Office of Social Justice Seeks Prayer for Church in Bethlehem

The CRC Office of Social Justice is seeking prayers to support a Presbyterian church in Bethlehem, Palestine that is struggling to obtain ownership of a former Bible conference center now being occupied by Israeli settlers.

In a prayer request sent out this week, OSJ said it is important to show solidarity with Danny Awad, pastor of Baraka Presbyterian Church, and his congregation in Bethlehem.

“Ministers from Baraka have visited the CRC in the past and consider us their friends,” said Peter VanderMeulen, coordinator of OSJ.  “We are taking up their cause and making it our cause as best we can.”

Awad says he is grateful for the support and prayers.

“We continue to call for prayer because the settlers and the army took over the conference center,” said Awad.

“We pray that the Lord will perform a miracle to save this place and to return it back to be used as a Christian center for our people.”

Awad’s congregation, along with Arab Christians from nearby churches as well as Muslims and Jews, have held protests outside the former Beit El Baraka Bible Conference Center for the last several weeks.

They have been trying to draw attention to the discovery earlier this year that the center had been sold in the late 2000s to a Swedish ‘mission group’ that was secretly run by an Israeli settler’s organization, said VanderMeulen.

“This is all part of a process of illegal settlements that are among the roots of the ongoing problems between Palestinians and Israelis,” said VanderMeulen.

VanderMeulen said the nine-acre conference center was built by the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions in 1945 before the establishment of the state of Israel.

“After first being used as a hospital and sanitarium, it was converted in the 1980s into the Bible Conference Center that hosted Christian camps, welcomed tourists, and held conferences for churches,” said VanderMeulen.

Beit El Baraka flourished for many years, but the Intifadas or violent uprisings in the late 1980s caused attendance to drop. Then, said VanderMeulen, a split in the Bible Presbyterian Church caused the mission board to lose most of its funding, which meant it needed to find another group to run it.

At that time, Barka Presbyterian Church members believed that as the Presbyterian congregation nearest the Bible Conference Center, located midway between Bethlehem and Hebron, the property would be transferred to them.

“I was there and saw how happy and full of praises they were when they thought this was going to happen,” said VanderMeulen.

But the decision was made in 2008 to sell the property to the group from Sweden, which bought the center promising to fix up the property and use it for ministry purposes.

“That never happened and now settlers have been moving in,” said VanderMeulen. “They are stringing barbed wire around the compound and the army is guarding it.”

News reports say Swedish officials have condemned the sale to the group that represented the settlers. In addition, new reports say Israel formally agreed this month to annex the property and make it part of a larger settlement complex.

“This story is important because we believe an injustice is being perpetuated against Palestinian Christians, but also because it illustrates the much bigger issue of the illegal settlements that we see going on over there and the ongoing problems that they are causing,” said VanderMeulen.

About two percent of the Palestinian population is Christian. Baraka Presbyterian Church is the only Reformed-affiliated church in the region, and as such has ties with the CRC.

In part, the prayer request sent to CRC congregations reads:

“Lord of comfort and peace, we lift our voices in unison with our brothers and sisters in Christ in Bethlehem. We pray that they may know they are not alone, that they have not been abandoned or forgotten, and that Christians around the world stand with them in love and fellowship.”