ICC Note: 22 regional church leaders met in Jordan to discuss the unification and cause for saving the Middle Eastern church. The level of human suffering, especially among the Christian community in Iraq and Syria is posing a great threat to the survival of the Christian population in those countries. For centuries Christians and Muslims lived peacefully side by side., why can’t they now?

09/08/2016 Jordan (The Jordanian Times): Heads of 22 regional churches met on the Dead Sea shores and agreed on the need for a unified ecclesiastical voice of Middle Eastern churches as an instrument for entrenching peace, tolerance and acceptance, greatly needed in the climate of death and atrocity much of the region is facing, most of it perpetrated by misguided religious zealots.

The clergy acknowledged the need to speak against the “forces of evil” and focus on “the alleviation of the human suffering”, and called on Christian Arabs to stay in their countries, to defy attempts at uprooting them from their ancestral lands.

The message comes at a more critical time than ever, when many Christian Arabs were forced to flee their homeland, in Iraq, Syria and elsewhere in the region, and seek safe haven elsewhere.

The plight of Christian Arabs, like that of their Muslim compatriots, is deplorable and a stain on humanity.

That in this day and age people should still be persecuted for their religious belief, enslaved or killed for it, goes against any claim at civilisation.

If anything, it is antithetical to it and to humaneness, the act of sick minds that have no values whatsoever, much less religious values, which they claim.

The loss of millions of Christian Arabs is a catastrophe for the Middle East and its future.

Christians have forever been part of the social fabric in this part of the world, the neighbours and friends who contributed in equal measure to the economy of their countries and in immense measure to the cultural and spiritual dimension of any given community.

For centuries, Muslims and Christians lived side by side in brotherly and cordial relations, fighting for common national or ideological causes.

…

[Full Story]