Have you ever heard of St. George’s Anglican Church in Baghdad? Didn’t think so. The current building was built by the British military in 1936, but the history of the congregation goes back to 1864. St. George’s is currently the only Anglican congregation in Iraq and welcomes hundreds and hundreds of Iraqi Christians, most of whom are not Anglican, each week for Sunday services. There is also a dental and medical clinic at St. George’s with staff members from the three Abrahamic traditions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Iraqis receive free treatment at the clinic, regardless of their religious or ethnic background.
A little over a month ago, The New York Time’s blog “At War: Notes from the Front Line” featured a post entitled “St. George’s and the tree.” It includes a picture of the church interior and describes a day in the life of this congregation that could have ended even worse than it did. Windows were blown out and the clinic was severely damaged by suicide bomb blasts on a Sunday morning. Fortunately, Sunday services and related activities were not scheduled until later in the afternoon. The attacks were aimed at nearby government buildings and resulted in the deaths of more than 150 people, including children.
The picture of St. George’s that remains ingrained in my memory is one that I first saw on the homepage of Anglicans Online soon after the March 2003 invasion of Iraq. It’s actually a satellite image that had been taken more than 5 months earlier, which I have included at the end of this post with the gracious permission of DigitalGlobe.com. Note how the church buildings seem so insignificant in the shadow of Saddam Hussein’s Ministry of Information, which was headed at the time by Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf (a.k.a., “Baghdad Bob”). Looking at this satellite image always makes me think of Jesus standing before the Roman Governor, Pontius Pilate, and being asked the question, “What is truth?”
