The Rev. Fahed Abu-Akel, moderator of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), uses parables to illustrate to Americans the complexities of the Middle East. He is the first Arab-American to head a major U.S. denomination.

Like another man from Galilee, the Rev. Fahed Abu-Akel teaches through parables. One of his most pointed is the tale of the misidentified minister.

Last year, Abu-Akel gave the invocation at the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. birthday observance at Atlanta's Ebenezer Baptist Church. Despite his introduction as a local Presbyterian minister, despite a prayer that invoked God and Jesus, his name seemed to cause some confusion.

"National Public Radio introduced me to the nation as a Muslim clergyman," says Abu-Akel, still ruffled at the implication that any Arab must be Islamic.

The moral of the story?

"It is naive and dangerous to lump people together the way most of us do in this country. A superpower cannot afford to think that way. It makes us more likely to cave in to emotion and racism."

For the past year, Abu-Akel has been preaching his message of tolerance and understanding from one of the loftier pulpits in American religion. Last June, he became moderator of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), the highest elected position in a denomination of 2.5 million that is a cornerstone of the Protestant establishment. His term ends next weekend, when the church convenes its 215th annual General Assembly in Denver.

In leading the Presbyterians, Abu-Akel also became a pioneer for his people.

"He's the first Arab-American to head a major U.S. denomination," says Eileen Lindner, deputy secretary for research at the National Council of Churches. A Presbyterian minister herself, she adds, "Fahed is our gift to religious pluralism."

Abu-Akel's biography testifies to the complexity of the Middle East. As a Palestinian Christian who grew up in Israel, he is part of a minority within a minority -- and thus something of a mystery in his adopted land.

"To the average American," he says in a spicy Arabic accent, "a Palestinian Christian does not exist."

Abu-Akel is sitting in his cluttered office at First Presbyterian Church in Midtown, where he runs a ministry for international students. At 59, he is bald and graying on the sides but has the enthusiasm and eager grin of a much younger man. The only sign of his position is the silver pendant around his neck -- the moderator's cross -- which, he notes with a laugh, sets off airport metal detectors. His post is unpaid and largely honorary. After presiding over last year's assembly, he set off on a breakneck itinerary that has kept him on the road 90 percent of the time, traveling around the church in the United States and representing it overseas in Korea, China, Indonesia, Cuba, Sudan and Israel.

"It's sinful how much I travel," he says.

This spring his journeys took him to the idyllic setting of Montreat, the Presbyterian assembly ground in the North Carolina mountains, for a conference on peace in the Middle East. By coincidence, the program began on the first full day of the war in Iraq.

"This is surreal," said an obviously pained Abu-Akel, as a TV across from the registration table showed tanks rolling toward Baghdad.

The lobby of the Assembly Inn teemed with ministers and educators who were, to a soul, against the war -- one woman going so far as to profess embarrassment that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is a Presbyterian. Abu-Akel opposed the war, too, preferring a continuation of weapons inspections, but he was careful not to come off like a strident peacenik. He wore a U.S. flag pin on his lapel and prayed for the soldiers as well as the civilians.

Then, in the keynote address, he offered his best parable: his own story.

"Every time I see a child run from fighting," he said, "I see myself."

Among the refugees

Abu-Akel grew up in Kuffer-Yassif, a Palestinian village in the hill country between the Mediterranean and the Sea of Galilee. When he was 4, in 1948, war broke out between the newborn state of Israel and the Arab nations that violently opposed a Jewish homeland in their midst. Israelis remember it as their War of Independence. Palestinians call it al-nakba -- the catastrophe.

One of Abu-Akel's earliest memories, burnished by a lifetime of telling, is fleeing the family home ahead of advancing Israeli troops. His mother refused to leave.

"I can see her standing on that flat roof waving to us -- it's as clear as an image on a TV screen," he says. "She told my father, 'This is our land, our home, our church. If they want to kill me, they will have to kill me at home.' "

The rest of the family -- five daughters and three sons -- lived for months in a refugee camp. Israeli forces destroyed hundreds of Palestinian villages but spared Kuffer-Yassif because its elders promised not to fight. Almost a million Palestinians fled the country. The Abu-Akels were among the minority who went back to Israel, reuniting with his mother and resuming their farming life.

"We were second-class citizens," Abu-Akel says. "Our schools got less money. Our village had no electricity or running water until two years before I moved away. If I wanted to go to Jerusalem or the Sea of Galilee, I had to get a permit from the military governor."

He read about the civil rights movement in America and sympathized with the plight of another dispossessed people. When King was jailed in Georgia, Abu-Akel and some classmates wrote a letter to President Kennedy pleading for his release.

The Abu-Akels had been Orthodox Christians for generations, part of the 10 percent of Palestinians who follow the cross instead of the crescent. Abu-Akel's path to the ministry began when a pair of Scottish medical missionaries came to stay with the family when he was a teenager. They tutored him in English, his third tongue after Arabic and Hebrew, praying and reading the Bible together.

He decided to go to seminary. On the recommendation of American friends, he enrolled at Southeastern College, an Assemblies of God school in Lakeland, Fla. He arrived in 1966 with a suitcase, an Arabic Bible, an English dictionary and $90 -- half of which he promptly blew when he mistakenly took a limousine instead of a taxi from the Tampa airport.

Still, he fell for America and its boundless sense of freedom. He has never forgotten how it felt to pile into a car with a friend and drive hundreds of miles to Michigan without having to stop at checkpoints. "In Israel, I couldn't drive 30 miles like that," he says. "I thought, this is the best country."

He has been a U.S. citizen for more than 20 years.

But there was one aspect of the States he did not care for, one that became apparent during the Six Day War of 1967. Americans, he thought, were so wed to Israel as the embodiment of the Holy Land that they were blinded to other viewpoints in the Middle East.

Abu-Akel could see it when he spoke about his Palestinian upbringing at churches. Once, he remembers, a woman came up to him after a talk and asked, "Now, which Jewish tribe do you belong to?"

"I came to the conclusion that Americans simply did not know, and I had to share my story with them," he says.

An Arab in Georgia

Abu-Akel came to Atlanta in 1970 to attend Columbia Theological Seminary. He soon found his calling at First Presbyterian, where, 25 years ago, he established the Atlanta Ministry for International Students.

AMIS offers orientation and hospitality to some of the estimated 5,500 foreign nationals who attend Atlanta-area colleges. Every autumn, Abu-Akel hires buses and takes the newcomers around town to see the sights and enjoy some cultural events. Since many of them are unfamiliar with American institutions, he usually hauls them to court, where they witness a mock trial, their genial host playing the defendant.

On occasion, Abu-Akel has had to function as a one-man social service agency, doing marriage counseling or helping to smooth out immigration hassles. When a Nigerian graduate student died in a crash with a drunken driver, he arranged and conducted the funeral, found the widow a lawyer and assisted her in going back to school and starting a new career as a librarian.

A couple of years ago, Abu-Akel added program to his portfolio -- Christmas International House -- a service that matches students with American families willing to host them for the holidays. He wants to expand the program beyond its 35 cities.

Abu-Akel is known as a hard worker who often arrives at the office before daylight. "When he has nothing to do, he goes to work," says Mary Zumot, his wife of 22 years, a feisty native of Jordan who until recently taught at Mercer University. "He has no hobbies."

Abu-Akel laughs and says that isn't quite so; he walks, follows the Braves and reads history and theology.

"You should see our house," Zumot counters. "Whenever I try to throw anything away, he says, 'Oh no, those are historic church documents.' "

Abu-Akel's international ministry led directly to his election as moderator. After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, he organized a moving service for Middle Easterners of all faiths to pray for the victims. Later that fall, the Atlanta Presbytery, the church's local governing body, approached him about running for moderator at the next General Assembly, if only for the healing symbolism of having an Arab-American head the denomination.

"He didn't want to run at first," says the presbytery's executive officer, Ed Albright. "He said he had too much to do here."

But Abu-Akel prayed about it and changed his mind and won on the second ballot. After his triumph, 300 Arab-Americans in Atlanta threw a banquet in his honor. "It was a beautiful thing to see all those Christians and Muslims come out for him like that," says the Rev. Charles Black, a colleague at First Presbyterian. "Fahed is a real pastor to the international community here."

Abu-Akel was seen within the denomination as a non-ideological figure who could appeal to all political factions. Even so, it wasn't long before he found himself snagged on a thorny issue that has bedeviled mainstream Protestant churches for years -- gay and lesbian ordination.

In January, 57 delegates to the previous General Assembly presented a petition demanding an unprecedented special assembly to discipline churches that were openly defying the denomination's ban on gay ministers. Abu-Akel wanted no part of the controversy. He thought reopening the matter would be too divisive, the meeting too expensive. Under advice of the church's headquarters staff in Louisville, Ky., he wrote a letter to the dissidents imploring them to reconsider. Some of them did, and the petition was invalidated.

An Ohio church challenged the ruling, saying the moderator had unfairly pressured petitioners. The case worked its way to the denomination's highest court, the Permanent Judicial Commission, whose members weighed a videotaped deposition from Abu-Akel. On the night of the trial, he admits, "I couldn't sleep."

In the end, the court declined to call the assembly but also said Abu-Akel had "acted improperly" in his letter. He now concedes that he probably overstepped the bounds of impartiality.

The Layman, a conservative evangelical publication with a large readership among Presbyterians, accused Abu-Akel of not taking his constitutional duties seriously -- tough words in a church that treasures order and process. "He treated that part of his work as unimportant," it editorialized. "He preferred his trips around the world."

A bittersweet return

There is no doubt that Abu-Akel would rather travel the church proclaiming the gospel than stay at home umpiring doctrinal disputes. As he leaves office next week and returns to his ministries in Atlanta, he will remember one trip in particular for the way it lifted and lowered his spirits. It was a pilgrimage last fall to his homeland.

In the West Bank, Abu-Akel witnessed the tragic results of 36 years of Israeli military occupation and violent Palestinian resistance. He met with representatives of the American Jewish Committee and with Yasser Arafat, who surprised him by pulling a chain and cross out from under his shirt. He led a Communion service in Jerusalem, his heart sinking when fewer than 50 people showed up in a sanctuary that holds 500. Gathering to worship has become nearly impossible in a war zone where authorities severely restrict movement.

"In the birthplace of Christ," he says, "the church is struggling to survive."

On a happier note, Abu-Akel also went back to his village in Galilee and was welcomed as a hero. His old home, still standing, remains in the family. "We went up on the roof and he said, 'This is where my mother stood,' " says Marthame Sanders, an Atlanta native who grew up in First Presbyterian and credits Abu-Akel with his decision to become a missionary. He and his wife, Elizabeth, serve in an ecumenical ministry in the West Bank.

Not long after his return to the States, Abu-Akel was riding a shuttle bus to the Atlanta airport when the subject of Iraq came up. The driver made a radical proposal that seems unlikely to appear in any road map for peace. "What we need," he said, "is for Israel to take over everything from the Nile to the Euphrates."

No Egypt, no Jordan, no Palestinian state -- just Israel.

Abu-Akel likes to tell the story, if only to show why a Palestinian Christian must keep telling stories.