Commentary: Hey, SBC, Bethlehem is still waiting

During their 2026 annual meeting in Orlando in June, Southern Baptist messengers were adopted a series of resolutions, including one that clearly condemned antisemitism and expressed solidarity with Jewish communities. That is a serious and necessary concern, and it should be taken seriously. Antisemitism is real, and the church is right to speak against it.

But when the resolutions are read as a whole, something noticeable appears. Palestinian people or even Palestinian Christians are not explicitly mentioned. There is no direct reference to churches in the land most often discussed in these conversations. No named recognition of the Christian communities who still live there.

I went looking carefully, thinking I might have missed something. I had not. In the publicly available resolutions, I did not find any direct mention of Palestinians, Palestinian Christians, Gaza, the West Bank, or the humanitarian situation there. The word “Palestinian” does not appear in the resolutions.

While Jerusalem and Israel are referenced in prayerful and thematic language, there is no parallel reference to the Christians or other communities who live in the same region.

And yet Palestinians are not absent from the world. We appear daily in news reports, analysis, and political debate. We are present everywhere except, it seems, in the formal spaces where decisions are made about how the church speaks of us.

I am a Palestinian Christian

I am a Palestinian Christian. I live a short distance from Bethlehem, in the same land where the church has existed since the earliest centuries. My church prays in Arabic. The stones of its walls carry centuries of worship. My family did not arrive here recently. We have remained here.

And yet, in many global evangelical conversations about this land, our voice is rarely heard directly.

This is not written in anger. It is written in honesty.

Part of me hesitated to write again. I have raised this concern before, and often nothing changes. Not disagreement. Not engagement. Just distance. And over time, distance becomes familiar. Silence hurts even more than you can imagine. As we say in the Arabic proverb: “No right is lost as long as someone is demanding it.”

But Bethlehem is still here, and so are we.

A proposal

So, let me ask something direct, the way I think Scripture asks us to speak to one another. Southern Baptists, your next convention is set for Indianapolis, June 2027. I am asking you to change that location, and I have nothing against Indianapolis. I am asking you to hold it in Bethlehem instead.

Not as a tour. Not as a photo near the Church of the Nativity with a guide explaining where Jesus was born or where the shepherds once stood. I mean the actual convention. The actual business. The actual messengers, voting on actual resolutions, in the actual town where Christ was born, sitting a short drive from a wall, surrounded by the Christians who still live there.

I think if you did that, the resolutions would be written differently. It is easy to speak about a place from a distance. It is much harder to do it while a Palestinian pastor is sitting in the same room, in his own town, having just passed through a checkpoint to reach the convention hall.

Presence changes things

I do not say this to accuse anyone of bad faith. I believe most Southern Baptists who voted for those resolutions did so out of sincere conviction and a desire to stand against hatred. That sincerity deserves respect.

But sincerity is not the same as presence. It is possible to care deeply and still not hear the people most affected by your words. You can love a people you have never had to listen to. You can also forget a people you have never had to see. It happens easily. It happens quietly. It happens, I think, without anyone meaning for it to.

Scripture reminds us it is unwise to answer a matter before hearing it fully. In this case, the deeper concern is not that we were answered incorrectly. It is that we were not asked at all.

I do not know if this will change anything. The last appeal did not. But Bethlehem is still standing, the church bells still ring on Sunday, and there is still time before June 2027 to decide whether the next convention will speak about us or finally speak with us.

We would open the door. The question is whether you would walk through it.

A request

And while that question is being considered, here is a second one that does not require moving an entire convention: If anyone within the Southern Baptist Convention is open to it, I would welcome the opportunity to help draft a resolution myself for next year, so that Palestinian Christians are not simply discussed from a distance, but finally included in writing the words that concern us.

Jack Nassar is a Palestinian Christian based in Ramallah, Palestine. He holds a Master of Arts degree in political communications from Goldsmiths, University of London, and brings professional expertise across multiple sectors, driving positive change. He can be reached at: [email protected]. The views expressed in this opinion article are those of the author.