THE CHRISTIAN HOLYLAND

Rooftop View of Jerusalem

A visit to the Holy Land offers significant challenges to any trip planner. Its history and culture, its politics and religion, and its peoples, offer a complex landscape to navigate. What to include? How deeply to cover? How to show the present with a balanced perspective and topics entrenched with decades, centuries and millennia of passionate debate and war? How to accomplish this so that the visitor has fun while learning, growing and, as with our travel group, transforming?

Pictures to be added weekly, come back often.

Who is inviting you to come?

The Christians of the Holy Land want you to come and visit. They want to meet you and talk about their faith and lives. They want to share the sites where Jesus walked and help you learn about the Christian Church, which was born there and spread around the world. They want you to see what is happening to them now, as they feel forgotten by Christians in other countries.

Today’s Palestinian Christians are the indigenous descendants of the founders of the Christian Church, who have stayed and kept the Holy Land for today’s Christians. This website is a guide by an American Christian who lived there and who wants you to experience the Land and know the local Christians as she did.

Not everybody can go on such a long trip but this website can serve as a way to take a virtual visit. It can also help you to work to keep Christianity in the land where Jesus lived, despite the turbulence in the Middle East.

Things constantly change, even in ancient countries. You are invited to Email Betty Jane Bailey with corrections you find as you travel with her in the Christian Holy Land.

Betty Jane helped transform the lives of our group of pilgrims and I believe her website will provide a critical link between visitors to the Holy Land and the people who live there. It may also transform you.

Reverend Betty Jane Bailey is unique in her abilities to meet this challenge. Betty knows the region’s history, culture, religions, politics, geography, and peoples, but this only provides the foundation. Her magic elixir is her ability to broker ideas by bringing people together. She led a group of 22 persons from our church. We talked with Palestinian children about their hopes and dreams. We met with kibbutz residents fearful of the Oslo accords. We saw Swedish peace makers separating angry mobs in Hebron. We shared a Shabbat meal and prayed for peace. We shared the hope of Palestinian women for the economic success of their businesses financed by creative micro-economics. Just as 2000 years ago, the Holy Land today offers many sources of light and hope in an environment of turbulence.
Steve Harms

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