In the final approach to Christmas, many people will be bustling about visiting relatives, shops, churches, carol services and maybe even Santa’s Grotto. One stop that many people will not be making this Christmas, however, is the one place where it all started.
The Church of England is attempting to revive the flagging numbers of people making pilgrimages to the Holy Land and to engage with the local and often forgotten community of (largely Palestinian) Christians in the Holy Land, known as the “Living Stones”.“I would encourage people to go to the Holy Land for their own faith but even more at this time I would encourage them to go in solidarity with their fellow Christians,” says Bishop Michael Doe, General Secretary of USPG: Anglicans in World Mission.
The Bishop recently returned from leading a pilgrimage to the Holy Land along with Richard Llewellin, former Bishop of Dover, Rev Tim Woods and 34 other pilgrims.
Last year at Christmas, the Archbishop of Canterbury visited the Holy land on a pilgrimage with three other church heads and, following that, the Church of England launched an audit which discovered a significant drop in pilgrimages being organised by Church of England parishes and dioceses.
Charles Reed, International Policy Advisor of the Church of England, said, “One of the things that came out through the audit was that the number of people doing pilgrimages has quite significantly declined and as a result of that decline there’s now a loss of an institutional capacity to organise pilgrimages.”
Reed attributed this to “a general underlying anxiety which people have about travelling to the area”.
“If you look at the media images coming out of Israel/Palestine and the wider Middle East then your perception will be that this is a region torn by conflict with violence occurring everyday and in every part,” he added.
“But obviously the actual reality of the situation is far from that. That being said, those security concerns need to be taken into consideration.”
According to Reed, the perception of violence has meant “that even if people are organising pilgrimages, pilgrims are being forced to cancel or being forced to re-direct their efforts to other parts of the Holy land for example Jordan, Syria and elsewhere”.
Although pilgrimages from within Church of England parishes seem to have declined recently, other evidence suggests that pilgrimages as a whole are picking up again.
