No region conjures up more images of violence, terror and hatred in the minds of Americans than the Middle East. But you know that story.
I’d like to tell you a different story. A love story that goes back more than a century and a half and binds U.S. Presbyterians together with the peoples of the Middle East.
The first chapter begins as love expressed for the people of five Middle Eastern countries in very concrete ways. Beginning in the 1800s, Presbyterian mission workers traveled to Syria and Lebanon (1823), Iran (1834), Iraq (1836) and Egypt (1854), planting churches that continue to worship God and serve their community today. The church they birthed in Egypt is now the largest Protestant church in the entire Middle Eastern region. Presbyterians founded schools and universities, clinics and hospitals; they trained pastors, literacy workers, doctors and nurses — they even authored medical textbooks and biblical commentaries in the Arabic language. They opened up education for women. In Palestine, Presbyterians joined with Lutherans and Episcopalians in cooperative mission work and, when that land was partitioned in 1948 to establish the State of Israel, Presbyterian mission workers across the Middle East protested what they perceived to be an injustice against the indigenous population. As the Middle Eastern Presbyterian churches grew into maturity and increasingly took up responsibility for engaging mission in their own communities, a second chapter began.
Beginning in 1959, our denomination turned over extensive properties and mission leadership to the churches they had birthed: our missionaries became “fraternal workers” and, later, “mission co-workers” to indicate the new sense of partnership, rather than control. This important second chapter allowed the Middle Eastern Presbyterian churches to grow according to their own sense of the leading of God’s Spirit and ushered in a period of growth and expansion, despite constant pressure on them as a distinct religious minority in a largely Muslim context.
The third chapter of the love story opened more recently as a growing number of PC(USA) congregations connected to focus their mission efforts through networks supported by Presbyterian World Mission. Presbyterian World Mission recently increased the number of its mission workers in Egypt and invites congregations to support an innovative effort of the Synod of the Nile (the church Presbyterians founded in Egypt). The effort takes advantage of the unprecedented decision by the Egyptian government to grant land (14 properties in all!) to build churches across the country. The government desires that the same values of tolerance, respect and love of neighbor that have characterized the long Presbyterian witness in this region will take root in more Egyptian communities during these fearful days. “Perfect love,” the writer of John’s first epistle reminds us, “casts out fear.”
Today, despite the danger, as Iraqi Presbyterians educate their Muslim neighbors’ children, Egyptian Presbyterians share faith with their neighbors and Syrian Presbyterians offer a cup of cold water to refugees, the beautiful love story will continue in chapters yet to be written.
I’d like to tell you a different story. A love story that goes back more than a century and a half and binds U.S. Presbyterians together with the peoples of the Middle East.
HUNTER FARRELL works as the director of world mission for the PC(USA). He served as a Presbyterian mission worker in the Congo and Peru for 15 years. He is a Presbyterian minister and he and his wife, Ruth, have three adult children.
