"May this flame be found still burning.."
- May 19
- 7 min read
The Crisis and the Call to the Body of Christ
If you enter the Old City of Jerusalem from Damascus Gate and take Al Zytoun El Shafa towards the Cardo there’s a chance you might find St. Mark’s Church. It’s easily missed, but worth the effort - if only to stand for a moment on the street outside, and consider what happened here one late Spring morning.
Evidence suggests this is the place where the Upper Room was located — and it is here, on the first Pentecost, that three thousand people were baptised. Every Christian alive or dead is linked to those people who were on this street that fateful morning in May. Every Christian was baptised by someone who was baptised by someone who is connected by unbroken chain to this street, on that day, and those three thousand people.
The families of those first baptised have lived continuously in Jerusalem and the Holy Land. Through Roman occupation, and Arab conquest, through Crusades and Ottoman rule, through British mandate and the foundation of Israel - they have been a continuous presence. A presence that has been the Salt of the Earth more faithfully than many Christian communities. They built schools and taught the children - hospitals to care for the sick and in St. Mark’s Church to this day, they pray in the language Jesus spoke.
This could be the last generation that does.
This is the crisis of the remaining Christians - what has happened to them while the world looked away. The crisis facing everyone from the River to the Sea if the Body of Christ is erased from the Land.
A Community Rooted in the Land
Their presence belies a dangerous myth - that the current conflict is a religious war between Jews and Muslims or Islam and the West. The native Christians show this is untrue. Christianity was not imported to Palestine by European missionaries or British administrators. It was born there. And it spread from the street outside St. Mark’s like fire blown on by a mighty wind.
Yet theirs is the voice that is never heard, theirs the story never told. It’s the story of nurses and teachers, scout troops and soup kitchens, and a community that’s kept the flame of Faith burning in the land of Christ’s birth. It’s the story of Palestinian Christians and it deserves to be heard - before their light is extinguished forever.
They trace their presence in the land directly to the earliest church — communities gathered in Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Nazareth, and Gaza within living memory of the Resurrection. As Fr. John Paul SJ, Rector of the Tantur Ecumenical Institute in Jerusalem, put it to a London audience in October ‘25:
“We are not an imported faith. Christianity was not shipped here from Europe. We are part of the soil, part of the history, part of the living story of this land for two thousand years.”
Small in Number, Immense in Contribution
Today, Palestinian Christians make up less than 2% of the population of the Holy Land. Yet the social infrastructure they sustain is extraordinary.
A landmark 2021 study — the first of its kind — mapped 296 church-related organisations (CROs) operating across the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem. Together, they employ over 9,000 people and invest approximately $416 million every year in healthcare, education, development, and social protection. They serve around 1.9 million Palestinians annually — roughly 37% of the entire Palestinian population in these territories. Crucially, more than 90% of the beneficiaries are not Christian. This is not a self-serving community, but one that exists to serve. They understand Christ’s answer to “Who is my neighbour?” and live the lesson of the Good Samaritan.
Four of the six specialist hospitals in Jerusalem are church-affiliated. They treat over 330,000 patients a year, providing services including paediatric cancer care, cardiac surgery, eye care, and maternal health that would otherwise simply not exist. Ninety-three schools, universities, and vocational centres educate nearly 182,000 students. Forty-seven social protection organisations care for the elderly, the disabled, and the most marginalised. These institutions are the social fabric of Palestinian civil society. Remove them, and the fabric tears.
These organisations are also the most significant employers in the Palestinian economy — behind only the Palestinian Authority and UNRWA, and ahead of the largest private sector companies. They’re not only native to the land, they are Salt and Light at the crossroads of history.
A Voice for Peace in a Land of Division
Beyond the institutions, Palestinian Christians offer something harder to quantify but equally vital: a theology of reconciliation in a landscape defined by division.
The Tantur Ecumenical Institute sits at the crossroads between Jerusalem and Bethlehem. Its mission, as Fr. JP described it, is to be a crossroads where East and West meet, a lighthouse of unity in diversity, and a bridge between peoples who might otherwise never encounter one another. There are many who share this ethos.
Musalaha, meaning “reconciliation” in Arabic, is a faith-based organization that teaches, trains, and facilitates reconciliation between diverse ethnic, religious, and social groups, drawing on biblical principles and indigenous practices to pursue joint liberation and redemption through nonviolent co-resistance. Bethlehem Bible College - “working toward a society built on the Word of God and the values of love, mercy, justice, and truth.” And the Holy Land Trust - Bethlehem non-profit dedicated to promoting nonviolence, healing, and peacebuilding.
These are not peripheral voices. As the Bishops of the Holy Land Coordination put it: they are people whose faith makes them “salt of the earth” and “light of the world” — “witnesses to the possibility of peace even in conditions designed to extinguish hope.” These Catholic bishops from across the world visited the region in January 2026. They were moved by encounters with Israeli and Palestinian parents who’d each lost a child to the conflict but could still speak of forgiveness. “When such a mother or father pleads for an end to violence,” the communiqué stated, “the world must listen — and act.”
The Crisis Is Now Urgent
And yet this community is under existential threat — not from the conflict alone, but from a sustained pattern of pressure that is driving Christians from the land their ancestors never left.
In the West Bank, settler violence against Palestinian villages has intensified sharply. The village of Taybeh — the only entirely Christian Palestinian village in the West Bank — reported in May 2026 that Israeli settlers had established a new illegal outpost on their land and threatened to kill anyone who returned to their property. This was not an isolated incident. Bishop James Curry, lead bishop for the Holy Land of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales, who visited Taybeh just months earlier in January, condemned the attack as part of a pattern: olive trees uprooted, land seized, daily life rendered unbearable by intimidation. “This pattern of intimidation and violence too often goes unaddressed,” he warned.
Speaking to Christians in Jerusalem and the West Bank there’s one factor that each of them cite as causing most damage.
The absence of pilgrims.
The Holy Land’s economy has relied on pilgrimage for 2000 years and the absence of tourism has created real poverty. The guesthouses, restaurants, craft workers and tour guides have seen their livelihoods vanish. And is it’s this factor more than any that’s led families to leave - knowing they may never return. The damage is not just financial. There is a real sense of abandonment among these Christians who feel that the world has forgotten them, especially their siblings in Faith.
Compounding this are growing financial pressures through new taxation measures, clergy facing visa restrictions, and churches that have been desecrated. Communities that have survived for two millennia have been told they have no future in the land. If current trends continue, the Christians of the Holy Land — ancient, indigenous, and irreplaceable — will simply cease to exist.
What You Can Do
If you, who are reading this, are also a Christian, then you are not a bystander in this story. You share a faith with these communities, and you owe that faith - at least in part - to the witness of their ancestors. Our connection is more than familial - we are members of One Body. And this is what we can do:
PRAY - This is no platitude. The communities of the Holy Land have asked for prayer explicitly and urgently. You can find ways to pray with these communities through the Christian Media Centre, pilgrimsofhope.co.uk and Friends of the Holy Land, and with informed awareness of what they’re living through. Speak to your Church, Parish or community about twinning with Holy Land Churches and pray together more intimately online.
GO ON PILGRIMAGE - Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, has made a direct appeal in the words of Jesus Christ:
Come and See! And when you visit, stay in a local guesthouses, shop at family businesses, sit with a community facing emigration. When you do this you are saying: “We see you. You are not alone. We have not forgotten.”
Bishop Curry has echoed this call:
Pilgrimage is solidarity through encounter, and it has direct economic consequence for communities facing ruin.
BEAR WITNESS - Write to your MP, sign relevant petitions, and use whatever platform you have to amplify these voices. Counter the false narrative that Palestinian Christians are recent arrivals or bit-part players. They are an ancient people, a living church, and a vital bridge between communities. Their story deserves to be told accurately and widely.
SUPPORT THE ORGANISATIONS ON THE GROUND - Caritas Jerusalem, the Latin Patriarchate, Bethlehem University, the Augusta Victoria Hospital, Christian Aid, and many others do extraordinary work with limited resources. Your financial support, however modest, sustains institutions that serve hundreds of thousands of people who have nowhere else to turn.
A Final Word
To paraphrase Fr. JP of the Tantur Institute - if you have read this far you know bear responsibility. To act or not to act are both conscious choices and each have consequences that will reach beyond the Christians of the Holy Land. Helping to sustain their presence is an act of charity toward all who live there - Jewish, Muslim, Atheist or Christian. Supporting their presence will help promote peace.
It falls on us to ensure the flame of hope burns bright in the Land of the Resurrection.
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