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What struck me most as my Arab driver artfully maneuvered the roundabouts and winding streets of Amman, Jordan, was the sense of timelessness in a city made of stone. One of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world, Amman boasts a 5,000-seat amphitheater built in the 2nd century that is still in use today, and a Christian church built in 326 A.D. On the modern, western side of the city, the gleaming white stone repeats the ancient theme in stately homes, five-star hotels, and a massive, blue-domed mosque in which nearly 3,000 worshipers gather in prayer.

But it was Arab Christians, not architecture, that had brought me to Amman. I spent the next five days in a secluded retreat center listening to lectures and talking with men and women whose stories shook my understanding of what it means to be a Christian in the Middle East. Evangelicals for Middle East Understanding sponsored the gathering and billed it as an opportunity for American and European Christians to "listen to the church in the Middle East." The conference brochure should have come with a warning: "You will leave this place feeling sick at heart, and your tears will continue to fall long after you return home."

I learned, for example, that in the Armenian Orthodox community in Baghdad, 35 Christian leaders have been killed and another 40 have been kidnapped by Iraqi insurgents since the beginning of the war in Iraq. It often surprises Westerners to learn that Christianity is indigenous to Iraq and that prior to the war, Christians lived in peace with their Muslim neighbors. Unfortunately, the increasingly negative view of "Christian America" and the equating of Arab Christians with American imperialism, the Crusades, and Christian Zionism poses an ever-increasing threat to the security of Arab Christians throughout the Middle East. In 1977, there were over two million Christians in Iraq. Before the invasion of 2003, there were 700,000. Today, there are just 350,000. Of the 1.2 million Iraqi refugees currently living outside Iraq, 400,000 are Christians.

I did not arrive in Amman completely ignorant of the plight of Christians in the Middle East. Since our mid-20s, my husband and I have been mentored by Gilbert Bilezikian, an Armenian born in France to refugee parents who fled the Armenian genocide of 1915. "Dr. B" served for several years as president of Haigazian University in Beirut, Lebanon, before becoming a professor of New Testament at Wheaton College. It was Dr. B's vision of the Acts 2 church that inspired my husband to start a church in 1975. For years, Dr. B was an elder at our church and often led members on trips to the Holy Land. Although he focused his Holy Land teaching on "Jesus, the Servant Leader," he never failed to note the desperate plight of both Christians and Muslims in the occupied Palestinian territories.

So I was not fully unprepared for the words I heard in Amman. However, nothing could have prepared me for the gut-wrenching emotional impact of looking into the eyes of these Christian brothers and sisters and hearing their history of pain, their sense of being abandoned by Western Christians, and yes, their righteous anger. Try to put yourself in my place as I listened to these heartbreaking stories.

An Iraqi doctor spoke of his father, a pastor, who was recently killed by insurgents because he refused to close the doors of his church. "It's God's church," the pastor said. "I can't close it." So they shot him and threatened to do the same to his son if he did not leave the country. The doctor began his presentation with actual video footage of Iraqi citizens being lined up against a wall and executed. He finished by quietly reminding us that Americans rarely hear of what goes on in his country: "Do you realize that in Iraq, 30 percent of the women under 30 are widows?"

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November (Web-only) 2008, Vol. 52