Jordanian Senator Visits Evangelical Council After Being Excluded from Earlier Meeting

Retired Maj. Gen. Imad Ma’ayah, president of Jordan’s Evangelical Council, met with Sen. Michael Nazzal, chair of the Tourism Committee in Jordan’s upper house, at the council’s headquarters in Amman’s Khalda neighborhood. The meeting followed an earlier parliamentary gathering where evangelicals were excluded from discussions about Jordan’s 2030 millennium celebrations marking the anniversary of Jesus’s baptism.

The earlier meeting, held at the Parliamentary Senate offices, brought together Catholic and Orthodox church leaders to outline plans for the 2030 event. Evangelicals were not invited, despite Nazzal’s office requesting the Council of the Heads of Churches to include relevant church leaders. The council, which does not include evangelicals and generally opposes their participation in public events, did not extend the invitation.

Ma’ayah provided Nazzal with an overview of the history of evangelicals in Jordan, tracing their presence back to the late 19th century, predating the modern Hashemite Kingdom. He explained that five evangelical denominations — Baptist, Evangelical Free Church, Assemblies of God, Nazarene, and Christian & Missionary Alliance — formed the Evangelical Council in 2007. Today, the council includes 57 churches nationwide, along with institutions and parachurch organizations offering educational, medical, and humanitarian services to Jordanians and refugees, including prison ministry.

Ma’ayah also highlighted his role as chair of the Alliance of Evangelical Councils in Palestine and Israel. He mentioned the World Evangelical Alliance’s recent selection of Rev. Botrus Mansour, a Nazareth-born pastor and advocate, as its secretary general at a general assembly in Korea last October.

Nazzal expressed unfamiliarity with the breadth of evangelical ministry in Jordan and encouraged evangelicals both locally and internationally to support the country’s pilgrimage initiative and the 2030 event at the site traditionally identified as the location of Jesus’s baptism on the east bank of the Jordan River. Ma’ayah, who previously commanded the Jordanian army’s royal engineering unit, noted his involvement in clearing landmines following the 1994 Jordan-Israel peace treaty.

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