Archbishop Shane Parker, primate of the Anglican Church of Canada, visited the Anglican diocese of Jerusalem from Jan. 8 to 17. During his trip, he attended the consecration and installation of the Rev. Imad Haddad as bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Jordan and the Holy Land, which took place at the Church of the Redeemer in Jerusalem.
Parker also visited the Anglican-run St. Luke’s Hospital in Nablus, Christ Episcopal School in Nazareth, and the Princess Basma Centre and St. George’s College in Jerusalem, as well as the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. He met with fellow Christian leaders, including Archbishop Hosam Naoum, president bishop and primate of the Episcopal Church in Jerusalem and the Middle East; and Patriarch Theophilos III of the Orthodox Church of Jerusalem.
The Anglican Journal’s Matthew Puddister spoke to the primate on Jan. 22 about his experience in Israel and Palestine. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What reflections would you like to share from your trip to the Holy Land?
We have been in a partnership with Jerusalem for well over half of their 50 years of being governed by indigenous leadership. The Anglican church there back in 1976 became independent of the Church of England with the first Arab bishop. We started connecting in a corporate sense going back to the ’90s, so it’s a longstanding relationship. My own personal relationship goes back 22 years now.
When the primate visits, the primate brings the Anglican Church of Canada with her or him. The significance of a visit from the primate of Canada to the folks there was very high. The Christian community there is maybe only two per cent of the population at best. It’s a group of people sometimes described as a butterfly between two hands, where on the one hand you have the state of Israel [and] on the other hand you have a largely Islamic Palestine. Most Christians there are Arabs and identify as Palestinians. Being an Anglican Christian is to be a minority within a minority.
What I want people to be aware of, first of all, is the importance of remembering that there are Christians in the land where Christ walked. They live under oppressive, limiting circumstances, and they live in an environment that is decidedly unstable and even dangerous at times. While some of the Christians, our fellow Anglicans, live in the state of Israel and are Arabs with Israeli citizenship, other members of our church live in the West Bank, and not so much in Gaza. But we have a hospital in Gaza, the [Anglican-run] Al-Ahli Hospital.
The second thing is that the Anglican church runs hospitals and educational and rehabilitation centres throughout Israel and reaching into the West Bank. For example, St. Luke’s Hospital in Nablus is essentially a full-service hospital. In the midst of all the limitations and dangers, people are still having babies, they’re still having heart attacks, they’re still having all kinds of health issues. We have a hospital that serves people of a variety of means and backgrounds—Christian, Muslim, doesn’t matter.
At St. Philip’s Church in Nablus, there’s a kindergarten that provides a safe place for Muslim and Christian kids who live with poverty in their own homes. In some cases, there’s only one parent. In other cases, they have been displaced from other parts of the West Bank as people move into the centres because as we know, much of the land and smaller villages are simply unsafe for Palestinians to live in now. That small kindergarten is a place where little kids who often don’t have proper meals or stable environments come and learn that there is such a thing as peace and comfort and care and trust and food, and that learning is fun.
The Jerusalem Princess Basma Centre, on the Mount of Olives, offers rehabilitative services for kids with disabilities and their families in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. It has a program for kids with disabilities that works out of the Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza. Increasingly, those disabilities are because of the war. Part of the rehabilitation includes recovery from trauma. This is our church in the middle of a highly conflicted area, offering practical support to people who live in the region.
On the one hand, the Christian population is very small [and] lives in uncertain circumstances. On the other hand, it is mighty because of the care that it gives to the wider community, practical education and health and other support services for families. While movement into Gaza and the West Bank is limited, all kinds of innovative means have been put in place to provide assistance. For instance, the doctors at the Al-Ahli Hospital are often guided by video conference by experts from outside.
The third point is the united resilience of the Christian community. I attended the consecration of the new Lutheran bishop, Bishop Imad Haddad at the Church of the Redeemer in Jerusalem. All Christian denominations were present. There are significant theological and liturgical differences between the churches. Nevertheless, they set aside those differences in order to stand together and be united as Christians in a context where they are a threatened minority. Seeing the capacity for joy, the capacity to celebrate, the capacity to assert together their presence as Arab Christians, as a Christian community, in the land where Jesus walked is quite inspiring. It’s in many ways a model for ecumenism that we would do well to emulate here.
I assume you couldn’t go to Gaza.
I was unable to go to Gaza. Even Archbishop Hosam had not yet been admitted into Gaza. It’s very restricted. The closest I got was talking to people at the Jerusalem Princess Basma Centre who have close connections through the programming that happens through the Al-Ahli Hospital.
Have you noticed any changes since your last visit to the Holy Land in 2023, which was only a few months before the October 7 attack?
Definitely a change. Pilgrimages have almost dried up completely, which has an economic impact as much as anything. There are micro pressures and macro pressures being exerted on the Christian community and being exerted on Palestinians generally at this time—little things that could appear to be an inconvenience, and then larger things, like massive highways being built on Palestinian territory to service large, well-equipped settlements.
There’s been an intensification of what I observed 22 years ago: a kind of slow grasping of control of land, the ever[-increasing] limiting of the freedom of movement for Palestinians in the Palestinian territories, and of course, the omnipresent concern on both sides for violence. Jerusalem itself has to some extent a sense of being in the eye of the storm. I would say there’s an atmosphere of concern and worry, notwithstanding the resilience and the capacity for joy at gathering together to celebrate a new bishop.
In a Dec. 4 open letter, you and Bishop Larry Kochendorfer, national bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada, asked Prime Minister Mark Carney to call for lifting of all blockades and restrictions on humanitarian assistance in Gaza; to work for an end to the impunity of settlers attacking Palestinians in the West Bank; to reaffirm support for UNWRA in providing humanitarian assistance for Palestinian refugees in Gaza and the West Bank; and to ensure that the reconstruction of Gaza “is guided by the principles of dignity, equity and self-determination.” But to date there has been no indication the Canadian government will change its existing policies.
No. I think we advocate for our partners there. Neither they nor we want to be construed as being anti-Israel. Israel has a right to exist. Palestine has a right to exist. The citizens of Israel have a right to live without fear of acts of terrorism or acts of war against them. The people of Palestine have an equal right to live without fear, without acts of violence being visited upon them or being deprived of human rights.
My concern is not to say what I think, but to reflect what I have seen and heard from Archbishop Naoum and from the people there. We write our letters with sincerity reflecting the concerns of our partners there. It’s not a good situation for Christian Palestinians and for Palestinians generally. I’m talking about people who want to live their lives, who want their children to be safe, who want to be able to go to work, who want to be able to leave their town or village or city to travel, to visit relatives, to leave the country. Things we take for granted are severely compromised. In Gaza, the flow of aid is simply not happening.
When I was there, it was cold and wet and the nights were long and dark and [Gaza was] not too far away, because Israel and Palestine is not a large region. You could drop [the whole region] into Vancouver Island. To think that only an hour or so away, people were living in meagre tents and children were dying from exposure—it’s appalling. It is a true humanitarian crisis and the solution is within reach, but the forces at play are simply not engaging in the solution.
Last September, Italian workers held a general strike making similar demands as those in letters you’ve sent to the prime minister, including stopping weapons shipments to Israel. Do you think Anglicans should support such forms of direct action to effect change?
I think people need to inform themselves and follow their conscience. If people hearing the remarks I’m sharing with you are people who have connections or can make decisions that might effect [change], then they should make them. There are people within the Anglican Church of Canada who sit in positions of power and authority, and [to] the extent to which those positions can be used to make decisions that directly affect the well-being of people in Israel and Palestine, they should follow their consciences and do so.
I think there’s a moral imperative right now for the international community to recognize what is happening in Gaza, [which] is the squeezing out of a people, the crushing of a people. That is profoundly unacceptable, and that has to be said. It has to be said in a way that can be heard. I think that’s a concern for our partners who are literally right there. What leverage [do they have]? Well, their relationships with us, the international partnerships with the Christian community, are very important because that is noticed and observed and lifted up. It’s not a forgotten community. We see what is happening there. We speak of what is happening there because of those partnerships and connections.
Again, referencing the work of the Anglican Church in Gaza, the Al-Ahli Hospital continues to function, and the program offered by the Princess Basma Centre continues to help children who have been disabled. We are there serving—our church in its broadest sense is there serving. That’s a story that has to be told.
Any other points from your trip that you’d like to highlight?
I went as the primate of Canada, so in a sense, I brought every Canadian Anglican with me. My greeting to people there was: “I come here as primate, and I bring the Anglican Church of Canada to you. You’re not forgotten, and I will bring back your stories.” Those are true words and they are very meaningful words for our siblings in Christ who live there.
