Sunday in Jordan

Today we donned our business clothes and sat at the table with His Royal Excellency Akel Biltaji with Jordan’s Royal Institute for Inter-Faith Studies (www.riifs.org). He's a gentle man who has been sorry to see a mass exodus of Christians from his country. The burning question on our minds was the fact that it's illegal here to convert to Christianity. (Jordan's legal system cannot contradict Shari'a law.) He told us "I answer this question in every meeting." He went on to explain that Jordan has "freedom of religion apart from the sensitive matter" of converting, "which is only a minor factor in our society."

This afternoon some of us took a four-hour round-trip to see remains of the oldest church in the world. Beneath a seventh-century church they found a cave with an altar that turned out to be a first-century church, where excavators have found coins dating to roughly the time of Jesus' resurrection. Some of the phone service was down today so the person with the key never arrived, but we made our own fun instead.