The Evangelical Christian Heritage

Summary of the History of the

Evangelical Churches

in the Middle East

  The Evangelical church depends on the inspiration of the Bible and considers the Bible to be the only source for teaching.

   Most of the people in the Middle East give the name protestant to all the Evangelical churches without exception because they say the protestants are all those who have protested against the rituals and the teaching of the original church.

   The Evangelical church is the continuation of the first church as recorded in the book of Acts, which started on the day of Pentecost and taught and preached from the Bible alone. Constantine embraced the Christian faith and made the Christian church the religion of state.

   In the first half of the sixteenth century the Evangelical church appeared again in Germany and other European states and started the Renaissance refusing to submit to the ritual church of the Catholic Church. Many different denominations came out from the Protestant Reformation very similar to the Catholics, which has many branches as the Latin Catholic, the Maronites, the Franciscan, the Roman Catholics, and the Jesuits.  Yet in spite of the different denominations of the Protestants, the foundation is the same for all which the Bible as the word of God, and salvation is obtained by faith in the finished work of Christ on the cross without our work.

   In the beginning of the eighteenth century, the Presbyterian missionaries pioneered the evangelization of the people of the Middle East, then the Missionary Alliance and then the Baptist and Pentecostals and the Brethren. The first group of missionaries came to Beirut, Lebanon and established the Palestinian Mission. Later, it was called the Syrian Mission to the Holy Land and later was called the Syrian Mission and they started by building schools to teach the children, Bible schools, and Universities. One of the most famous universities is the American University of Beirut was built during the year 1847 and the American University in Cairo, Egypt. At the same time, Britain began sending missionaries to Jordan, Palestine, and Egypt and are called the Anglican Churches. They were very successful.

   During the time of Mohammed Ali Bashaln in the year 1841, he appointed the first Anglican bishop in Jerusalem and from that time on the activities of preaching and propagating the Gospel for the Evangelical Church. Both sides of the Jordan river began to be included to the churches. Around the middle of the eighteenth century, Mr. Eli Smith started translating the Bible into Arabic with the help of a very educated Lebanese person whose name was Massif Alyaziji. After Eli’s death, Dr. Cornelius Van Dyke took over the work of completing the translation of the entire Bible into the Arabic language in the year 1865.

After the Bible was translated, it spread into the Middle East and in the middle of the nineteenth century, Peter Al-bostani established the first national Presbyterian school in Beirut, Lebanon. He is also the author of the Dictionary in Arabic, which he called “Moheet Al-Muheet.”

   The Americans began to limit their missionary work and they consummated their work in the year 1958 and they gave all their work to the National Evangelical Convention, which organizes and arranges all the activities of the churches and represents them before the government.

The Lutheren Church took foot in the country of Iraq beside the Presbyterian Church in 1882 and established churches in Baghdad, Busra, Mousel, and Karkouk.

Prepared by Rev. Monthir Abdullatif