As Moses once led his people out of Egypt to Mt. Sinai, church leaders in a post-Mubarak era are discovering how to guide the largest Christian population in the Middle East against new threats and become good neighbors.
On a bright Sunday morning in Nasr City, a district of Cairo, millions of Egyptians begin a typical workday: Women in brightly colored head coverings barter for vegetables in outdoor markets, men in compact cars relentlessly blare horns during morning commutes, and children in neat uniforms march arm-in-arm to local schools.
The morning call to prayer wafts from dozens of nearby mosques, but Sunday isn’t a holy day for Egypt’s majority Muslim population. Schools close and mosques open for weekly sermons on Friday.
But in an eight-story building tucked into a row of high-rise apartments on a major thoroughfare, an exception to the normal routine unfolds. Draw near to the gates of the only evangelical church in this district of some 2 million Egyptians, and you’ll hear the sound of nearly 300 voices singing in Arabic: “Consider it all joy when you go through trials.”
Come inside the packed meeting room with high ceilings and wooden pews and you’ll find a church leader behind a pulpit talking about Moses. “Moses understood the sovereignty and power of God,” he says. “But I don’t think he had a clue how powerful and sovereign God was until he lived with Him in the wilderness.”
It’s a message that resonates for Egyptian Christians living in a modern-day wilderness of their own. Though life has been difficult for the minority group for decades, the last year has brought a revolution that yielded an Islamist-dominated parliament and worries that life may grow even harder for Christians already facing discrimination and oppression.
Last October, fears deepened when the army cracked down on Coptic Christians in Cairo protesting the demolition of a church building in Aswan. The assault on protesters killed 27 and injured more than 300.
Source: World Magazine | Jamie Dean
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