Only 200 Active Church Members in Nation of 75 Million
Seventeen people who have committed to joining the Seventh-day Adventist Church in Egypt at an ongoing evangelism meeting are providing at least some hope for the church’s future here.
The six-week series in Cairo has brought attention and new interest to the Adventist Church in Egypt—which the church’s president for the country, Samir Berbawy, describes as dying.
Officially there are 840 Adventist Church members in Egypt, but Berbawy says in reality about 200 members are active in the country of 75 million people.
Meetings at the Heliopolis Adventist Church in Cairo have drawn an average of 100 attendees with Egyptian, Filipino and Sudanese backgrounds.
“This is a significant number of people,” says Berbawy, a former United States high school principal who grew up in Egypt and Lebanon.
“We have not had people make decisions like that for years,” says Berbawy, who took up his post as president last year. “This has also been helping with the awakening of our local members.”
The evangelism series, titled “Revelation of Hope,” has garnered positive publicity for the small church in Cairo. Newspaper advertisements for the series prompted calls from other newspapers interested in the church’s mission.
“Other newspapers started asking us to publish our beliefs,” says Berbawy. “We have very limited Arabic publications in Egypt and we haven’t been able to circulate our beliefs. This has definitely helped us in the public eye.”
Each evening’s message was written especially for the series by Mark Finley, an Adventist world church vice president. The sermons were translated into Arabic and used in a computer slide show program.
Ted Wilson, a vice president of the Adventist world church, led the meetings for four nights each week. Berbawy picked up where Wilson left off and is now leading the meetings for two nights a week until the series finale July 6.
Berbawy says one of the biggest challenges facing the church in Egypt is the lack of young people prepared to lead the church in the future. While there are many children in the church, he estimates there are only 40 to 50 people between the ages of 15 and 25.
“We have no leadership in place for the future,” he says. “Young people have been leaving the country to seek their future goals because there is nothing for them here.”
Former Secretary-Treasurer for the Adventist Church in the Middle East, Homer Trecartin, says many young Adventists leave the country to avoid being drafted into the required three-year military service and taking university classes and exams held on Saturdays, the Adventist Sabbath.
Berbawy says other challenges include reaching a country of 75 million people with only eight pastors. Traditional evangelism methods are outlawed in the Arabic country and only eight of the Adventist Church’s 24 buildings are in good enough shape to be called houses of worship; many have been neglected and are in need of major repair, while others need to be torn down.
But the series is one of a few points of hope for the church in the country, church leaders say. The Adventist Church in Egypt is applying for a permit to launch a college to train future church leaders. The theology college, which the church is allowed to run without governmental interference, will provide Nile Union Academy graduates with a recognized degree in Egypt.
“We just need everybody’s prayers,” Berbawy says. “The challenges here are great.”