CHRISTIAN COMMUNITIES IN THE HOLY-LAND

The Holy Land is full with the scene of the holy history and momentous events as described in the holy bible, and numerous places were sanctified through historical religious memory and later by commemorative structures to glorify the greatness of our Lord Jesus, beyond the events characters and holy sites that all Christian believers belong to.

The local Christian community preserved the value of the holiest sites in our faith and maintained the Christian identity and traditions in the land of our lord for over 2000 years. The numerous Christian denominations make the Jerusalem Church an anthropological-theological-liturgical museum. This variety transforms the Holy Land into a very impressive composition of the different types of religious experience.

The local Christians in the Holy Land belong to the below churches:

•  Catholic Church

•  Eastern Catholic Churches

•  Eastern Orthodox Churches

•  Oriental Orthodox Churches 

•  Armenian Orthodox

•  Copts – Orthodox

•  Syriac Orthodox

•  Protestant Churches

During the last decades the local Christian community faced a movement of emigration due to political and fanatical situation in the region, many families decided to emigrate seeking a better future, to have a clearer point of view we refer to the census carried out by the British mandate authorities on 23 October 1922 approximately 73000 Christians live in the land, comprise 9% of the total population while according to the last statistics on the eve of Christmas 2019, approximately 177,000 Christians live in the Holy Land, nowadays we comprise less than 2% of the total population, 77.5% of the Christians are from the original inhabitance of the land known as the Christian living stones, mostly living in Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Nazareth and the villages around the cities, while the 23.5% are foreigners who came to live in the land either for studying or working temporarily.

Brothers and sisters in Christ nowadays we are a minority in our land, we ask each one of you to keep the land of our Lord in your heart and brain by accepting our invitation to take an important role in preserving the Christian identity and presence in our land by keeping interactive relations with the local Christian community and support their activities, without our presence the church in the Holy Land will never be the same if the roots will be gone so how the branches continue.