Continuing a series of blogs heading round the 32 qualifying countries in the 2022 World Cup - I will pick out one church in each one. I am not going to choose only churches that are to my liking. This is a exploration not a recommendation! To see all in the series select the label 'World Cup Churches' below.
Saudi Arabia, on the face of it, is uniquely unchristian among the nations qualifying for this World Cup in neighbouring Qatar. If you are a Saudi Arabian and convert to Christianity you receive the death penalty. This makes public profession of Christianity non-existent - or very short.
Long before Islam - and longer still before anyone in the Americas had heard about Jesus - there were Christian monastic communities in the Arabian desert. Encounters with these shapes some of the responses to Christianity in the Koran. But these are long past, and only ruins remain, the latest discovery being made by a dune buggy hitting something hard in the sand.
For the past ten years or so there have been serious noises, however, about the Saudi's allowing a Church building or two for the Christians who do live and work in the nation - as has happened in Qatar. It will help to make Saudi Arabia look more internationally acceptable of course. But nothing has happened so far - despite a visit by the Pope.
Yet these Christian workers constitute a significant part of the population. Remarkably, this means that the Christian population of Saudi Arabia is proportionately larger (in some cases far larger) than in several other World Cup qualifying nations - Morocco, Iran, Senegal, Japan and Tunisia. (Perhaps more astonishingly and sadly it is larger than the proportion of Christians in Israel.)
So there is a church in Saudi Arabia, but with none of the trappings of gothic architecture, freedom to convert the local populace or freedom to meet at all except domestically. In some ways more like the church as it was very long ago.
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