what to say about this terrible war,” he said. “‘God is with us,’ I tell them—but it is difficult; I don’t have an answer beyond this truth.”

The Egyptian government has allowed Christian humanitarian efforts, but the refugee presence is politically sensitive. Egyptian leaders remember how Palestinians who fled from Israel to Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria in the 1948 and 1967 wars never returned home. Officials have categorically rejected the permanent settling of Gazan refugees in Egypt. Israel will not accept the displaced in its territory either.

Israel and Egypt jointly imposed a blockade on Gaza in 2007. Prior to 2011, Egypt’s government unofficially tolerated a network of Gaza-Egypt tunnels but has since destroyed thousands. Despite Egyptian denials, Israel stated that smuggling continues and links its control of Rafah to ongoing ceasefire negotiations.

But beyond the political and security concerns, humanitarian needs of the displaced do not fall under official United Nations refugee jurisdiction. Yet whether through the church, diverse grassroots initiatives, or other UN agencies, assistance is available.

Assistance is more difficult in Gaza. This summer, Egyptian Christians have worked in conjunction with Christian Mission for Gaza (CMG) to provide meals for over 15,000 Muslims in Deir al-Balah, Khan Younis, Jabaliya, and the Remal neighborhood of Gaza City. Residents have lined up with bowls and tins to receive ladlefuls of yellow rice, often heated over makeshift fires in metallic vats. Sometimes they get canned vegetables, and very rarely, chicken.

During last month’s distribution, children beamed while receiving the latter in tinfoil-wrapped portions. Black-robed women in headscarves extended their hands through tent openings to receive the same.

The Gaza-born former pastor of the Baptist church, Hanna Massad, serving prior to Maher, founded CMG in 1999. An Israeli missile flattened his family’s home in the Remal neighborhood, which took ten years for his father to build in the 1960s. Aware that most Gazans believe a “Christian West” is selling bombs to Israel, Massad said he wants his former neighbors “to know there are Christians who care—and are helping them.”

CMG has also distributed bread fifteen times in various areas and clean water five times. At each location, posted signs flap in the wind: From Gaza Baptist and the Presbyterian Church in Egypt. Many Muslims have offered thanks to their “brothers” for caring about their needs, and one even made the sign of the cross. Others have asked how they can learn more about the faith.

“People in Gaza have begun to see the true light, but they need guidance,” he said. “So I pray that the situation here will change after this war and that there will be a space to work freely with these people.”

About 200 of the 1,000 Christians who were living in Gaza before the war have since fled to Egypt, Massad estimated. Many have already received visas to Australia, and more are likely to emigrate as soon as they can.

Saliba, waiting in Cairo, prays for the Gazan Christians who remain.

“I thank God I was able to leave Gaza,” he said. “Jesus was with me every step of the way. Now I just want my family to join me.”

The post Egyptian Christians Show ‘Love of Jesus’ to Displaced Palestinians appeared first on Christianity Today.

Both candidates failed to address the most salient current issue on Ukraine for evangelicals: religious freedom.

Last month, the Ukrainian parliament overwhelmingly approved a proposal to ban the activities of the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) and compel the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) to break all ties with the patriarchate in Moscow. President Volodymyr Zelensky signed the bill into law, hailing his nation’s “spiritual independence.”

Some Republicans, including vice-presidential candidate J.D. Vance, have accused Ukraine of “assault[ing] traditional Christian communities.” Vance linked these alleged violations to the continuation of US military support, stating that military aid should be used as leverage to ensure religious freedom.

The charge is nonsense, said a leading Ukrainian expert in an interview with CT.

The law, said Maksym Vasin, director for international advocacy and research at the Institute for Religious Freedom in Kyiv, is meant to protect Orthodox believers in Ukraine from Russian propaganda. The State Service for Ethnic Policy and Freedom of Conscience (DESS) studied ROC and UOC documents to demonstrate the continuing link between the two churches, despite the UOC’s postwar assertion of independence. Each of the UOC’s 10,000 parishes has now been given nine months to demonstrate that it is not connected to the ROC, subject to court judgment.

Russia Restricts Churches in Ukraine. Divided Orthodox Critique Both.

Jayson Casper

However, the GOP is not alone in its concern.

Pope Francis stated last month that no church should be abolished “directly or indirectly” based on how its people pray. The World Council of Churches urged “caution.” And according to various reports, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, considered first among equals in the Orthodox world, sent a delegation to Ukraine to inquire about canonical structure and whether individual UOC parishes are being forcibly transferred to the rival Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU).

The state said 1,500 parishes have voluntarily aligned with the OCU since 2018.

In 2019, Bartholomew granted autocephaly (canonical independence) to the OCU, a then-schismatic body that had earlier broken off ties with Moscow. The move, supported by the United States, shifted OCU allegiance to the ecumenical patriarch’s church in historic Constantinople.

Orthodoxy first spread among the Slavic people from Kyiv, which was joined to the ROC in 1686. Following passage of last month’s law, the OCU reached out to the UOC for dialogue, emphasizing the need for unity and reconciliation.

CT spoke with Vasin, who contributed a chapter analyzing an earlier draft of the law in last year’s Security, Religion, and the Rule of Law, about the response of Ukrainian evangelicals, the limits of individual criminal prosecution, and whether the law should be considered a “ban.”

Ukraine Passes Law to Ban Russia-Linked Orthodox Church

David I. Klein (Religion News Service) and Jayson Casper

Please explain the aim of the new law.

The law aims to terminate Russian influence on Ukrainian society through Russian religious centers and to limit the propaganda of the chauvinistic ideology of Russkiy Mir (Russian World) in Ukraine. Ever since Soviet times, Russia has systematically used religion and religious centers of various denominations, primarily the ROC, as a tool of propaganda to achieve its military and geopolitical goals.

Churches are then manipulated to exert totalitarian control over their citizens or are closed down if they refuse to cooperate. This repressive policy is clearly visible in the eastern and southern regions of Ukraine, annexed following the Russian invasion. There, the Russian authorities are carrying out brutal repression against Ukrainian Christian churches and religious communities of various denominations, including Muslims and Jews who do not support Russian aggression.

Putin and the Kremlin want to maintain a key instrument of influence in Ukraine, namely the ROC and its affiliated local Orthodox eparchies and parishes. For this reason, Russia is most vocal critic of the Ukrainian government’s initiatives aimed at protecting religious freedom from abuse.

Is the new law a “ban” of the UOC?

It is a ban of the ROC in Ukraine, because of its open support for Russia’s  war.

It is not an immediate ban on the activities of the UOC, which is not even directly mentioned. The government will issue directives to break administrative and canonical subordination to the ROC or other Russian religious centers. If a religious community refuses to sever these ties, the government will have the right to apply to the court to terminate the activities of this legal entity, given the danger to national and public security. But if the defendant parish complies during these hearings, the court case will be dismissed.

Thus, it is wrong to say that this law bans the UOC. Instead, the law allows this church and any other religious associations in Ukraine to liberate themselves from the influence of Russian intelligence services and stop being mouthpieces for Russian propaganda.

It is up to the UOC priests and parishioners to decide whether they will continue to agree to be used by the Kremlin or whether they will end their dependence on the ROC and Russian authorities.

Orthodox Debate Ethnocentric Churches Amid Russia-Ukraine War

Meagan Saliashvili – Religion News Service

Your analysis of an earlier version of the law advised the government to concentrate on individual criminal proceedings against clerics who collaborated with Russia. Why is this not a sufficient safeguard against Russian interference?

Religious communities should not be responsible for the activities of their clerics, and a ban must be the last resort if other measures have been ineffective. But in recent years, it has become increasingly clear that the ROC is losing the features of a religious organization and has become an instrument of political influence in the hands of the Kremlin.

Therefore, now, when it comes to the existence of the people of Ukraine in the face of genocide committed by the Russian military, the UOC must make a clear choice to refuse any ties with the ROC. This is a reasonable requirement of the law that meets the expectations of Ukrainian society, which is on the verge of survival.

The UOC can fulfill this simple legal requirement and continue to exist legally in Ukraine. However, when the UOC bishops refuse to obey the law and claim persecution, it becomes evident that its leadership wants to maintain its dependence on Moscow.

Court rulings will consider the assessment of DESS. But its previous director, prior to her removal, reviewed changes in UOC internal canons and stated in 2022 that it was independent of Moscow.

It is not enough for the UOC to declare independence alone. It must be confirmed not by words but by practical actions, such as the condemnation of traitorous bishops and priests who have collaborated with Russia—especially in the ROC-annexed UOC eparchies of Crimea, Berdiansk, and Kherson.

The government has several requirements for the UOC, the fulfillment of which could demonstrate not declarative but actual termination of influence from Moscow.

My Top 5 Books on Orthodox Christianity

Bradley Nassif

The UOC has already condemned the war, stopped prayers for the ROC’s Patriarch Kirill, and called on Ukrainian members to defend their country against Russian aggression. Why is canonical separation necessary?

Some UOC bishops and priests continue to pray for Kirill and do not condemn his statements justifying Russian aggression, such as calling it a “holy war.” At present, it does not appear that the entire UOC leadership has severed its ties with Moscow. Each case should be considered separately. And if senior leaders refuse to comply with the government’s legitimate demands, the individual parishes can prove in court that they have done everything to be independent of Russia’s influence.

Slavic nations have fought wars previously without shifting religious orientation. Should religious liberty allow citizens and clerics to adhere freely to the spiritual heritage of either Kyiv or Moscow, independent of current politics?

Freedom of religion is a fundamental human right. But it should not be abused for political purposes, especially in the context of a brutal war to destroy Ukraine. If we look at history, Moscow illegally established its canonical influence over the UOC. Now, the Ecumenical Patriarchate is trying to correct this historical injustice. The Ukrainian government’s intervention in this process is necessary only because the UOC leadership allows Russia to use it to spread the “Russian World” propaganda, collaborate with the Russian military, and weaken Ukraine’s resistance.

How have Ukrainian evangelicals responded to this law?

The Ukrainian Council of Churches and Religious Organizations (UCCRO), except the UOC, supported President Zelensky’s initiative to protect them from Russian influence. The council includes various evangelical churches, including Baptists, Pentecostals, Adventists, and Lutherans. Their statement condemned the ROC, calling it an accomplice to the “bloody crimes of the Russian invaders.” The council furthermore confirmed that religious rights and freedoms are respected in Ukraine, even in the face of a brutal war.

Evangelicals, like the other denominations, see that the main threat to religious freedom in Ukraine is Russian aggression, which has killed dozens of clergymen and destroyed hundreds of churches and houses of worship in Ukraine.

The Orthodox world is divided about the legitimacy of the Ecumenical Patriarch’s recognition of the OCU. And some argue that this law is evidence of government persecution of the UOC, to compel their merger. Should there be one Orthodox church in Ukraine, or does religious freedom demand a plurality if believers so choose?

This law does not force Orthodox churches to unite. Since 1991, every religious community in Ukraine, as a legal entity, has the right to freely and independently choose its canonical subordination. The only restriction is the prohibition of ties with countries that have committed armed aggression against Ukraine, meaning Russia.

Religious pluralism is a sign of flourishing religious freedom, of which Ukraine can be proud and can continue to cherish.

What consequences will Ukraine suffer if the UOC continues to protest this law?

The UOC is advised to break ties with Russia now and not wait for a court judgment. Even if the court bans some local parishes, their members can continue to freely practice their faith and hold worship services without the status of a legal entity. Unlike Russia, Ukrainian legislation allows unregistered religious communities to operate and retains a broad scope of religious freedom for their members regardless of denomination.

But it would be beneficial for Russia if the UOC ignored the law and continued to play the role of a martyr church. The Kremlin will undoubtedly use future court decisions against the UOC to spread propaganda about religious persecution, while concealing their war crimes against Ukrainian churches in the occupied territories.

I hope the government will implement this law without haste and in accord with legal procedure, to protect Ukraine’s religious communities from Russian influence.

Some Republicans argue that the issue of religious freedom is one reason the US should stop contributing to the war effort in lieu of a negotiated settlement. How would you respond?

Despite undisputed US commitment to freedom of speech, the House of Representatives is not averse to debating a bill to ban TikTok over its links to China, due to concerns about national security interests. Similarly, the law adopted in Ukraine seeks to protect Ukrainian society from “Russian World” ideology and the influence of Russian intelligence services through the churches, while remaining unequivocally committed to the value of religious freedom.

The Kremlin uses religion as a tool of war. Russia will use any reason, real or fake, to deprive Ukraine of international military support.

The post Expert: Ukraine’s Ban on Russian Orthodox Church Is Compatible with Religious Freedom appeared first on Christianity Today.