Ken Sehested’s column on remembering St. Francis asked how a saint gets domesticated, made comfortable, scrubbed of the strangeness that made him worth remembering. I write from Efrat, Israel, where two years of war have kept a version of that question in front of me, applied not to a Medieval saint but to living communities: the Arab-speaking Christian congregations of the Galilee, whose pews emptied and refilled through sirens, evacuations and a war that was never theirs and never not theirs.
What their staying says about faith as a minority in a Jewish state is a story Baptist News Global’s readers are uniquely positioned to hear, told from the ground rather than the headlines.
Mark Ginsberg
The war reached the Galilee’s Christians obliquely and then directly. First came the economics, pilgrims vanished, tour buses stopped and the towns whose livelihoods waited on pilgrims’ feet went quiet within weeks. Then came the rockets, Hezbollah’s fire falling on the north, and Christian villages sat inside the same evacuation zones as their Jewish neighbors, their families scattering to churches and relatives in the center like everyone else’s.
Priests held Mass for congregations of 11. Bells rang over empty streets. And then, in the pattern the whole country learned, the refilling began, families driving back for Sunday between alerts, a baptism scheduled around the news, a choir that rehearsed on Zoom and sang together the first week the roads opened.
“What is the faith actually for, when belonging costs something.”
The emptying was the war’s doing. The refilling was theirs.
A small community in a country at war does its own arithmetic. The Galilee’s Christians number less than 2% of Israel’s population, and every family weighed what the war asked of a minority: Whether its young people should stay for a country whose flag carries a different symbol, whether the quiet accommodations of normal times still held when everything was strained.
Many left, as they have left the whole region for a century, and the departure is its own grief. But the staying majority made a choice that deserves reporting on its own terms. They sent their sons to no army but their ambulances to the same hospitals, staffed the same volunteer shifts, buried the same neighbors. The war asked them the question Sehested’s column keeps asking about the saint, stripped of comfort: What is the faith actually for, when belonging costs something.
What the staying says, the pastors and grandmothers of the Galilee would tell you plainly, is that a faith is known by where its people stand. Israel’s Christians stayed inside a Jewish state’s hardest two years not out of resignation but attachment to their villages, their language, their churches’ stones and to a country that is theirs too, imperfectly, contestedly, honestly.
For American readers watching Christian presence in the Middle East thin year by year, the Galilee’s wartime congregations are the counterexample that rarely makes the news, a minority that measured its belonging in baptisms held under alert and choirs that kept singing. The saint remembered accurately, Sehested wrote, is stranger and harder than the garden statue. So is the minority that stayed.
Mark Ginsburg is a digital marketing and analytics expert who lives in Jerusalem. He is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania.