Evangelicals Building a Base in Iraq

I truly deplore this. And it seems like some of the more ardent evangelicals always do this - come to a country with ancient and rich Christian traditions, and ply them with a dumbed-down replacement alien to their culture, plundering Christian churches with millenia of accumulated wisdom and traditions of reverence. The Chaldean Catholic church is a unique rite of the Catholic church, with liturgies and churches of supreme beauty. It is ancient, founded by the apostle Thomas the Twin. Also common in Iraqi Christianity is the Syriac Orthodox Church, founded by St. Peter within a decade of the crucifixion (the account of this church's founding is actually recorded in the book of Acts.)

The happy-clappy types come to convert Iraqis found that the Muslims weren't interested. So in order to feel better about their mission I suppose, they started drawing Christians away from their long-established hearth, plying them with Michael W Smith songs and the reductio ad absurdum Western hemisphere preaching style that tends to exalt the preacher (and their personal political views), and not that which is to be preached. These peoples are a living remainder of an ancient form of Christianity - St. Basil's liturgy (basically the words to be said during church service) is seventeen hundred years old and used every Sunday in both Chaldean and Syriac churches in Iraq. Converting these people to an alien form of worship is little short of the ravishing of Christianity's living heritage.

Evangelicals Building a Base in Iraq