‘Crying for Help and Reformation’

With a focus on Arabic-speaking Protestants in Ottoman Syria (present day Lebanon and Syria) in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this chapter explains how Syrian Evangelical Church members who shared the same Reformed theological tradition came to define themselves as either Congregationalists or Presbyterians. Contrary to the accounts of Presbyterian missionaries who operated the American Syria Mission after 1870, the church schism in Beirut and subsequent denominational divisions were not merely the result of internal Syrian Protestant squabbling, self-interested troublemaking, or a preference for congregationalism. Rather, the church controversies and anti-missionary critiques that emerged during this period were part of a wider Protestant dissenting tradition.