Palestinian Christian Leader Requests Prayer that Believers Will Not Leave - July 29, 2010

The Rt. Rev. Dr. Munib A Younan, recently elected President of the Lutheran World Federation (LWF) and President of the Fellowship of Middle East Evangelical Churches has urged believers to pray that Christians in Palestine will “not lose faith and leave the country.”

Speaking in Uhlbach, a suburb of Stuttgart Germany, the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Jordan and the Middle East Bishop asked “who could imagine the Holy Land ... without Christians?”

Younan was elected LWF President this past Saturday and began his term on Tuesday.  In his sermon on Sunday during the 11^th Assembly of the LWF he said that Christians have a role to play in reconciliation and interfaith dialogue in the Middle East. 

Many Palestinian Christians have fled the Middle East in the past few years, due to “the difficulties caused by the political conflict, a lack of jobs and growing political and religious extremism,” according to Younan.  Christians now comprise less than 1.5% of the population of the Middle East.

However, Younan says that there is reason that Christians have survived some 2000 years. “We have carried the death and resurrection of our Lord in our bodies, souls and minds,” Younan stated.  “We have never ruled the country, nor were we ever in the majority. We do not have much property, power, money or influence. Yet we have survived.”

Bishop Younan called on Christians in the Middle East to be “brokers of justice, instruments of peace, ministers of reconciliation, defenders of human rights including women’s rights and apostles of love.”  He urged Christians everywhere “to serve every human being regardless of gender, race, ethnicity, religion or political affiliation”.

As “children of the light”, Christians should work to promote justice, peace and reconciliation and “to eliminate Islamophobia, xenophobia and anti-Semitism,” he added.

Younan puts action to his words. He currently serves with three Jerusalem patriarchs and nine other bishops on the International Christian Committee of Jerusalem.  He also co-founded the Council of Religious Institutions in the Holy Land, a group made up of the two chief rabbis of Israel, heads of the local churches, the Chief Judge of the Islamic Court in Palestine and other Muslim leaders.

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