Evangelizing Lebanon

Baptists, Missions, and the Question of Cultures

Melanie E. Trexler

• Publisher: Baylor University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781481302593
• eBook ISBN: 9781481302616
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History

In 1893, Said Jureidini, an Arabic-speaking Christian from the Ottoman Empire, experienced an evangelical conversion while attending the Chicago World's Fair. Two years later he founded the first Baptist church in modern-day Lebanon. For financial support, he aligned his fledgling church with American Landmark Baptists and, later, Southern Baptists. By doing so, Jureidini linked the fate of Baptists in Lebanon with those in the United States.

In  Evangelizing Lebanon, Melanie E. Trexler explores the complex, reflexive relationship between Baptist missionaries from the States and Baptists in Lebanon. Trexler pays close attention to the contexts surrounding the relationships, the consequences, and the theologies inherent to missionary praxis, carefully profiling the perspectives of both the missionaries and the Lebanese Baptists. 

Trexler thus discovers a fraught mutuality at work. U.S. missionaries presented new models of church planting, evangelism, and educational opportunities that empowered the Lebanese Baptists to accomplish personal and communal goals. In turn, Lebanese Baptists prompted missionaries to rethink their ideas about mission, Muslim-Christian relations, and even American foreign policy in the region.

But Trexler also reveals how missionaries' efforts to evangelize Muslims came to threaten the very security of the Lebanese Baptists. Trexler shows how Baptist missionary theology and praxis in Lebanon had more to do with bolstering an insular Baptist identity in the U.S. than it did with engaging in interfaith relationships with Lebanese Muslims. Ironically, American Baptists' efforts to help ultimately spun out of control and led to unintended consequences. Trexler's study of Baptists in Lebanon serves as a warning for missional identity everywhere, Baptist or not: missionary insistence on a narrow and politically useful definition of what it means to be Christian can both aid and undermine, build and destabilize.

1

Landmarkers in the Holy Land

Ottomans, Landmarkers, and the Formation of a Southern Baptist Mission in the Holy Land

1893–1919

The Baptist church took root in modern-day Lebanon due to the efforts of Arabic-speaking Baptists funded by Landmark Baptists in the United States, not foreign missionaries. Baptist beginnings in Lebanon date back to 1893, when Said Jureidini, a twenty-seven-year-old Greek Orthodox Christian from Mount Lebanon, boarded a ship destined for New York.24 He joined hundreds of people journeying to America to participate in the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, also known as the Chicago World’s Fair. There, he dazzled fairgoers by performing the sword dance in front of the camels in the Wild East exhibit in the Midway Plaisance. During his time in the United States, Jureidini experienced an evangelical conversion that sent him into the waters of baptism at the Third Baptist Church in St. Louis, Missouri. Motivated by his newfound faith and the possibility of financial support from America, Jureidini returned to Beirut to found the first Baptist church in the Syrian province of the Ottoman Empire in 1895.25

Baptist historians celebrate Jureidini as the first Baptist to embark on mission work in modern-day Lebanon, paving the way for Southern Baptists to adopt the area as a mission field in the twentieth century.26 In Palestinian Tapestries (1936), the earliest history of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) mission in the modern-day Middle East, missionary Mattie Reid Watts praised Jureidini as a “cultured, gifted, and eloquent” man who “has through these many years preached to multitudes of people the love of Christ. Persecutions and privations have been as nothing as long as he has been at his appointed task.”27 Her account touted Jureidini as the farmer who scattered the seeds of Baptist faith in the Holy Land. By building on the efforts of Arabic-speaking Baptist pioneer Said Jureidini, Southern Baptists used Lebanon as a gateway for missional activity in the wider Middle East throughout the twentieth century.

But this historical narrative is incomplete. Missing from the pages of official Baptist histories is a detailed discussion of Landmarkism, a Baptist tradition that impacted both the SBC and the rise of Baptist missions in the Holy Land. The primary doctrine of Landmarkism claims Jesus founded the true church, the Landmark Baptist church, which existed throughout history. Anyone associated with a non-Landmark group attended a “church” in name only, rejected Christ, and denied the essence of the true church ordained by God.28 As the founder of the church, Christ alone maintained authority over the local congregation and no individual or organization could usurp Christ’s power over it. Landmarkism grew throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century, threatening the missional structure of the Foreign Mission Board (FMB) of the SBC. In her discussion of Jureidini, M. Watts briefly notes that he found support from the Baptist General Association (renamed the American Baptist Association) in the early years of his mission.29 She fails to classify this association as Landmark. Writing fifty years later, historian Albert Wardin does reference the Landmark character of the Baptist General Association but does not indicate that the SBC had a hostile relationship with this association that affected Jureidini’s mission. Glossing of Jureidini’s connection to Landmarkism is likely a means to paint the development of the SBC mission in the Holy Land in a positive light, as one of cooperation and harmony between the FMB and Arabic-speaking Baptists to advance the gospel throughout the world. However, by overlooking this connection, Baptist histories ignore how Southern Baptist politics impacted Baptist missions in the Holy Land.

An examination of the initial encounters between Arabic-speaking Baptists and Landmark Baptist groups in America reveals that they mobilized before the Southern Baptists to engage in missions in the Holy Land, which includes the areas of modern-day Lebanon, Palestine, Israel, Jordan, and Syria. Said Jureidini’s alliance with a divisive Landmark group in the United States, the Baptist General Association, led to the establishment of the first Baptist church in Mount Lebanon. Two other Arabic-speaking Ottomans, Joseph David and Shukri Musa, also aligned with Landmark Baptists from southern Illinois and started Baptist churches in modern-day Lebanon and Palestine, respectively. Ultimately, the Southern Baptists’ contest with Landmarkers ended with the emergence of Baptist churches in the Holy Land overseen by the SBC. However, motivated more by finances than by theology, Arabic-speaking Baptists unwittingly involved themselves in internal American Southern Baptist politics that shaped the development of Baptist life in the Holy Land for the next fifty years.

Baptists in the American South: The Challenge of Landmarkism

The number of Baptists in the United States was on the rise when various Baptist leaders, churches, and mission societies in the American South formed the SBC of the United States in 1845.30 The distinct convention and mission board framework enabled SBC leaders to centralize and coordinate mission efforts as they simultaneously cultivated a strong denominational identity. Today, Southern Baptist denominational heritage is a combination of four distinct Baptist traditions that synthesized from the eighteenth century through the first decades of the twentieth century.31 Understanding one of these Baptist traditions, the Tennessee Tradition nurtured by the Landmark movement, assumes importance, as this is the Baptist tradition that most heavily influenced Said Jureidini’s ability to found a Baptist church in the Holy Land and shaped his understanding of Baptist doctrine.

Landmarkism emerged as the group having the first and longest lasting challenges to the SBC in the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Landmarkism, a Baptist form of “high churchism,” originated in Tennessee.32 James Robinson Graves (1820–1893), a Baptist preacher and editor of the SBC paper the Tennessee Baptist, Amos Cooper Dayton (1813–1865), the head of the Bible Board in Nashville, and James Madison Pendleton (1811–1891), a Baptist minister in Bowling Green, Kentucky, acted as the ideologues for the movement.33 Known as the Landmark Triumvirate, these men perceived the progressive, liberal religious environment of mid-nineteenth century America as a challenge to Baptist identity and religious practices. Through Baptist newspapers and publications, the Triumvirate launched an attack on the ideas and teachings of the Methodists, Presbyterians, and Campbellites.34 Fearful that Baptists strayed from tradition toward liberal religious teachings, the men reset the Old Landmarks of the church.35

Although some discrepancy developed in the tenets of Landmarkism outlined by its leaders, they agreed upon two primary ideas: the Baptist church was the only true church of God, and the independence of the local church was imperative. Four basic principles flowed from this assertion. First, Christ founded the Baptist church and Baptists could trace their heritage from the present day through various martyrs of the church to John the Baptist. Second, believer’s baptism by immersion was the only valid form of baptism and only Baptist baptisms were valid. Third, baptism by immersion in a Baptist church was a prerequisite for participation in the Lord’s Supper, which must occur in a Baptist church to be legitimate. Fourth, any “gospel act” (e.g., preaching, baptism, and communion) performed by a minister associated with a non-Baptist denomination was invalid because the minister was not immersed nor authorized by the true Baptist church to perform the ritual. The four principles of Baptist successionism, anti–infant baptism, anticommunion, and antipulpit association led Landmarkers to reject all non-Baptist teachings and religious practices. In short, outsiders viewed Landmarkers as opposed to anything they did not consider as part of the Baptist tradition.36

Landmarkers successfully gained a foothold in Southern Baptist life by both appealing to tenets of the Baptist tradition and innovating them. In Old Landmarkism: What Is It?, Graves asserted that Landmarkers were “carrying out in our practice those principles which all true Baptists, in all ages, have professed to believe.”37 By arguing Landmarkers practiced the true Baptist faith preserved for the ages, Graves emphasized the orthodox Baptist teachings at the heart of Landmarkism. In his groundbreaking study of Landmarkism, James E. Tull contends that Graves’ assertion is only partially true. Landmarkers did build their ideas upon established Baptist principles like rejection of infant baptism and emphasis on baptism by immersion as a prerequisite for communion. However, Graves also advanced new ideas, including limiting communion to members of one particular, local Baptist congregation. This stricter interpretation of closed communion altered the accepted intercommunional practice in which Baptists from different Baptist churches participated in the Lord’s Supper together as members of the same denomination.38 Graves denounced inter-Baptist communion, which eventually took hold in many churches across the South. By simultaneously emphasizing accepted Baptist beliefs and practices as well as new ideas, Landmarkism became a strand of thought operative in the SBC.

Landmarkers also presented an alternative model of foreign missions, which threatened the missional identity of the SBC and the existence of the FMB. Prioritizing the independence and authority of the local church, Landmarkers viewed each church as an individual unit in charge of its own ministries, members, and missionaries. Graves argued that the FMB did not have

any right to call upon the missionaries that the churches send to China or Africa, to take a journey to Richmond to be examined touching their experience, call to the ministry, and soundness in the faith. It is a high-handed act, and degrades both the judgment and authority of the Church and the Presbytery that ordained him, thus practically declaring itself above both.39

By appointing and funding missionaries, the FMB superseded the authority of the local church, and Graves advocated for FMB dissolution. In its place he envisioned the local church or a group of churches as the basic building block coordinating mission work. Despite his efforts, the convention did not dissolve the FMB or stop missionary appointments, as mission work remained the cornerstone of Southern Baptist identity. Rather, the SBC proposed a compromise: churches could appoint their own missionaries and allocate funding to them through the FMB.40 Appeased, the debate over foreign missions between Landmarkers and the SBC quieted, seeming to disappear altogether as Confederates fought against the Union Army in the American Civil War.

The movement grew as Graves stealthily dispensed Landmark teachings through the denominational press, and as the SBC leadership’s attention concentrated on solidifying the denominational structure of the SBC. During Reconstruction, as the majority of Baptists focused on repairing homes, farms, culture, and civilization destroyed by war, convention leaders worked to rebuild and expand denominational institutions, including churches, schools, and publication houses.41 Although Graves did not agitate against the FMB during this period of rebuilding, Landmarkism coiled throughout the South as a “virile, grassroots movement of the people, growing almost silently.”42 Denominational newspapers played an instrumental role in the resurgence, and by the turn of the century about half of the SBC newspapers leaned toward Landmarkism, particularly those in Arkansas, Tennessee, and Louisiana.43 These newspapers contributed to development of a Landmark Belt across the South as well as to a growing sense that the Landmark tradition belonged to Southern Baptist denominational identity.

More problematically for the convention, the resurgence also gave birth to schismatic Landmark groups like the Gospel Missioners in 1890 that would influence Arabic-speaking Baptists in the United States at the turn of the century. Founded by Tarleton Perry Crawford, an SBC missionary to China, members of the Gospel Missioners affirmed the Baptist belief in the autonomy of the local church and its status as a self-governing and self-sustaining body. Gospel Missioners advocated a direct mission approach in which local churches appointed and funded missionaries, wholeheartedly rejecting a denominational board structure that dispensed salaries and absorbed missionary debt. In 1879 Crawford presented his ideas on mission to the SBC at its annual meeting in Atlanta. After the SBC rejected Crawford’s suggestions, he formed the Gospel Mission Association in North China in 1890 and found domestic support for his movement among Baptists living in Arkansas and Texas. Officially, Crawford and several other missionaries in China severed ties with the FMB in 1893. While the Gospel Missioners issued a challenge to the organizational structure of the FMB, the group did not survive beyond the first decade of the twentieth century.44 The Gospel Missioners did, however, inspire two additional schismatic Landmark groups: the Baptist Missionary Association of Texas, formed in 1899, and the Baptist General Association of Arkansas, formed in 1902.45 In November 1905, the latter two groups merged into the Baptist General Association, though it changed its name to the American Baptist Association in 1924, and officially split off from the SBC.46 For the first time in the history of the movement, schismatic Landmark Baptists established their own organization to manage foreign mission work in competition with the SBC.

By the early twentieth century, Landmark thought permeated the SBC to the degree that most Southern Baptists did not realize the Landmark character of their beliefs. Several specific Landmark principles were deeply ingrained in Baptist life. First, Baptists practiced a closed communion, typically shunning intercommunion opportunities with Baptists from different churches. Second, many Baptist churches only accepted church members baptized by immersion in other Baptist churches, rejecting potential members who were baptized in non-Baptist churches. Strict Baptists required that a church member undergo baptism in the church of membership, even if the member had been baptized by immersion in another Baptist church. Most significant, however, a form of exclusiveness prevailed among Southern Baptist churches that led Baptists to remain aloof from other Christian groups.47 The prominence of Landmark ideas in the Southwest led those in the area to understand Landmarkism as the ideology of Southern Baptists rather than one strand of Baptist thinking among many others.

By the final decades of the nineteenth century, the term “Landmark” came to identify schismatic groups outside of the SBC. Baptists often overlooked the presence of Landmark ideas within the SBC, unaware that Landmarkism had become a tradition of Baptist teachings synthesized within Southern Baptist identity. The Landmark tradition, as taught by schismatic Landmark Baptists, would have the most significant impact on Said Jureidini in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Said Jureidini: A Schismatic Landmark Encounter

A pivotal moment in Said Jureidini’s life involved his enco...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. Landmarkers in the Holy Land: Ottomans, Landmarkers, and the Formation of a Southern Baptist Mission in the Holy Land (1893-1919)
• Chapter 2. Building a Baptist Community in Beirut: Said Jureidini and the Arrival of the Near East Baptist Mission (1900–1948)
• Chapter 3. Reform, Resistance, and Rebellion: The NEBM Program of Advance and the Arab-Israeli Conflict (1948–1968)
• Chapter 4. A Mission to Muslims: From “Gospel Bomb” to Dialogue (1969–1974)
• Chapter 5. Reconciliation: The Lebanese Civil War, U.S. Marines, and Hizbullah (1975–1986)
• Chapter 6. Breaking the Ties That Bind: Redefining the Lebanese Baptist Community (1987–2011)
• Chapter 7. Conclusion: Evangelizing Lebanon
• Selected Bibliography
• Index