Skip to content

Donate now

Choose province

Set your location

Tell us where you are so we can show you news from your area.
Visit MCC U.S.
Canada Go to U.S. site
Mennonite Central Committee

Relief, development and peace in the name of Christ

Search form

Learn more Get involved Centennial Contact us Donate
Get involved Current openings What we do
Learn more Centennial Contact us Donate
Menu

Mennonite Central Committee

Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) shares God's love and compassion for all in the name of Christ by responding to basic human needs and working for peace and justice.

About MCC​

  • Message from the executive director
  • Vision and Mission
  • Leadership and Board
  • Annual reports
  • Funding and reports
  • Coalitions
  • Historical records

COVID-19 response

  • COVID-19 stories
  • Resources for a time of uncertainty
  • Cancelled and postponed events
  • COVID-19 provincial updates
  • How you can help

Publications and resources

  • A Common Place magazine
  • In Touch newsletter
  • Intersections quarterly
  • Education resources

Stories

Webinars

Podcasts

What we do

  • Relief
  • Food
  • Water
  • Health
  • Education
  • Refugees
  • Peace
  • Restorative Justice
  • Canadian Programs

Where we work

Donate to MCC

Give a gift that changes lives, supporting MCC’s work around the world. Donate now.

Events

  • Relief sales
  • Canning

Make kits or comforters

Advocate

  • Ottawa Office
  • UN Office

Fundraise

  • Host a fundraiser
  • Donate now
  • Legacy Giving
  • My Coins Count/Penny Power
  • Giving Registries

Serve

  • Work with us
  • Volunteer locally
  • Young adult programs

Alumni

Thrift Shops

Looking for more information?
Get in touch with a representative from your region here.

Happy Birthday, MCC! 

It's been 100 years since we first started responding to basic human needs in southern Russia (present-day Ukraine). Now, we continue to work for relief, development and peace all over the world. 

Engage

  • 100 Stories
  • Alumni reunions

Give Back

  • Our Faith. Our Future.
  • Legacy giving
  • New roots

Advocate

  • Advocacy campaign
  • Send a message to your MP

To mark 100 years of sharing God’s love and compassion, and your generosity and partnership through the decades, we invite you to explore stories from MCC’s decades of work around the world.

Looking for your local office? Tell us where you are so we can show you locations and news around you.

MCC Canada
MCC Canada
134 Plaza Dr.
Winnipeg, MB R3T 5K9
Canada
Office: (204) 261-6381
Toll Free: (877) 684-1181
Fax: (204) 269-9875
canada@mcccanada.ca
News media contact: Media coordinator
134 Plaza Drive
Winnipeg, MB R3T 5K9
Canada
Office: (204) 261-6381
media@mcccanada.ca

Contact MCC

  • General contacts
  • Media contacts
  • Contact Human Resources
  • Send us your questions

Find a Thrift Shop

Manage your subscriptions

  • A Common Place magazine
  • In Touch newsletter

Where needed most

A gift to where needed most supports the breadth of MCC’s work – meeting urgent needs and building stronger, healthier communities. Give today.

Donate

  • Current disaster responses
  • Share Your Table
  • More giving projects

Giving Registries

Other ways to give

  • Make kits and comforters
  • Legacy Giving
  • My Coins Count/Penny Power
  • Support a service worker

More information

  • FAQs
  • Annual reports
  • Privacy policy
  • Security information

You are here

  1. Home
  2. Stories
  3. This is the land of the Bible
Palestine/Israel

This is the land of the Bible

The struggles of Christians in Palestine

September 7, 2017

Story by Emily Loewen, Video by Meghan Mast

It’s a Sunday morning service like many others. Filled with scripture reading and hymns accompanied by organ. During How Great Thou Art, those who know it well close their books, singing from memory. After the service people drink coffee and tea in the hall next to the sanctuary.

This congregation, however, isn’t in Abbotsford, BC or Lancaster, PA. It’s the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Beit Sahour, in Palestine’s West Bank.

Some people consider Beit Sahour to be the birthplace of Christianity. The city’s name —depending on the original language —refers either to the shepherds or the wise men in the biblical Christmas story. Two different sites in the city claim to be the fields where the shepherds saw the angels of the Lord. The city of Bethlehem lies just to the West.

Living as a Christian in the Holy Land is a special experience for Rev. Ashraf Tannous, the pastor of the Beit Sahour congregation. “This is the land of Jesus, this is the land of the Bible,” he says. “This is the land of the birth, this is the land of resurrection, this is the land of ascension, this is the land of the humiliation of Jesus, this is the land of everything. It’s very unique.”

But living in the land of the Bible also comes with challenges for Palestinians. It’s a land where the Israeli government confiscates Palestinian property. It’s a land where Palestinians need a permit to visit holy sites in Jerusalem.  It’s a land where members of Tannous’ family were forced out of their home during the war in 1948. It’s a land Palestinians, Christians and Muslims alike, are leaving in search of a life with fewer obstacles.

What makes the situation worse for Tannous is the feeling that his Christian family around the world has turned their backs. 

Pastor Ashraf challenges the global church to advocate for a just peace in Palestine and Israel. 2:21
Pastor Ashraf challenges the global church to advocate for a just peace in Palestine and Israel. 2:21

Click to watch

Close

The descendants of Jesus

Pastor Ashraf challenges the global church to advocate for a just peace in Palestine and Israel.
Download video
Download video here

You feel it burning inside you 

Tannous has been pastor at the Beit Sahour congregation for five years, but his desire to serve the church has been with him much longer. At the age of 10, the pastor of his church in Ramallah asked him to be an altar boy. “He came to my house, and he gave me the keys of the church and he told me, ‘Ashraf you are now responsible for opening the church, ringing the bells, lighting the candles.’”

That request changed his life. “I became responsible for the church, all these procedures. So then slowly it became kind of ‘in me,’ it became part of me to become a servant,” he says.  

When Tannous graduated from high school he made a deal with God – if he was accepted to study theology in Lebanon and got the necessary visas he would take that as a clear sign that God wanted him as a servant. His family tried to convince him to apply to other universities as a back-up plan, but he refused. “This is what is called, ‘the call,’ you know, you feel it burning inside you,” he says. He was accepted, and after his studies in Lebanon he went on to the World Council of Churches Ecumenical Institute at Bossey in Switzerland before doing a one-year internship in Germany.

At the end of his year in Germany he was invited to stay and work with the church there. But he chose to return to Palestine: “This is my home, this is where I belong. Here where my heart and my mind is. Here where I want to bring children, give birth to children, where I want my children to grow up and to live and to die.”

Saad Jodeh Iseid, a member of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Beit Sahour, rings the bell before the Sunday morning service with his grandchildren, Lamar Iseid, left, and Joudeh Iseid.MCC photo/Emily Loewen

Our hope comes from heaven

Choosing that life in Palestine isn’t easy. His father’s family was driven from their home in Lydda (Lod in Hebrew), in 1948 during what’s known as The War of Independence in Israel, and the Nakba (Catastrophe) for Palestinians. They fled to Jordan where five of Tannous’s aunts and uncles still live, unable to return because they don’t have the necessary Palestinian identification papers.

Travel to Jerusalem, about 30 minutes away, requires a permit which isn’t guaranteed. And even with a permit it means passing through military check-points. The former pastor of Tannous’s congregation lives near an Israeli settlement and worries his land will be taken. (Learn more about settlements). In nearby Bethlehem, multiple refugee camps are filled with generations of Palestinian families who haven’t been able to return home for nearly 60 years.  The unemployment rate in Palestine was over 26 per cent in 2014,1 it was just under 6 per cent the same year in Israel.2

Tannous has seen the Christians and Muslims in his community leave Palestine fleeing the conflict or leaving because it’s too hard to earn a living and support a family.

MCC photo/Emily Loewen

It’s a struggle to keep faith alive under occupation, says Tannous. “Most of the time we ask [God] to end occupation, to live a very beautiful life, peaceful life,” he says. “And when we don’t get these prayers fulfilled, when people don’t get it, they feel they are left by God.”

Tannous says the role of the church in this context is to help maintain hope for a peaceful and more just future. “To confirm for our people that our hope, faith and love does not come from the people themselves but it comes from heaven, from Jesus Christ the one who taught us how to hope, how to love and how to appreciate our life here.”

You have to work for love, peace and reconciliation

Tannous believes strongly in the role of the church in Palestine, but he doesn’t always feel the Christian community worldwide supports them. Despite Palestine being the land of Jesus, many are surprised to hear there are Christians living there today. “Most of the Christians all over the world unfortunately they don’t know that there are Christian brothers and sisters in Palestine, fighting for the justice, fighting for freedom,” he says.  “People think that Christianity came from Europe from American, and they forget that it comes out from this Holy Land.”

Tannous has seen churches ignore the situation or, worse, support the Israeli government, the state that’s causing his oppression.  “This is what makes me very upset that lots of Christians insist that no, the Jewish people are better than the other. No they are not better, we are all God’s children.”

MCC photo/Emily Loewen

Tannous also believes it’s the role of all Christians to put their faith into action, working for an end to occupation and conflict. He likes a quote from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “Faith without hope is sick,” but he would take it further, asking Christians to build relationships and advocate for justice. “I mean faith without hope, without love, without bridge building, without working for the others, without cooperating with the others...without working against humiliation and check points and walls is as well sick." 

"When you are a Christian you have to work for love, for peace, for reconciliation,” he says. “Defending the people who are living under occupation.”

Tannous knows that no description he offers can give a true picture of life in Palestine. His words alone aren’t enough for some to take action. That’s why he invites Christians around the world to come and see the struggles of life in the Holy Land. “The moment people come and see and recognize the existence of Christians, and not only Christians, the first Christians,” he says, “this might change lots of things.”

 

References

1. UN Data
2. UN Data


 

Pastor Ashraf's story is part of an MCC campaign called A Cry for Home. Learn more about the campaign and see how you can get involved. 

Read more stories from the A Cry for Home campaign 

View A Cry for Home fact sheets

 

Share this story
Share
Tweet
Plus 1

Donate today

Every gift makes a difference

Please enter your donation amount

Sign up for our e-newsletter

Stories and photos from MCC delivered to your inbox once a month.

Connect with MCC

Like us on Facebook
View on Instagram
Follow us on Twitter
Subscribe on Youtube
  • Learn more
    • A Common Place
    • Where we work
    • What we do
      • Relief
      • Food
      • Water
      • Health
      • Education
      • Refugees
      • Peace
      • Restorative justice
    • Privacy
  • Get involved
    • Employment
    • Events
    • Kits
    • Advocate
    • Volunteer
  • Donate
    • Donate now
    • Legacy giving
    • Donation FAQ
    • Giving registries
Mennonite Central Committee
© 2021 Mennonite Central Committee
CRA #: 107690877