Remapping the Holy Land from the margins: how a Jordanian Evangelical church juggles the ‘local’ and the ‘global’ in the Syrian refugee response
Author: Ann-Christin Wagner
Publisher/Publication: Contemporary Levant
DOI/ISBN: 10.1080/20581831.2018.1532573
This article explores how the Mafraq Unity Church, an indigenous Evangelical congregation, balances its religious identity with an increasingly professionalised NGO ‘business’. Drawing on 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork, the writer argues that through tapping into resources from secular and non-secular transnational networks, the church appeals to two ‘international communities’: the aid industry and Evangelical communities worldwide. This allows Jordanian church officials to rhetorically shift Evangelism’s centre of gravity to the Global South and move Mafraq closer to the demographic and historical centre of Christianity.
