Recently I attended an evangelical church in Cairo. I was warmly welcomed and given a headset for real-time translation of the service. It’s the largest evangelical church in the Arab world, with many thousands attending in person and tens of thousands attending remotely each week.
This particular service, for young adults, was filled with beauty. The teaching was biblically sound. The prayer was heartfelt. The worship of 3,000 young Egyptians rose like a flood tide within the walls of the sanctuary.
The Coptic Orthodox Church is the primary Christian communion in Egypt, representing about 10 percent of the population. It traces its roots to the missionary work of Mark the Evangelist.
Evangelicals in Egypt are a minority within a minority, and the police vehicles sitting outside the church were a sobering reminder that many churches there have been torched or bombed in recent decades. CT is partnering with filmmakers to recount how 21 Egyptians in Libya died for their faith in Jesus at the hands of ISIS in 2015.
The story of evangelicals in Egypt is the story of a faith that flourishes even in the harshest environments. It’s the kind of story Christianity Today was made to tell—the kind we tell today more frequently and more powerfully than ever before.
In the March issue, I explained that we have been reexamining and rearticulating who we believe God is calling us to be. The truths we affirm are timeless, yet the ways we affirm them are adapted to each generation. Our calling, we believe today, is to be a storyteller of the global church. Because we yearn for the church and world to love Christ and his kingdom, we advance the stories and ideas of the kingdom in every corner of the planet every day of the year.
It would be easy, especially in an election year, to grow discouraged at the fragmented nature of the church here in America. As members of the global body of Christ, however, we are called to have a wider view.
The vision of this evangelical church in Cairo cites the second chapter of Habakkuk. Verses 13 and 14 read, “Has not the Lord Almighty determined that the people’s labor is only fuel for the fire, that the nations exhaust themselves for nothing? For the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.”
Someday, the stories that consume our thoughts and stoke our anxieties will fade into silence. The story that endures is the story of the bride of Christ. That’s the story that will continue into eternity. Thank you for joining us in telling it.
Timothy Dalrymple is CT’s president and CEO.
