About Our Church

Our Story

The Protestant community of Minyara was founded in 1880, and is one of the largest in Lebanon. Around five hundred people belong to it today, making it the second-largest community in the village.

We are a Presbyterian congregation of the National Evangelical Synod of Syria and Lebanon, which belongs to the World Communion of Reformed Churches.

Our Village

Minyara is a village of about five thousand people in Akkar, in the far north of Lebanon. Five Christian communities live here side by side: Greek Orthodox, Greek Catholic (Melkite), Maronite, Baptist and our own Presbyterian community. We keep good relations with all of them, and with the Muslim and Christian communities of the villages around us.

Akkar is the poorest region of the country, and it carries more than its share. Alongside its own people it hosts a very large number of Syrian refugees, and the second-largest Palestinian camp in Lebanon. Lebanon's economic collapse has made all of this considerably harder.

What We Believe

We understand the Church to be a messenger and a witness of the Kingdom of God, and we believe that witness is a whole one. The Kingdom takes in every part of life, and so the social dimension of our work is not a tool for something else — it matters in itself. A church without it has a real problem of identity.

A person is not divided into parts, so the church serves the whole person: the social, the psychological, the medical and the cultural alongside the spiritual.

We do not measure ourselves by success. In the Gospels the good servant is the faithful one, and we try to do everything as faithfully as we can.

Christian presence in Akkar, in Lebanon and in the Middle East has a purpose. We believe we are called to a particular vocation here, and above all to break down the barriers between the communities that live alongside one another in Akkar. Crises are precisely the moments when churches must work out their theology and write their own chapter in the story of God's people.