By Lily Groves, Staff Writer
Last month, Parkview Community Church in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, hosted a conference that brought together Western Christians to discuss the church’s involvement in and response to the longstanding violence in Israel and Palestine, including actions recently declared as genocide by the United Nations.
The current conflict escalated after an attack by Hamas, in which 1,200 people in Israel were killed and 250 were taken hostage on Oct. 7, 2023. Israel subsequently attacked Gaza, and during the past two years of the conflict, more than 60,000 Palestinians have been killed. On Friday, Oct. 10, the two sides agreed to a cease-fire proposed by the Trump administration.
Organizers of the conference included Munther Isaac, a Palestinian pastor, author and director of the Christ at the Checkpoint conferences. Christ at the Checkpoint is a sister event to Church at the Crossroads, held in Palestine every other year. Church at the Crossroads concluded with the release of a public declaration responding to two open letters from Palestinian Christians written over the past two years.
“We have become a church that praises a political project. We confess our failure to speak and act for the dignity of our Palestinian siblings,” the declaration states. “We have dismissed their testimony, distorted their history and prioritized ancient stones over the lives being buried beneath them.”
The declaration, now signed by more than 3,000 people, was published nearly two years after Hamas’ attack on Israel. The statement was crafted to answer messages from Palestinians and Middle Eastern Christians: “An Open Letter from Palestinian Christians to Western Church Leaders and Theologians” (October 2023) and “A Collective Call to the Global Church from Middle East Evangelical Leaders” (August 2024). Both letters claim to “lament” and be “disturbed by” Western silence.
The conference featured Palestinian speakers alongside others from across North America. The conference’s communal worship sessions and messages from speakers frequently condemned the silence of Western Christians in response to conflicts in the Middle East.
Josephine Lawrence, a sophomore art major at Wheaton College, was surprised to hear speakers from the Black church and Pentecostal communities address the issue. “I feel like the diversity of the speakers really helped them build towards one goal,” Lawrence said.
Lawrence attended the Church at the Crossroads worship sessions with her parents, grandmother and family friends, who traveled to the Chicagoland event from Indiana and Florida. Lawrence herself grew up even farther from Illinois in North Africa, a context in which she “couldn’t have imagined anyone not being pro-Palestine.”
While not all attendees came from evangelical backgrounds, nearly half of the conference’s attendees self-identified as evangelical, according to conference organizer Ben Norquist, director of grants at Churches for Middle East Peace. For Norquist, the presence and participation of evangelicals were significant.
“That’s huge,” Norquist said. “In the end, it wasn’t even about pulling teeth or coming so you can be confronted with your sins. It turns out that the evangelicals who came really were hungry to understand.”
In retrospect, Norquist identified his own upbringing as “nominally Christian Zionist,” or openly supportive of a Jewish state in its ancestral land. Now, he said, it is hard to hold that position “when you hear, see and meet Palestinians who have been displaced or whose family has been bombed by Israeli warplanes.”
In his opening message, Isaac expressed concern for the well-being of his family living in the West Bank, while Fares Abraham, founder of Levant Ministries, called for an end to starvation and bloodshed. Signatories of the Church at the Crossroads declaration agree to “make a common cause with peacemakers from Palestine and Israel, advocating for a permanent cease-fire, the release of all hostages, unrestricted humanitarian aid and a just peace that addresses root causes of violence.”
The declaration features a page of founding signatories, individuals whose names and institutional affiliations appear alongside the document’s message. Conference speaker Alexander Massad, assistant professor of world religions at Wheaton College, said that by listing signatories, the declaration creates a “permission structure.”
Massad related the role of signatories to the role of powerful voices such as the late Tim Keller, a highly regarded Presbyterian pastor. “We give them the authority to have influence because we see them as people who are rooted in Scripture, we see them as having insight and we give them authority.” When readers of the declaration see recognizable names or institutions signing an agreement, they form a permission structure that encourages others to sign on.
Signatories include pastors, nonprofit leaders and Wheaton College faculty such as Gary Burge, professor of New Testament emeritus at Wheaton College, who also spoke at the conference. Burge said the American evangelical church has “been complicit in the destruction of Gaza, either by cheering on Israeli bombing in Gaza or by silence.”
“When we see violent oppression taking place in the world,” Burge said, “my commitment to Christ’s kingdom tells me I need to call out the perpetrators and stand with the oppressed.”
After attending Church at the Crossroads, Lawrence said she felt “a commitment to sharing the stories of those who are facing genocide and the oppressed.” Previously, she said she was “a little scared of losing friends, or losing scholarships, saying something wrong or accidentally heretical.”
These sentiments appear in the final lines of “Church at the Crossroads: Our Response to the Public Calls of Palestinian Christians,” which urges readers: “Let us be part of the church’s repentance and renewal. Let us stand with the suffering. Let us follow Christ more fully.”
