{"id":61772,"date":"2018-06-08T11:05:23","date_gmt":"2018-06-08T17:05:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/?p=61772"},"modified":"2018-09-05T09:53:35","modified_gmt":"2018-09-05T15:53:35","slug":"the-palestine-syrian-mission","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/2018\/06\/the-palestine-syrian-mission.html","title":{"rendered":"The Palestine-Syrian Mission"},"content":{"rendered":"<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC \"-\/\/W3C\/\/DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional\/\/EN\" \"http:\/\/www.w3.org\/TR\/REC-html40\/loose.dtd\">\n<html><head><meta http-equiv=\"content-type\" content=\"text\/html; charset=utf-8\"><meta http-equiv=\"content-type\" content=\"text\/html; charset=utf-8\"><\/head><body><p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_30690\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-30690\" style=\"width: 596px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/186\/2016\/02\/799px-Beirut.jpg\" class=\" decorated-link\" target=\"_blank\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\" wp-image-30690\" src=\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/186\/2016\/02\/799px-Beirut.jpg\" alt=\"Ein Blick \u00fcber Beirut\" width=\"596\" height=\"447\"><\/a><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-30690\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">A view of Beirut, Lebanon \u00a0 \u00a0(Wikimedia CC; Benutzer: Robysan)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>In the next era of Church history in the Levant:<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #003300;\">President Booth\u2019s sudden death did not end missionary work in the Near East. No new mission president was called until 1933, how\u00adever, when an Armenian by the name of Badwagon Piranian was appointed to preside over what would now be called the Palestine-Syrian Mission. He rented a new mission home, at 25 Garden Street in Haifa, and immediately went to work. Unfortunately, a substantial portion of the work that he had to do involved cleansing the portion of the Church that was under his charge. Following directions from Elder Widtsoe, President Piranian began an attempt to wean the members from dependence on Church welfare and the dole, to which many had become addicted during the troubled times of the 1920s. Such assistance had helped them greatly and in some cases had perhaps even saved their lives. But it had now become an obsta\u00adcle to the development of their own character and self-reliance. Nearly a hundred of the never-very-numerous Near Eastern Saints were excommunicated, many at their own request, and a number of them chose to move to the Soviet Union, hoping to live in the new earthly utopia promised by communism. It was a depressing and difficult experience for the missionaries.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #003300;\">In many respects, things grew even worse for President Pira\u00adnian\u2019s successor. Joseph Jacobs, a Salt Lake City school teacher, was called to preside over the Palestine-Syrian Mission in August 1937. This was a time of mounting violence by Arabs against Jews and by Jews against Arabs. He was spared some of this, as he spent his first two years working in peaceful Beirut. However, dur\u00ading a visit to Jerusalem in the summer of 1939 he intended to sur\u00advey conditions for missionary work there and learned that a bomb had gone off in Haifa and had killed seventeen Arabs and wounded many more. In Jerusalem, the streets were funereal and nearly deserted. Tension was everywhere. The day after his arrival in the city, an Arab coffee shop was destroyed by a bomb, which left two dead and a number of others wounded. As one local man explained the situation to him, \u201cJerusalem is a holy city with unholy people living in it.\u201d Not surprisingly, President Jacobs decided that the time was not right for opening missionary work in Jerusalem.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #003300;\">Unfortunately, conditions were hardly ideal anywhere. It was, after all, 1939. Hitler and Nazi Germany were moving the world toward a brutal war. On 1 September 1939, German forces invaded Poland. On 17 September, Soviet forces attacked that same unfortu\u00adnate country from the east. The war had begun. Not long after his return to Beirut, President Jacobs was withdrawn to the United States and the Palestine-Syrian Mission was closed.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: right;\">Posted from Richmond, Virginia<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u00a0 \u00a0 In the next era of Church history in the Levant: \u00a0 President Booth\u2019s sudden death did not end missionary work in the Near East. No new mission president was called until 1933, how\u00adever, when an Armenian by the name of Badwagon Piranian was appointed to preside over what would now be called the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1019,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-61772","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v21.1 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>The Palestine-Syrian Mission<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"&nbsp; &nbsp; In the next era of Church history in the Levant: &nbsp; President Booth&#039;s sudden death did not end missionary work in the Near East. No new\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/2018\/06\/the-palestine-syrian-mission.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Palestine-Syrian Mission\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"&nbsp; &nbsp; In the next era of Church history in the Levant: &nbsp; President Booth&#039;s sudden death did not end missionary work in the Near East. 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