Guide to the Syria-Lebanon Mission Records

American Protestant work in Syria dates from 1819, when Pliny Fisk and Levi Parsons, representatives of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) arrived in Smyrna with the objective of initiating missionary work in the Jerusalem area. Following the reunion of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. Old School and New School branches in 1870, the ABCFM's Syria Mission was transferred to the Board of Foreign Missions. The work of the Presbyterian Church in Syria was conducted through four main stations, sixty-three outstations, and several substations. Three of the main stations were taken over from the ABCFM. The first was Beirut, occupied in 1833 (Souk-el-Garb and Zahleh were two of its substations). Tripoli was occupied in 1848 and Sidon in 1851. The last main station, Aleppo, was opened by the BFM in 1920; its substations included Hama and Deir ez-Zor.

The work of the Syria Mission spanned three states. Lebanon encompassed Beirut, Tripoli, Sidon and Zahleh, and Syria included Hama, Aleppo and Deir ez-Zor. Latakia was the location of limited mission work in certain villages. Conflict between Christians and Muslims presented the mission with a diversity of problems unknown in other mission fields. The division of the population along religious lines resulted in internecine warfare throughout Syria and Lebanon that had an unsettling effect on the mission's educational, medical and evangelistic work. The mission made progress, especially in the areas of educational and medical assistance. Presbyterians were involved in adult Arabic literacy efforts, operating the American Press in Beirut, and developing reading clubs like the Beirut Literary Society. The schools which followed included the American School for Girls, the Syrian Protestant College (later known as the American University of Beirut), the Tripoli Girls' School, and the Gerard Institute. Medical work was carried out in three locations: the Hamlin Memorial Sanatorium for tubercular patients, the Kennedy Memorial Hospital in Tripoli, and the Deir ez-Zor Hospital in the remote northern desert.

The first evangelical church in Syria was organized in Beirut in 1848; by 1921 the existing three presbyteries united to form a synod. Though a Syrian Evangelical Church was organized, its communicants remained few and the Church continued to function with the Mission until 1959. In that year, the American Protestant Mission in Syria/Lebanon was dissolved and its work and program integrated into the National Evangelical Synod of Syria and Lebanon. Mission partnership in Syria and Lebanon continued, with the COEMAR representative sitting on Synod committees, on the board of Beirut University College, supporting the work of the Near East School of Theology, and continuing to administer property formerly owned by the UPCUSA. Missionaries in Jibrail during the crisis of 1958 lost property; some mission workers were evacuated during the Six Days' War in 1967. After the 1967 war, mission work in the whole of the Middle East -- including Iran, Iraq, and Egypt -- was administered in Beirut. In May 1984, the United Presbyterian Representative Overseas for Syria, Ben Weir, was kidnapped by members of Islamic Jihad and held hostage for 16 months.