Category: Current Events

This is part two of the Eddy family’s story. To read about the Eddy missionaries in Sidon, click here.

William Alfred Eddy was an American hero. Nicknamed “Bill,” he received the Navy Cross, two Silver Stars, and two Purple Hearts for his service in World War I. During World War II, he quit his job as a college president to reenlist and helped plan the Allied invasion of North Africa. Later, as a diplomat, he advanced Franklin Roosevelt’s agenda by forging the US alliance with Saudi Arabia.

“Eddy (hereafter ‘Bill’) managed to pack four or five lives into a single lifetime,” wrote Princeton University’s alumni magazine about its former doctoral graduate. One of those lives began as a missionary kid to an American family in the Levant.

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Part one of this series chronicled the Eddys’ multigenerational service in Lebanon, particularly its southern city of Sidon. Active in evangelism, education, and medical work, some of the Eddys died on the field and are buried in local evangelical cemeteries.

So was Bill. But while his gravestone inscription marks the rank of colonel in the US Marine Corps, it doesn’t include the number of years he “served the Lord” like his family members’ gravestones.  The modern Eddy biographer, Muhammad Abu Zaid, didn’t criticize either approach. He called Bill the American “Lawrence of Arabia” and sympathized with his family’s earlier religious commitments.

In Forgotten Pages from the Ancient History of Sidon, published in Arabic by the Baptists of Lebanon, the president of the Sunni Muslim Sharia Law Court in Sidon described the religious and social development of Protestant ministry through building churches, schools, and clinics. Bill, he contrasted, pursued his country’s political objectives in the Arab world.

But today, evangelicals number only one percent of the Lebanese population. And polls indicate America’s poor reputation in the Middle East. Secular or spiritual, how does Abu Zaid evaluate the Eddys’ presence in his homeland?

“I felt sorry for them,” he told CT. “They didn’t succeed.”

The story continues from part one, with William Alfred, age 10, watching his father William King die suddenly on a preaching tour. After this traumatic experience, Bill moved to America and eventually enrolled in a Presbyterian university. Two years later, he transferred to Princeton and graduated in 1917. When the US entered World War I, he enlisted, fought in the tide-turning battle of Belleau Wood, and suffered a leg injury that made him limp for the rest of his life. After receiving his PhD in 1922, he joined the American University in Cairo, and one year later, he became chair of the English department.

Bill remained devout in his Christian faith—he even…

This article was originally published at Christianity Today on September 5, 2025. Please click here to read the full text.

Christianity Today ends every year with a survey of its most-read and most-important stories in several categories. Click here for the home page, and in the link above to see the Top 10 overall — for which mine did not qualify.

But for the Top 10 news stories, several of mine were grouped at #4 under the Israel-Hamas War heading. This one was signaled out among the most pivotal:

Amid Israel-Hamas War, Local Christians Seek Righteous Anger and Gospel Hope

The Top 20 international stories were listed by most-read, with the attacks on churches in Manipur, India ranking #1. The Israel-Hamas war was grouped together at #2, with this article highlighted:

Palestinian Evangelicals Call Western Church to Repentance, Criticized in Return

Here is the list of the most popular other articles I contributed:

#3 — Turkish Christians Plead: Don’t Distribute Bibles After Earthquake

#7 — ‘We Are Not in Heaven’: Niger Analyst Explains Christians’ Concern After Coup

#8 — Saudi Arabia Embraced Coptic Christmas. Could Its First Church Be Next?

#11 — Train Up a Child: Ukraine’s Christian Schools Model Wartime Education

#19 — Quran Burning in Sweden Singes Muslim-World Christians

In another category, 12 articles were chosen by the editor of audience engagement for favorite less-read stories she wanted to re-circulate. This one was listed first:

From Dust to Lunch: Jordanian Christians Decry Cost of Funeral Feast

Finally, 13 stories were selected to highlight from the Greater Middle East, arranged in chronological order. Click here to see the list, or on select individual articles from Iran, Lebanon, Morocco, Sudan, Syria, and others.

Thank you for reading along faithfully this past year. Your prayers are appreciated for better reporting in 2024, and more importantly, for a better world.

When “God’s smuggler” came to the Middle East, he went through the front door. Once known for hiding Bibles in the back of his Volkswagen when crossing behind the Iron Curtain, Brother Andrew instead simply handed them to terrorists. Coupled with his devotion to the Palestinian church, the founder of Open Doors shook the Western Christian status quo.

Arab evangelicals loved him for it.

“He had a soft heart for those in pain, the persecuted, and those usually considered on the other side, the enemy,” said Jack Sara, general coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa Evangelical Alliance. “He was willing to step into a difficult place and talk with difficult people, but never compromise the message of the gospel.”

The news of Anne van der Bijl’s death Tuesday at age 94 shook participants during the second general assembly of the World Evangelical Alliance’s (WEA) Arab world region. David Rihani, president of the Jordan Evangelical Council, recalled the words of his father who received the Dutch evangelical frequently.

“This man is an example of a real Christian leader,” the first Jordanian evangelical pastor told his son. “He writes books, he shares knowledge, and he cares about everyone without discrimination.”

Rihani praised Brother Andrew’s ecumenical cooperation. Developing relationships with traditional Catholic and Orthodox leaders in the region, for decades Open Doors has chronicled persecution against all Christian denominations. And as the group’s advocacy across 60 countries grew to include the plight of believers in other religious traditions, the Bible smuggler won respect in the wider human rights community as well.

“He advocated tirelessly for religious freedom, a source of hope to persecuted Christian communities around the world,” tweeted US Ambassador-at-Large Rashad Hussain, a Muslim. “I’m grateful his legacy will live on in the work of @OpenDoors.”

But it was his literature that originally established Brother Andrew’s worldwide fame. God’s Smuggler, written in 1967, sold more than 10 million copies and was translated into 35 languages—including Arabic.

Maher Fouad, president of the General Society for Iraqi National Evangelical Churches, was touched most by And God Changed His Mind (1990). Calling Andrew a “blessed saint,” he recalled reading the book in 1991 when he headed the prayer ministry of the National Evangelical Church of Baghdad.

“It redirected me completely,” Maher said. “He knew how to slowly enter the presence of God, and only then find answers to prayer.”

The publication of Light Force in 2004 highlighted to the world Brother Andrew’s increased attention to the Muslim world. Acclaimed to be as captivating as Smuggler, his dependence on prayer was on display in practical concern for the Middle Eastern church.

“My purpose is to encourage and strengthen the local believers to be a Light Force,” he wrote, “an alternative to military might.”

But first he modeled it himself. In 1992, when 415 militants from Hamas were expelled by Israel to the side of a mountain in southern Lebanon’s Marj al-Zohour, Brother Andrew saw an opportunity to…

This article was originally published by Christianity Today on September 29, 2022. Please click here to read the full text.

Four years ago, Shenouda was an infant found at the door of a Coptic church. Today, renamed Yusuf, the boy is found in a state-run orphanage. In between lies the care of a priest, the devastation of a Christian family, and a sectarian bureaucracy undergoing partial reform.

Egypt is home to a Dickens-like tragedy.

“Adoption is not legal in Egypt,” said Nermien Riad, executive director of Coptic Orphans. “There is no possibility it will happen as known in the Western world.”

The boy’s family name and location have been kept anonymous as a cautionary measure, as reported by the Coptic publication Watani. Likely left by an unwed mother, the child was found by a Coptic priest who presented him to the couple, infertile for 29 years.

They took him into their home, obtained a birth certificate as if he was their own, and raised him with love and devotion. They gave him a Christian-signifying first name, honoring the prior Coptic Orthodox pope, and per Egyptian naming custom the four-generation quadrilateral was completed with the names of the doting father, grandfather, and great-grandfather.

All was idyllic, until a jealous niece realized the impact on her inheritance.

Egypt’s Islamic-based law, seeking to preserve lineage, prohibits taking another’s child as one’s own. The niece reported the couple to the police, who investigated. The prosecution determined there was no blood relation, but also no ill will.

The father signed a paper stating he found the child “on the street,” likely to shield the priest’s involvement. But though the case was dropped last February, the boy was taken to an orphanage. With no papers to prove his ancestry, he was assumed to be a Muslim—and thus forbidden to live with a Christian family—and given the religiously neutral name Yusuf, the Arabic equivalent of Joseph.

The desperate parents protested: What Muslim would leave their unwanted child at a church? Denied, they were even forbidden from visiting him in the orphanage. Their applications for employment at the facility were turned down. According to the Ministry of Social Solidarity, Egypt has…

This article was originally published at Christianity Today on September 27, 2022. Please click here to read the full text.

A thousand more Christians were killed for their faith last year than the year before.

A thousand more Christians were detained.

Six hundred more churches were attacked or closed.

And Afghanistan is the new No. 1, according to the 2022 World Watch List (WWL), the latest annual accounting from Open Doors of the top 50 countries where it is most dangerous and difficult to be a Christian.

“This year’s findings indicate seismic changes in the persecution landscape,” said David Curry, president of Open Doors USA.

Since Open Doors began its tally in 1992, North Korea has led the ranking. But since Afghanistan’s takeover by the Taliban last August, Afghan believers have had to leave their country or relocate internally. Many lost everything they had, notes the report, while house churches were closed in their wake.

“Before the Taliban, it was not great, but it was good,” said one evacuated Afghan, requesting anonymity in hopes that he may one day return. “[Now] Christians are living in fear, in secret, totally underground.”

Open Doors is quick to note the displacement of North Korea to No. 2 does not reflect an improvement in religious freedom there. On the contrary, a new anti–reactionary thought law has resulted in an increase of Christian arrests and house church closures.

Overall, 360 million Christians live in nations with high levels of persecution or discrimination. That’s 1 in 7 Christians worldwide, including 1 in 5 believers in Africa, 2 in 5 in Asia, and 1 in 15 in Latin America. Last year, for the first time in 29 years of tracking…

This article was originally published by Christianity Today on January 19, 2022. Please click here to read the full text, and here for the Arabic version.

I was able to contribute additional reporting to this AP article. Here is an excerpt of testimony from 2 of 4 Armenian evangelical sources:

“The American people honor all those Armenians who perished in the genocide that began 106 years ago today,” Biden said in a statement. “We affirm the history. We do this not to cast blame but to ensure that what happened is never repeated.”

Rene Leonian, president of the Union of Armenian Evangelical Churches in Eurasia, told CT he “salutes the courage” of the US president.

“Biden will open a new page for the American nation. This new page will also allow other countries to follow his example,” he said. “I deeply hope that in the future, the Turkish State will do an in-depth work collectively with its own people, to acknowledge the guilt of the Turkish authorities of 1915.”

“In a Christian spirit, reconciliation is possible when the culprit recognizes his fault, regrets, and asks for forgiveness,” Leonian told CT. “What is impossible for men is possible for God! I believe that through prayer, patience, and perseverance, we will get there.”

Paul Haidostian, president of evangelical Haigazian University in Beirut, Lebanon, told CT he found Biden’s word choice to be “gratifying.”

“Late recognition is naturally better than no recognition. However, for me the use of the term genocide in a statement is not a simple sound bite,” he said. “It is a commitment to justice, and those who have recognized genocide as a historical fact must know that this is not a posthumous medal on a coffin; rather, a commitment for pursuing the matter in various ways, academic, political, curricular, economic, etc.”

Haidostian described how he has expected a US pronouncement every year of his adult life, as has the wider Armenian diaspora.

“Having to wait year after year for 106 years for presidents or parliaments of countries of the world to remember and call the atrocities in the proper way has been painful and has represented the defeat of a sense of justice in the face of political strategy,” he told CT.

“Armenian advocacy is not a political act or maneuver. It is the voice of the Armenian heart that has ached for so long.”

This article was originally published at Christianity Today on April 24, 2021. Please click here to read the full text.

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After 85 years as a museum, the Hagia Sophia is poised to once again become a mosque. Might it also again become a church?

A Turkish court is scheduled to rule on July 2 if the iconic Byzantine basilica can be opened for Muslim worship.

Built in 537 by Emperor Justinian, in 1453 the Ottoman sultan Mehmet II converted the Hagia Sophia into a mosque. Five centuries later, the secularizing founder of modern Turkey, Kamal Ataturk, turned it into a museum.

UNESCO designated the Hagia Sophia as a World Heritage Site in 1985.

President Recep Erdogan has long stated his desire that the building would welcome prayer. In March, he led guests in silent Quranic recitation on the 567th anniversary of the conquest of Constantinople, dedicating the prayer to Mehmet II.

Last week, Erdogan found an unlikely supporter.

“I believe that believers’ praying suits better the spirit of the temple than curious tourists running around to take pictures,” tweeted Armenian Patriarch Sahak II, resident in Istanbul. “The site is large enough to allocate a space for Christians, [so that] the world…

This article was first published at Christianity Today, on June 29, 2020. Please click here to read the full text.