Evangelicals in the Arab World: The Example of Lebanon

Abstract

This chapter analyzes Evangelical missionary activity in the Muslim-Arab world, focusing on the case of Lebanon. All over the world, Pentecostal Churches aim to spread the Gospel, i.e. the ‘Good News’, among people; these organizations may have experienced great success in Africa and South America, but their missionary activity in the Muslim world faces many obstacles. Admittedly, the phenomenon of conversions to Christianity under the influence of the Evangelical Christian missionaries does not constitute a mass phenomenon in the Arab world. However, it receives a great deal of media attention and is treated in a sensationalist manner. Moreover, the stakes involved go beyond its breadth of conversions. Researchers have noticed that the emergence of fundamentalist movements is a product of the standardization and erosion of traditional values, linked to the process of decline of religion and the destruction of cultural areas, and caused by the phenomenon of globalization (Anderson, 2004). In any case, it is no coincidence that the problem of apostasy in the Islamic world raises such unbridled passions. As a matter of fact, an apostate calls into question the definition of the borders of social cohesion when it becomes apparent that common citizenship of a nation is insufficient to delimit its contours.