Scott Elliot: Rev. Charles Finnie - Lebanon visit

Thu, Mar 7th 2019 at 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm

Weekly meeting with guest speaker


Scott Elliot introduced last weeks Speaker – Rev Charles Finnie who has for the past 22 years been Minister at Hawick Burnfoot Parish Church. He spoke about his two visits to the Lebanon in recent years. On the first occasion he was part of a team of six, at the invitation of a friend who had met the Pastor of the Church of God in Beirut. The Pastor had asked for help to disciple people in the Christian Faith. Other Churches in Europe and America also support the people in Beirut.
People in Beirut have a different understanding of Church compared to our country. The Church in Beirut has three floors – on a typical Sunday morning, the top floor which holds 1,000 people is filled. In the afternoon the Nigerian Church meets from 12 noon to 4pm, and in the evening 500 Ethiopian women gather, with their men meeting on a week night. The middle floor has a School, together with six rooms where the group stayed. The rooms also house one or two refugee families needing food, clothing and looking after. Lebanon with a population of 5,000,000 takes in a maximum of 2,000,000 refugees from Syria. The Church goes down into the refugee camps in the Bekaa Valley to do work with mums and children. Other large refugee families, living in overcrowded conditions without much privacy, come to Church for washing, cooking and food.
The team went to teach certain aspects of the Christian Faith, normally in two hour seminars.
Charles then talked about the Lebanon – which could be quite lovely in the eastern end which bordered the Mediterranean, but in other parts all you could see was buildings. Beirut has no natural resources with all being imported. The group were not allowed to go into certain parts of Beirut – flags on the buildings at the end of the streets told them whether the area was Christian or Hizbollah. The group were also not allowed to go into refugee camps in the Bekaa Valley because the Lebanese government had decided to close them down and it was not safe to go there. A general observation was of battle scarred buildings from the 60’s and 70’s civil war, with poverty sitting side by side with great wealth, in a country with no social security and no free health care systems.
Seeing the poverty was the low point – the poverty of the people who had fled from a war zone with nothing, to settle in a strange country, with no extended family back up and no social network to give support. Whilst there are International Aid Agencies present, these refugees still have huge problems. Refugees from countries not bordering Lebanon have to go back to their country of origin, or a country neighbouring where they are from, and apply through the channels of that country. There are real difficulties for refugees from Iran and Iraq who have left because of religious persecution (Sunni or Shia)  - and worse if you are a Christian.
The speaker then referred to the highlights – seeing peoples lives changed, children in schools having food sponsored by Churches in Europe and America, the Church in the ridiculous situation it finds itself but still surviving and thriving. Peoples lives are changed because they are out of a war zone, or being told they are going to Canada as refugees and where a group of families have started a Church together, having found work and fitting in to their new community.
Charles finished with personal stories of families having overcome some of their health problems, including one young boy whose vital medication had been funded by members of Burnfoot Church.  
President Mairhi Trickett thanked the speaker most warmly for his excellent talk. The President had earlier welcomed Dr Mark Phillips, a visitor from the Langholm Club, on their “scatter” week.

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