Churches in Kuwait

Christianity has been present in the Gulf for roughly 1,500 years. In the 700s-800s a small Christian community lived in the center of the Failaka Island. In 2016, the work Al-Qusur, A Christian Monastery on Failaka Island was published detailing this archaeological site. Julie Bonnéric writes that, “the history of Christianity in the Gulf is still largely unknown since both archaeological and written sources are sparse. A church was excavated at al-Qusur by the French Mission to Kuwait in 1988–1989. Since 2011, a new French–Kuwaiti Archaeological Mission in Failaka has aimed to better understand the site… [it is] the second Christian settlement in the Gulf to be proven to be a monastery.” The images below come from Archaeology Magazine and IASA.

Much later, Western Christian missionaries were active in the Gulf region. According to The Arabian Mission’s Effect on Kuwait Society, published in 2014 by Khaled Albateni, in 1890 a group of students in New Brunswick Seminary established a missionary called the Arabian Mission to evangelize the Muslim people of Arabia. They established stations in Basra, Amarah, Masqat, Bahrain, and then in Kuwait in 1910. They used Kuwait to reach the interior of Arabia. Albateni writes that, “their missionary method was to use philanthropic services to gain the hearts and minds of the Muslims.” In 1914 they built a hospital in Kuwait, which operated in until 1967. Today it is a museum. They had a magazine entitled Neglected Arabia. You can see some covers below, all found on Internet Archive.

Following the discovery of oil in 1938, Kuwait’s society changed to primarily being made up of expats, many of whom are Christian. Here are some of the churches around Kuwait today:

Our Lady of Arabia Parish: located in Ahmadi, the first Catholic Church to be built in Kuwait, completed in 1955