What if The Children Leave?

Dear Members,

International Christian Concern has published the fifth installment of its series on the shrinking Christian communities of the Middle East, featuring this time the important concern for those remaining in the Holy Land. The piece reads less like a news report and more like a long-form letter. We encourage you to read it in full, and to pray for the Christian families who carry on their lives around the holy sites.

The article opens in a small olivewood shop in Bethlehem, where a father named Elias has spent his life carving crosses and nativity scenes for the pilgrims who pass through the Church of the Nativity. His grandparents are buried nearby. His children were baptized in the church down the street. And yet, Elias and his wife Rania are sitting at their kitchen table at night, worriedly working through a question neither had ever thought to be asking.

The numbers behind that question are a difficult reality. In 1947, Christians made up roughly 84 percent of Bethlehem. Today they are a small fraction of the city, and under two percent of the West Bank as a whole. In Gaza, the Christian community numbers about 1,000. A community this size feels loss to emigration and death in a very real way.

When a family in Bethlehem asks whether it can afford to stay, the answer we are called to offer is not only prayer, but the tangible support of the whole Body of Christ. Our membership, our contributions, and our prayers keep the Latin Patriarchate and the ministries it oversees at work in exactly these places.