CHRISTIAN MINISTRIES REELING IN JORDAN
By Julia Duin

The Washington Times
March 2, 2008 Sunday

Evangelicals are getting short shrift despite Abdullah’s interfaith
outreach.

Evangelical Christians are under fire in Jordan, and more than two
dozen missionaries and seminary students have been deported or refused
visas in the past year.

Some of the 27 families or individuals are American citizens, a source
of some embarrassment to Jordan’s King Abdullah II, who will be in
Washington tomorrow to visit the White House and conduct interfaith
discussions with Muslim and Jewish leaders.

Abdullah also appeared before a closed-door session of American
evangelical leaders during the February 2006 National Prayer
Breakfast. Jordan heavily markets to evangelicals its many biblical
sites as part of its $2.3 billion tourism industry.

"I think the king needs to see the repercussions for allowing
this thing to simmer underneath the surface," said Keith Roderick,
Washington representative for Christian Solidarity International,
which tracks religious persecution. "The king has to realize there
is a cost to this reaction. Christians are an important part of the
economic well-being of Jordan."

After the expulsions were reported Jan. 29 by the evangelical news
service Compass Direct, Al Jazeera TV devoted a lengthy Feb. 17 program
to the issue. Constantine Qarmash, an official with the Greek Orthodox
Church in Amman, Jordan, told the network that the evangelicals’
goal was to "serve Israeli interests in this region."

Awda Qawwas, a World Council of Churches representative in Amman,
accused foreign evangelicals of being "financed by their churches
in America."

"Most of them are of American nationality," he told Al Jazeera. "They
come as individuals, and they exploit the citizens of this nation,
recruiting them for their interests."

The Jordanian Embassy issued a statement saying a Council of Church
Leaders in Amman has "been complaining for many years about the role
of missionary groups in Jordan." Christian proselytizing of Muslims
is illegal in Jordan.

In off-the-record interviews, several Christians have told The
Washington Times that Jordanian government officials tend to listen
only to clergy from the historic churches native to the region. Those
churches actively work against evangelicals, seeing them as foreign
interlopers who undermine the native churches by converting their
members.

"It’s not the Muslims who are causing me problems," one Christian
leader said. "It’s the Orthodox."

"It’s the bishops," one ministry director said in a phone interview
last week, referring to leaders of the Roman Catholic, Armenian
Orthodox, Greek Orthodox and other native churches in Jordan. "There
are four bishops that are causing us a lot of trouble."

Dwight Bashir, senior policy analyst for the U.S. Commission on
Religious Freedom, said the rash of deportations are the highest
he’s seen in six years in what has been considered one of the more
tolerant Middle Eastern countries.

"There’s a troubling climate starting to brew there," he said.

A number of the deportation or refused-visa cases come from students
attending Jordan Evangelical Theological Seminary (JETS) in Amman,
one of a handful of Protestant seminaries in the Middle East. Imad
Shehadeh, its president, was en route to the United States on Friday
and could not be reached for comment.

But in November he said the seminary had been "extremely hurt by
Muslims," not only in denying visas to returning foreign students
but in the jailing and deporting of students who had converted from
Islam to Christianity.

Mr. Roderick, who visited Jordan in October with a group of American
evangelicals, said 78 foreigners out of JETS’ 300-member student body
had been deported or had their visas refused. He added that the U.S.

Embassy in Amman has an "institutional indifference" towards Christians
in general.

William Murray, founder of the Religious Freedom Coalition and a
member of the same delegation, said Abdullah is trying to satisfy
Islamic radicals.

"The evangelicals are the easiest to push around, and they can be
made an example of to satisfy the mainline Islamic elements there
he’s been unable to Westernize," he said.