Syria #1: Encouragement
Encouragement
For the team, Rev. Jack Baca
The Village Community Presbyterian Church, Rancho Sante Fe, CA
For several months now, our team of eight hardy souls has been preparing for yet another trip to visit part of our Christian family in Syria. We come from different parts of the United States, but we are bound together through faith in Christ, membership in the Presbyterian Church, involvement with The Outreach Foundation, and an affirmative answer to Christ’s call to be involved in relationships with those of similar faith in different parts of the world. Many Christians in the West have scant knowledge of the church in the Middle East, even though the church was born here. And so there is a particular passion in my heart to come on this, my fifth trip into Syria, not only so that I can share the story with folks back home about the faithful church that remains here but also so that I can continue to find inspiration and nourishment for my own faith from this part of the Body of Christ that has become so precious to me.
We make our way north through Lebanon, endure the normal wait that all governmental bureaucracies require for people to cross lines that we ourselves have created across God’s borderless creation, and then stop at a very small church within the National Evangelical Synod of Syria and Lebanon (the Presbyterian Church), before reaching our final destination for the next few days in Latakia, a large port city that is home to the largest congregation within the Synod. The town where we pause is called Baniyas. The church there is only a few dozen in number. Where the Latakia Church enjoys a historic, sizeable, and beautiful sanctuary in a bustling part of the city, the church in Baniyas makes do with a rented apartment in a nondescript residential neighborhood. The church here is “too small” for its own pastor, so the pastors from Latakia make the 30-minute trip once a week or so to lead worship and meet with the faithful. It is Friday, not the normal day for Christian worship, but the members of the church have made a special effort to come to meet us, and share a meal with us of both physical food and also – even more so – spiritual sustenance.
In one sense, our brief sojourn in Baniyas is something of a sidebar excursion on our way to the actual destination in Latakia. It’s only a few people. It’s only a small church. And yet…that is not the whole story.
My own spiritual journey began in a small town in New Mexico, in a small church that, compared to Baniyas, was huge. My home congregation of 125 folks was yoked with a tiny congregation of about 25 people in a mountain village 25 miles away. Every Sunday, our pastor would lead worship at 9:00 a.m. in the “main” church, then drive for 30 minutes in order to lead worship at the smaller church at 11:00. And, once a month, he would drive on, another 50 miles, most of it on dirt roads, to a little schoolhouse that had once served the ranching families of the region. At 3:00 p.m. he would lead worship for maybe 10 people, or five, and then, not finished yet, he would drive on another 30 miles, to a small town in the proverbial middle of nowhere. At 7:00 p.m., in a trailer home converted to a sanctuary, he would preach to another 10 to 15 people. He would return by a different route, completing a circle of sorts, arriving at home by 10:00 or 11:00 at night. You can understand why he did this only once a month.
Once, when I was a seminary student at far away Princeton, and our pastor was incapacitated by a brain tumor that would take his life a year later, I preached for six weeks in my home church. Exactly one preaching class under my belt at seminary qualified me for the task, I suppose. So, this meant that one Sunday, I made the trek of a couple of hundred miles to preach in Magdalena, then the Dusty schoolhouse, and finally at Winston. That was more than 40 years ago, but the memory is fresh, and the lesson sticks with me.
Here, in Banias, our team is greeted as if we were all long-lost daughters and sons returning home. Here, I see familiar faces from a similar visit a few years back. Here, I encounter the Body of Christ, the family of faith, the remnant who carries on. Their perseverance strengthens me. Their joy enlivens me. Their witness both chastens me and spurs me on, as I think of the many benefits I enjoy in a 1000-member congregation back home in California. Once again, I am confronted by the presence of a God whose purpose and plan to bless the world disregards the strength of numbers and often is accomplished by only a few. This is how powerful our God is.
Sometimes, the church thrives and grows. And sometimes, it suffers, and barely hangs on. But it always goes on, not by its own power, but by the power of its Lord, the same Lord who once was completely deserted and alone, but who nevertheless kept on going. And he prevailed.
Christianity in America is suffering a decline right now. Churches are fewer in number, and there are fewer people in our remaining churches. But so what? The faithful few in the old schoolhouse in Dusty, or the trailer home in Winston, or the apartment in Baniyas, kept on and keep on going. The Lord of the church, who himself is the source of the church’s life, will not let his church die. To the folks in Baniyas, near and dear to me, I say, “thank you.” Thank you for reminding me of our reliance on Christ. And thank you for imparting some encouragement into this pastor’s soul.
