World Cup Churches 10. Saudi Arabia

 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.

Snow

Last night it was -9 degrees in Wycombe.  The snow is nearly a foot deep on our lawn.  Not a lot is happening around town just now.  But this was January 6th, and that reminds me . . .

If you have the time and incliniation to read this link you will find that, even though human beings in their inabilities no longer work when the winter strangles them in her icy grip, the Great Maker of Winter will still be at work.

Wesley

Today is the anniversary of the conversion of John Wesley, perhaps the only conversion marked by a memorial on a London plaza (in Aldersgate Street, above). There I joined Methodists as they lay a memorial wreath and sang from this Wesley hymn that seem to me to be an apt end to a Sabbatical;

I want an even strong desire,
I want a calmly fervent zeal,
To save poor souls out of the fire,
To snatch them from the verge of hell,
And turn them to a pardoning God,
And quench the brands in Jesus’ blood.

I would the precious time redeem,
And longer live for this alone,
To spend and to be spent for them
Who have not yet my Savior known;
Fully on these my mission prove,
And only breathe, to breathe Thy love.

My talents, gifts, and graces, Lord,
Into Thy blessed hands receive;
And let me live to preach Thy Word,
And let me to Thy glory live;
My every sacred moment spend
In publishing the sinner’s Friend.

Enlarge, inflame, and fill my heart
With boundless charity divine,
So shall I all strength exert,
And love them with a zeal like Thine,
And lead them to Thy open side,
The sheep for whom the Shepherd died