WASHINGTON — The senior pastor of Kuwait’s National Evangelical Church (KNEC) told American journalists in July that Christian missionaries from the West are making life more difficult for Kuwaiti Christians.
“Sometimes they are detrimental to us,” Amanuel Ghareeb said. “Unfortunately, these Western missionaries, they don’t consider the consequences of their activities.”
Proselytizing by non-Muslim missionaries is illegal in Kuwait, although like many of its neighbors, the small Persian Gulf nation has laws protecting religious freedom, Ghareeb said recently when attending the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA) in Richmond, Va.
He noted that when international missionaries proselytize in Kuwait, the government puts pressure on local churches.
“We tell our friends, ‘You are responsible about your activities, but please don’t hurt or jeopardize the ministry of the local churches who are trying to nurture the faith of the Christians who are living and working in the Gulf states.’”
The KNEC has 70 parishioners, while there are 300,000 Christians — mostly from other countries — among Kuwait’s 2.3 million residents.
Ghareeb said he believes Arab Christians could serve as a bridge between Muslims and Western nations but disagreed with what he called the “Christian Zionism” of Western evangelical groups that see the Jewish state of Israel as a biblical prophecy come true.
“Our understanding of the Bible is that the state of Israel is not the fulfillment of the Old Testament prophecy. It’s just a political entity,” Ghareeb said. He said that for the most part Christian churches in the Middle East support a separate, independent Palestinian state.
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