In Evangelizing Lebanon, Melanie Trexler aims to fill significant historiographical gaps in the study of Lebanese Protestantism. She does so by focusing on the growth of the Lebanese Baptist population since 1895 and the shifting relationship between this community and Baptists in the United States who sought to evangelize the Middle East during the twentieth century. While adding to existing literature on Presbyterian and Congregationalist missions in nineteenth-century Lebanon, Trexler's contribution is valuable even outside of mission studies, as it addresses subjects ranging from Baptist controversies to Middle Eastern politics to interfaith dialogue.
The book begins by framing Lebanese Baptist history as a mutual encounter between the Lebanese and missionaries of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). Despite the SBC's claim of responsibility for Baptist missions in the twentieth-century Middle East, the first chapter reveals that the earliest Baptist community in the region was connected to a schismatic group of Baptists in the American South known as the Landmarkers. Identifying their church as the true successor of the “landmark” church founded by Jesus Christ, these Baptists practiced closed communion and recognized only Landmark baptisms. Their understanding of Christ alone as head of the local congregation led them to criticize the Southern Baptist organizational model of missions. Landmark Baptists funded Said Jureidini, the Lebanese convert and ordained minister who founded the first Baptist church in the Ottoman Empire in 1895 in Beirut. Jureidini was not particularly drawn to Landmarkers’ theology, but because of this early partnership, Landmark teachings would come to define Lebanese Baptist identity and shape relations with the SBC in later years.
Chapter two follows Jureidini's work and the growth of the Lebanese Baptist community from 1900–1948. The SBC dispatched its first missionaries to the region in 1923 and began employing Jureidini four years later, after his break with the financially strapped Landmarkers. Lebanon remained on the periphery of SBC missions until Findlay Graham moved there from Palestine in 1948, intending to initiate a new center for missions to Muslims. With the Arab-Israeli conflict in the background, the third chapter documents the deteriorating partnership between Lebanese Baptists and the SBC over the next two decades. The Lebanese challenged the missionaries’ role as permanent guardians of local Baptist churches, and several congregations withdrew from the Lebanese Baptist Convention to protest Western paternalism. While this move echoed wider Arab critiques of American imperialism, it was also consistent with Landmark teachings on congregational autonomy.
Despite these tensions, chapter four recognizes how missionaries revised their approach and stood in solidarity with Arabs against U.S. government policies. Admitting past failures, between 1969 and 1974 missionaries sought to communicate the Gospel to Muslims through dialogue and Christian presence rather than hostile conversionary tactics. As minorities in a largely Muslim society, most Lebanese Baptists did not join these outreach attempts. They emphasized instead Landmark teachings that prioritized spiritual care of church members. Missionary hopes for evangelizing Muslims had not come to fruition by 1975, when civil war broke out in Lebanon. As chapter five recounts, the war drew the Baptist community together. Missionaries focused on the life of the church, and Lebanese Baptists deepened their commitments to evangelism. Aware that death might be immanent, church members interpreted suffering as a validation of their faith and endeavored to share their beliefs with struggling neighbors. Chapter six details yet another shift, as the evacuation of Americans from Lebanon in 1987 severed ties between the SBC and Lebanese Baptists. Mission institutions came under local Baptist control, and Lebanese Baptists began recasting themselves as Arab Christian peacebuilders. They invested in social justice projects, forged Christian ecumenical partnerships, and initiated interfaith dialogue. Through these activities, Trexler concludes, Baptists in Lebanon disassociated themselves from America and from the SBC's more conservative agenda.
Drawing upon Baptist archival materials and personal interviews, Trexler's historiographical investigations demonstrate that official narratives on Arab and Southern Baptist beliefs and practices are far too simplistic. While at times Lebanese Baptist theologies and cultural affinities brought them into conflict with American missionaries, the book also discloses the reality that Southern Baptist missionaries in Lebanon challenged SBC leaders’ pronouncements about Israel and their exclusivist views of salvation. Recognition of this complex and interwoven history could be, as Trexler maintains, a significant point of learning for Arab Baptists and a new generation of SBC missionaries today. Yet the book is sure to resonate far beyond Baptist circles, as it incorporates a range of secondary literature to engage with Middle Eastern Studies and contributes to conversations on world Christianity, missiology, interreligious dialogue, and Christian-Muslim relations.
Trexler offers one of the only comprehensive studies on Lebanese Protestants in the twentieth century, but historians may wish for more information on the relations between Lebanese Baptists and other Protestants in the region. Although the book designates Landmark theology as a defining point of Lebanese Baptist identity, it only briefly addresses other distinctions between Baptists and the longer-established Presbyterian and Congregationalist communities. For example, Trexler notes the common evangelical Protestant emphasis on vernacular preaching as she frames Jureidini's colloquial sermons as a tactic “to lessen Baptist foreignness” (47). Yet the book might have highlighted the uniqueness of Baptist evangelism techniques by acknowledging the Lebanese Presbyterian practice of preaching in formal Arabic, rather than the colloquial dialect of Lebanon. Such sermons were often printed at the American Mission Press and demanded a level of literacy and education that was not required for Jureidini's audiences. The book would also benefit from consideration of common gendered practices among Protestants in the early 1900s—like the segregation of men and women in worship—and views of women's leadership later in the century. This would help balance the book's Lebanese Baptist source materials, which mainly convey Arab men's perspectives.
These minor suggestions aside, the book's scope of engagement with religious, cultural, and political questions is impressive. For students and scholars of the Middle East, it reveals that the history of the region remains incomplete without the stories of religious minorities. For church historians and professors of missions and interfaith dialogue, Evangelizing Lebanon proves the relevance of the often-neglected Middle Eastern context, and for members of the global Baptist community, the book preserves a rich heritage that should not be overlooked.
