The Dilemma of the Middle Eastern Christian Exodus
John 15:12

When you think of Middle Eastern Christians, what comes to mind??? Fact: The world’s oldest Christian churches in the world are found in the Middle East. Many trace their roots all the way back to the early apostles of Jesus. 

Truth be told, the Christian Church is found in every country in the Middle East.  Of course, in all these countries Christians are a small minority – in most they represent less than 10% of the population.

Yet even with these small numbers the diversity within this minority is greater than in any other part of the world.  Virtually the entire spectrum of worldwide Christianity is represented.

The great diversity of Christian peoples, sects, and denominations are a testament to the diversity of the people themselves who have chosen to follow in the steps of Christ and his disciples in the most difficult and challenging of circumstances.

These Churches carry rich spiritual, cultural, and doctrinal traditions, most of which are very different then our own Western Christian experience.

 The incredibly rich Middle Eastern Christian spirituality, which is Oriental in its orientation, can teach us much about prayer, meditation, and fasting. 

Arab Christians can also share with us how to live with Muslims, who, by the way, represent the fastest growing religion in the West.

For centuries, the Middle East, which has been home to numerous religious and ethnic groups, demonstrated how to live in close proximity with a degree of harmony and mutual tolerance not seen in Europe and the West during the same period.

But now, after two thousand years of a continuous presence, Christianity is on the decline in its very birthplace. The Christian communities of Egypt, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, Israel/Palestine, Jordan, and Syria have all experienced a dramatic decrease in numbers, shrinking in some countries to a mere 10 percent of their former size over the last century. 

The Middle East is a region that has been of prayerful concern for the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) for more than a century and a half.

But not just with prayers -- over the past 150 years, educators, theological teachers, medical teams, rural health workers, agricultural experts, engineers and other specialists have been sent as missionaries by the Presbyterian Church to the Middle East.

Last June, the PC(USA)’s 217th General Assembly overwhelmingly approved an overture calling on its more than 11,000 congregations (of which we are one) to take part in an observance of prayer and witness in support of Christians in the Middle East.

The idea was to lift up Christians in parts of the Middle East where their numbers are declining.

Our prayers and support are vital to these vulnerable communities as they strive to be faithful witnesses throughout the Middle East. And so, this morning, we are attempting to do just that.

In the hectic days just before the Iraq War, one prediction often made and systematically ignored was the warning that Western military action would put Christian populations in the whole Middle East at risk. Middle Eastern Christians would be seen as supporters of the crusading West.

At the very least, some were asking, shouldn't we have a strategy about how to handle this?

Well, we didn't have one. And the results are now painfully adding to what was already a difficult situation for Christian communities across the region. Iraq's own Christian population is dropping by thousands every couple of months and some of its most effective leaders have been forced to emigrate.

Violence, terrorism and the Islamic extremists' growing influence pose a very real threat to Christianity in the Middle East. In some countries, members of an unpopular Christian minority are already fighting for their very survival - or fleeing for their lives.

In Baghdad, the driver of a minibus, a Shiite Muslim named Ali, set out at 7 a.m. on the last Sunday before this past Christmas. A few hours earlier he had received a call on his mobile phone with instructions to pick up five passengers for a long trip outside the city.

His first passenger, he had been told, would tell him who the other passengers were and what their destination would be. He was also told not to mention a word to anyone.

The first passenger was a 24-year-old man named Raymon, who was sitting on his suitcase a few blocks away. He directed Ali through the city's dreary east side, where having a Shiite as a driver is a smart move – they drove first to the Karrada district, where Amir and Fariz boarded the bus, and then to Selakh, where Wassim and Qarram were waiting.

By 9 a.m., Ali had picked up all of his passengers and the bus left Baghdad and began traveling to the northeast -- for the 218 mile journey to Kurdistan, the only part of Iraq that is anything close to safe.

The five young men traveling in Ali's red Kia were the last seminary students at the Chaldean Catholic Bible College to leave Baghdad. Just a few months earlier four priests had been abducted, and recently two others were murdered.

Father Sami, the director of the seminary, was kidnapped in early December. The community just barely managed to raise the $75,000 required to buy his freedom.

After hesitating for weeks, Emmanuel III, the Chaldean patriarch, finally decided to close down the teaching institutions of his community in Baghdad.

He ordered the evacuation of the city's four Catholic churches, the Hurmis monastery and the college in the city's Dura neighborhood.  It was just too dangerous.

Christians have lived in the Arab world for the past 2,000 years. They were there before the Muslims. Their current predicament is not the first crisis they have faced and, compared to the massacres of the past, it is certainly not the most severe in Middle Eastern Christianity.

But in some countries, it could be the last one. Even the Pope, in his Christmas address in 2006, mentioned the "small flock" of the faithful in the Middle East, who he said are forced to live with "too little light and too much shadow," and demanded that they be given more rights.

There are no reliable figures on the size of Christian minorities in the Middle East. This is partly attributable to an absence of statistics, and partly to the politically charged nature of producing such statistics in the first place.

Given the lack of hard numbers, demographers must rely on estimates.  They approximate that Christians make up about 35 percent of the population in Lebanon, less than 10 percent in Egypt and Syria, four to six percent in Jordan, and less than two percent in Iraq.

The major political changes that are currently affecting the Middle East have led to ever shrinking Christian minorities. In Jordan, the number of Christians was reduced by half between the 1967 Six Day War and the 1990s.

In East Jerusalem, where half of the population was Christian until 1948, the year of the first Arab-Israeli war, less than five percent of residents are Christian today.

Christians in Jerusalem are a powerless minority.  Christian communities in Israel do not receive state funding equal to that of Jewish communities for education, health care, or housing.  They cannot serve in the military which precludes them from most educational and social services.

Only .4% of Iran’s population is Christian. In 1975 that number was almost four times as high. Part of the problem is that Christianity in recent times has often been feared as sympathetic to alien, Western ideals and the result is that persecution is common. 

The consequence is that the majority of Christian denominations continue to shrink due to emigration.

The fall of Saddam Hussein, once seen as having the potential to bring peace to Iraq, has unleashed unprecedented violence against the Christian community there.  Before the US led invasion of Iraq in March of 2003, there were approximately one million Christians living in Iraq – roughly 5 percent of the population. 

Iraqi Christians, though, are now equated with the occupation, as I mentioned before, regardless of their actual views. 

With the violence of war and the backlash of extremist activity, Christians have been leaving at unprecedented rates. By October 2006, more than half had left Iraq, joining families around the world or finding refuge in Jordan and Syria.

These Middle Eastern Christian communities will only survive if fellow Christians in the West decide to pay a bit of attention. This doesn't mean using political or military pressure to 'protect' them, in ways that just reinforce the idea that they're Western allies and so must be unreliable.

What it does mean, though, is being willing to protest when they are ill-treated; to make contact with them directly, to set up links between local churches here and in the Middle East.

Speaking up for and befriending the ancient Christian communities is good for them and for Muslims too; it's a reminder of the healthier and saner relationship between the faiths, which existed in many parts of the Middle East for long periods of its complicated history.

The first Christian believers were Middle Easterners. It's a very sobering thought that we might live to see the last native Christian believers in the region. It's not a problem we can go on ignoring if we care about the health and stability of the Middle East in general; we need to try and confront it by making real relationships with the communities there and working at trustful contacts with those Muslims who understand their own history and want to live in a lively and varied culture.

Our texts for this morning say that we must love one another; that we must value one another; that we must stand up for one another.  How do we do that in regards to the Middle East?  I’m not sure. 

This service is a start.  We can certainly pray.  We can become informed.  And hopefully, we can partner with a Middle Eastern Christian church to provide love, prayer, hope, and support.

It is my prayer that we will not just give lip service to the situation our brothers and sisters are faced with in the Middle East … but that we will give power to our prayers and our actions.

May God be with us as we reach out in Christian love across the seas and across the theological and liturgical divides that may separate us.

Amen.