"Call to Prayer: Evangelizing in an Arab/Islamic Lifeworld"

Dr. Arpan Roy

My current project investigates theological innovations emerging from the Christian/Muslim missionary encounter, broadly defined. Christian missionary work in the Arab region is marked by a practical limit that, as my project investigates, opens up new theologies emerging from precisely this limit. By not having a public missionary apparatus, Christianity in the Arab region differs significantly from Christianity elsewhere in the world in that it is not an outwardly expanding religion. Recent attempts by Arab Christian intellectuals to query this situation has inevitably led to dialogues with and about Islam—the supreme spiritual force in the region. Arab Christian theologians of recent decades have identified this situation as the “contextual theology” of Arab Christianity, in which Islam is the contextual basis in which the various churches of the Arab world operate, much like liberal modernity in the case of Western churches. My project is an anthropological investigation into the Islamic context of present-day Christianity in the region, specifically in Palestine, Lebanon, and Jordan. How is the imperative to proliferate the teachings of Christ reinterpreted by church figures in the context of the Arab world? Because of the challenges of outward expansion, does Arab Christianity expand “internally,” via theological and spiritual resources in dialogue with Islam that are unique to its Arab context? And how does Arabic—the language of the Qur’an—lend a certain distinction to Arab Christianity in its liturgical use?