A freshman came in to talk with me today about his plans to go to the WB for the summer. The plan is to live in a refugee camp with friends of the family who are serving with Fs in a tough neighborhood outside of the city of David's birth. As he told me the plan, I grew increasingly alarmed, and I realized that the insider strategy followed by some organizations is really a bad idea in a place as saturated with missionaries and as politicized as a refugee camp on the WB.
As I spoke with this student, I emphasized that this strategy actually weakens our witness. By criticizing other Christians for not evangelizing, by failing to support believers--both indigenous and from non-Christian backgrounds, we are not supporting our brothers and sisters in the faith. Our students should be able to work with Christian groups in places like the WB where there are evangelical Christians. If they do not, and instead go "underground" they open up the body to suspicion and doubt. Dissimulation is a strategy necessitated only where it is truly dangerous to openly identify oneself as a Christian. This is not the case in the Holy Land.
Hear more about this today in the SMU office from 3-7, and the debate in the Collegium from 7-9 between Jeff Morton and Carl Medieras.
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