Source: The Washington Post
JERUSALEM — Lynne Hybels is revered for her work helping the impoverished around the world, but some people view her as dangerous.
Hybels, cofounder with her husband of one of the nation’s largest churches, has been called a heretic and an anti-Semite for her efforts to build bridges between Palestinians and Israelis in the Middle East.
Hybels is among a small number of influential evangelicals who are challenging a decades-long stance of blanket evangelical support for Israel’s government. They are taking trips to the Middle East, not only to visit biblical sites but to engage with modern-day Palestinians and Israelis in conversations centered more around modern politics than ancient texts. They are organizing conferences and writing publicly in an attempt to discern a new role for Christians in bringing an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Gradually, their ideas are taking hold, especially with young evangelicals.
Hybels believes that by promoting Jesus’s message of peace and reconciliation, American evangelicals can promote a solution to the conflict.
“American Christians know so little about the Middle East and yet we form very strong opinions about it,” said Hybels, who takes evangelicals from the Chicago-based Willow Creek Church on tours to both Israeli lands and Palestinian territories.
“It takes care to break out of the polarization to talk about the needs and responsibilities of both sides.”
Evangelicals tend to view Israel through a biblical lense: The place of Jesus’s birth and burial, the place to which God would call the Jews to gather before Jesus could return. Even those who didn’t embrace the theology embraced the conclusion: Support Israel.
A 2013 survey by the Pew Research Center revealed that 80 percent of evangelicals say they sympathize with Israel, while 61 percent have little or no sympathy for Palestinians.
And yet many evangelicals are not very knowledgeable about Middle Eastern politics, said Mark Amstutz, a political science professor at Wheaton College who studies evangelicals and foreign policy.
Categories: Christianity, Israel, Middle East, Palestine, The Muslim Times