The Five Great Global Dilemmas of the Suffering Church (Part 2)
The Middle East: How do you do church when most everyone wants to leave?
“The essence of being a leader of a suffering church with a history as long as Egypt is that you learn to think in centuries, and not everyone – including many of the Christian faithful – remembers this.”
Thus said the Coptic leader, Pope Shenouda, explaining to a small group why he publicly exhorted Egypt’s young Christians not to go to Tahrir Square in Cairo and join the demonstrations calling for the end of the strongman Hosni Mubarak. Coming during the heady days of the Arab Spring in 2011, Pope Shenouda was roundly condemned from many quarters for his apparent ‘timidity’. Mubarak was brought down, but there followed an election that put the leader of the extremist Muslim Brotherhood movement into power, who foolishly tried to fast track a more Muslim state and was deposed in a coup by a Mubarak protégé, the current leader General Abdel Fatah al Sisi in 2013. Did Shenouda see all this coming? Was he offering the 8-10 million Coptic Christians of Egypt a wise blast of realpolitik, or was he speaking as a representative of a sclerotic, elderly, and fearful clique of old men who continue to run the ancient institutional churches of the Middle East?
Many Middle Eastern Christians today continue to react to this according to age. If you are younger (and most of the region’s populations half under the age of thirty) you tend to reluctantly think that Shenouda might have been right, and that’s why you should seek to leave the region. Another older group say Shenouda was right and that to survive the future Christians must keep their heads down and not challenge Muslim leaders in order to preserve fragile tolerations. This older group want to stay but mainly because they have to. There is too much to leave behind and cannot muster the energy to make a new life, especially in a foreign country requiring other languages.
And so we get the second of our global presenting dilemmas of the global persecuted church: How do you do church when most everyone wants to leave?
Since the Arab Spring started in 2010, the Middle East has been in turmoil, although it might be more accurate to say that the region continues to be defined by its continual apocalyptic horseman… War! This brings in its wake a massive militarization. Seven out of the ten top arms buyers in the world come from this region, which is a shocking diversion of resources that could have gone into the building of more stable instructions. The Palestinian and Jewish people, for one, have experienced wars no less than nine times since end of the second world war; in 1947, 1956, 1967, 1973, 1982, 2006, 2009, 2015, 2023.
Initially it was Syria and the rise of Islamic State who in 2014 managed to install a Caliphate in a large tranche of Syria and northern Iraq. Over 100,000 Christians in the plain of Nineveh fled and less than half have returned, such are the prohibitive costs of reconstruction as well as the result of settling in the Kurdish part of Iraq. This all seems old news now, although many of the fighters of Islamic State – after their final ouster in 2019 – managed to take their expertise in running a criminal enterprise down to sub-Saharan Africa, taking advantage of the collapse in Libya to arm themselves afresh and turning the region into jihadi haven.
The Syrian armed conflict resolved after a fashion in 2024 when a jihadi militia from Idlib in the north gathered other factions to oust the Assad regime. The leader of this outfit, Ahmed al-Sharaa, quickly attempted to change his jihadist spots, donned western suits and promised a pluralist state. But Christians are not convinced, and sectarian bloodletting remains high as the country returned to top ten (at number 6) of the 2026 Open Doors World Watch List of nations where persecution of Christians is highest. The country has seen a virtual exodus since 2011, down from 1.6 million to less than 250,000 Christians today. Said a Christian leader in Aleppo, “If you are young, you have gone – this is no country in which to raise children. Only the older Christians stay, because there is just too much to leave behind, unless of course they have seen all they own reduced to rubble.” Indeed, this sentiment sadly holds for almost all the Christians of the region.
Then war reared its head again. First in Gaza when on October 7th, 2023, when Hamas fighters, who crossed the border into Israel on October 7th, 2023 on paragliders following the launch of 4,300 rockets from the strip and massacred 1200 civilians. Isreal responded by obliterating Gaza’s infrastructure and killing as many Hamas fighters as it could, though they have proven difficult to winkle out. The tiny Christian population left has largely gone, and the even smaller MBB population are refugees.
If Israel’s response to the Hamas atrocity was predictable, the war that broke out on February 29th 2026 between Israel and America on the one hand, and Iran on the other, was more surprising, even to the Gulf states who were US allies yet not consulted before the bombardments began. A fragile ceasefire is barely holding, but if the USA calculation was that they would oust the extremist regime in Iran in short order, this has proven to be a bitter disappointment. The upshot in the short term is not good for the church in Iran, which has the distinction of being the country in the world today with the largest church movement consisting of former Muslims. Most agree with the prestigious academic Farwaz Gergez who said recently, “If Iran survives, it will be a more radical Islamic state because all the more moderate leaders have been killed and those left standing will see their mere survival as proof that God is on their side.”
No other church in the world has to parse Jesus’s permission so carefully given in Matthew 10:23, “When you are persecuted in one place, flee to another.” Says a Baptist pastor in Damascus, “We are living in our fifth house in three years, and we continually discern what it means to have a home and a witness in our country when there is such chaos, despair and persecution.” Says another, in Tehran, “every Christian in our region is always saying to God, you must give me a very strong call to stay – it’s not that we seek an easier life, but we do seek a dignified and safer life for our children.”
Even more poignantly, a secret Christian in Gaza confides, “I have a recurring dream that I am living in a house with my family and the sky is blue and there is no sound of bombs, no shouts of soldiers, no gunfire, no leaflets telling us to move again… then I wake up and cry to the Lord, ‘how long’.” He added, “Please tell the world’s Christians to rejoice in peace if they have it, and then commit an act of solidarity with us for one day – queue for water for nine hours, or for kerosene for six, or even just shelter under your dining table for three, and use the time to pray for us, that we can somehow stay here and bring peace.”
The Middle East is the region where to the mere act of staying in one’s home constitutes an act of brave witness. Like Pope Shenouda, this is the church that has learned to “think in centuries” when it comes to co-operating with the mission of God.