Iraq: New Anglican school opens in Baghdad
THE HEAD of the Chaldean Catholic Church joined other ecumenical guests and dignitaries at the official opening of a new Anglican school in Baghdad. The Anglican School of the Redeemer – al-Fadi – was officially opened on Sept. 29th by the Anglican Bishop of Cyprus and the Gulf, Michael Lewis. The bishop also opened a newly re-sited and refurbished Hope Resource Centre.
The new school will enable St George’s Church in Baghdad to eventually offer six years of primary-level education to children after they have completed their time at the existing Redeemer kindergarten. It has been planned for a number of years.
Like the kindergarten, the primary school will serve all the local community. Some 90 per cent of the kindergarten’s 150 children are from Muslim families (both Shiite and Sunni) but all the teachers are Christian.
“The parents greatly value the safe environment of learning, the subjects offered in the school, including simple things like behaviour and values,” the Anglican Chaplain in Baghdad, Father Faiz Jerjees, said last year. “Children are able to relate what they learn in school to everyday life experience, and the parents are very happy to see the positive development of their children.”
The students receive breakfast, lunch and midmorning fruit, which is not typical in Iraqi schools.
Speaking earlier this year in a video by the NGO Stand With Iraqi Christians, Father Faiz said the school was focused on “not just language, not just to teach them Arabic or English; we want to also [teach] them how to live together, how they can learn together, eat together and love each other. This is very important for the future in Iraq.”
In addition to the kindergarten and primary school, St George’s runs a health clinic for its local community.
Father Faiz has been involved with St George’s since 2006. After ordination, he served as curate at the church under Englishman Andrew White who was dubbed the “Vicar of Baghdad.” However, in November, 2014, the Archbishop of Canterbury ordered White’s departure due to security concerns. In 2015 Father Faiz was licensed to succeed White as Priest-in-Charge.
That year the Church supported some of the internally displaced Iraqis who had fled from what was then the rapidly-advancing ISIS or Daesh in the Mosul and Nineveh Plain area of Iraq, and who by then were congregating at and around St George’s. With the support of the Church of the Epiphany in Doha, Qatar, St George’s provided household goods and provisions to around 60 families.
In October 2017, St George’s staged a Festival of Faith, “in the midst of hardship and at a time of disturbing political developments,” the Diocese said, to provide an opportunity for many Christians in Iraq to “joyously reaffirm their faith in God the Holy Trinity, who is Lord of all.”
In 2017 the Iraqi Ministry of Culture honoured Father Faiz as one of the country’s Distinguished Personalities of the Year for his role in supporting human rights work in the country.
St George’s Church in Baghdad was founded in 1864 and remains the only Anglican church in Iraq. The Foundation for Relief and Reconciliation in the Middle East, which supports the church, says that the present building was constructed in 1936 as a memorial to the soldiers of the British Empire who lost their lives in Mesopotamia during the First World War.
Originally built as a church for expatriates, its present congregation is entirely Iraqi. The Church was closed in 1991 after the first Gulf War. By the time it re-opened, in 1998, the building had been totally looted and was restored with funding from the British Embassy in Baghdad and the Diocese of Cyprus and the Gulf. TAP -–ACNS
