PUTTING UP A CHURCH BUILDING IN ISRAEL TODAY
CONSTRUCTION STALLED DUE TO ORTHODOX OPPOSITION

Following serious delays due to the Intifada (which made it impossible for many Palestinian construction workers to enter Israel), another delay was forced a few days ago by Orthodox pressure on the licensing authorities. The Orthodox fully realise the implications of our constructing a church building in a Jewish area and will fight us with all they have. If they could, they would forestall any likelihood of establishing a precedent for a local Christian community being allowed to construct its own house of worship. But since, for conscience sake, we are careful to maintain the law and to follow the building code, there is no way they can stop us. The only thing they can do is to harass, slow down the process and try to make it as expensive as possible for us due to repeated delays. Already, volunteers who came to Israel in order to assist us in the building program have been forced to remain idle, and we have no idea when the next stall to the construction will come - which is precisely what our opponents wish to achieve.

Obviously, the Orthodox are determined, well-monied and a highly influential body in Israel. They have hired a battery of five lawyers, including one of Israel's most tenuous and most expensive lawyers, in order to combat us at every step. They successfully brought about a stall in the building process (now overcome) and are likely to try their hand at this time and again. They will invent reasons to stall construction, question our adherence to the letter of the law, raise objections and so on.

They hope to erode our resources and our determination. This is war, no less, and we need to learn to be patient, wise, doggedly gentle and persistent without allowing our opponents' negative behaviour to affect us or to draw us into behaving as they do. We serve a higher cause than preserving the status quo, and both God and morality are on our side.

Our response should be to accelerate the building process as much as we can in order to reduce the length of time our opponents can harass, so we are determined to go as far as we can each time volunteers, contributed materials and our financial resources enable us to do so.

LATE NEWS

We have been able to overcome present technical hindrances to the construction process and are resuming work.

Baruch Maoz