This past year, the Hudson Institute released a report on global philanthropy. It indicated that in 2011, the Middle East remains near the top of US Government funding priorities, but at the bottom in US individual giving priorities. Evangelicals, of course, account for the lion’s share of individual philanthropy in the US.
Many U.S. Evangelicals have recently awoken to the realization that we cannot look to political leaders to do our work, the work of being salt and light in American society. These numbers reveal that Evangelicals are still looking to political solutions to the problems of the Body of Christ in the Middle East.
Yet the Body of Christ has a thoroughly biblical mandate to help Christians in the Middle East thrive, and be salt in light in their societies, too.
Paul’s collection among the new churches of the West for the church of Jerusalem seems to be a motivating factor in many of the greatest of his epistles, including Romans, Galatians, 1 and 2 Corinthians. It motivated his final missionary tours, and his final journey to martyrdom. In a paper published by LCMS World Relief and Human Care, (2007) Matthew C. Harrison writes that “the collection was Paul’s crowning achievement in life.” He tells the Romans that the newer churches “owe it” to the Jerusalem church. (Romans 15:27) The Gentiles received their faith because of the tradition that the Jews preserved. The same principle applies for us today, who received our faith in Christ from the tradition preserved and passed down by others in the ancient New Testament homelands of Christianity, including Egypt.
The Church in the West has dedicated itself to the cause of AIDS and Malaria in Africa, and to the cause of Evangelism in Asia. In recent years, the Body of Christ in the West has found yet another cause as alarm spreads that the Christian light in Iraq and the Holy Land is smoldering, and may soon go out altogether.
Two thirds of all Christians in the entire Middle East are Coptic – they are indigenous Christians of Egypt. Egypt’s Church is the light that shines the brightest in the entire region. It is Christianity’s last chance to thrive in the Middle East.
Just like Jerusalem, Egypt also bears the blessing of having Jesus’ presence during his lifetime, and an ancient community that goes back to the early believing Jewish/Gentile communities that the apostle Mark led according to early sources. Egypt’s Christian community meets all the same criteria for an ancient homeland church that merits our help. Egypt needs our help. But Egypt remains a very gaping hole in Evangelical expressions of brotherly love worldwide.
Pope Shenouda, (“Pope” as a title for the patriarch of Alexandria is a more ancient term than the one used by the Pope of Rome, and has none of meaning we associate with Rome) the Coptic spiritual leader, recently rejected offers of foreign legal and political pressure after peaceful Christian demonstrations in Maspero, Cairo went badly wrong. Some in the West assumed that it was because he had become too fearful of the Egyptian government to state his true mind. Could it be rather that he has weighed past interventions and found them wanting? The world, too, is asking whether decades of US government in Egypt has done much more harm than good.
Whatever the answer to that question, decades of U.S. foreign aid and diplomatic pressure in Egypt have produced all the fruit they will ever produce. Now it is time for the Body of Christ to step up for this cause as it has for others, before it is too late …for Egypt, and for the entire Middle East in which Egypt’s Christians shine.