Witnessing Faith in Action
The historic architecture of Cairo. (Credit: David Uttley, Compelling Story)
Katharine von Schubert, Embrace Trustee and a Lay Pioneer in the Southwark (CofE) Diocese, recently visited Egypt and met Embrace partners in Cairo, Alexandria and Upper Egypt. She describes the impact of encountering people of inspiring strength of faith and of witnessing the transformative power of their commitment to lift up the marginalised.
A few weeks ago, I went back to Egypt where I had worked on and off through the 1990s. As a young Arabic graduate, I had found Cairo a magic, historic and fascinating city of between 12 and 20 million people, depending who one spoke to. It was stark in contrasts with its thick black air pollution, pungent smells, crowding, noise and poverty, yet its sophisticated cultural heritage, ancient monuments, the vast wealth of its middle and upper classes and the serenity of the desert surround, with its monasteries and Bedouin culture.
Now, 30 years on, the population is nearer 30 million and Cairo is one of the world’s mega cities. It sprawls into the desert in newly built suburbs, block on block, built to relieve the pressure on historic Cairo. As before, I found myself both stunned at the extent of the city and the unending poverty of the masses, as well as emboldened by the faith of its people.
I found myself stunned witnessing the unending poverty of the masses.
For amidst the sprawl of the endless dwellings and mud alleyways, are also the clean and perfect lines of stunning ancient mosques, and the round domes and lowered floors of even older Coptic churches. Egypt is a place of faith and belief. Religion is omnipresent. Religion is public. It is faithfully and publicly practised by millions of active believers, symbolised most clearly for the western Christian in the frequent call of the muezzin for believers to pray. If only, I think, we too could be called by the peal of church bells to pray more regularly and be reminded to put our focus on greater things.
Yet as church-going Christians have dwindled significantly in Britain during the last 30 years and faith has become more private, young Egyptian Christians are burgeoning, and their churches remain vibrant. In most of the conversations we had with people of different denominations, I was struck that they do not seem to have a problem with identity. Their Christian status and calling remains wonderfully clear, perhaps by dint of living in a religiously-conscious society. As they spoke with passion and faith about their vision for the people they served – those with the least rights in Egyptian society, the least social status, those struggling with drug abuse, with mental health issues, with food scarcity and illness – I couldn’t help reflect on why I felt it was easier somehow to be a Christian in Egypt than at home!
Hearing Embrace’s partners speak of their Christian task and God’s faithfulness, unhindered it seemed by the kind of doubt that Western cynicism can induce, I found my doubt diminished and my faith rejuvenated.
This is not to underestimate the challenge we have as Christians in the West to work out how the gospel challenges the prevailing culture – not least, our relentless individualism and rampant consumerism. But the mindset that we can get into, where religion is permitted but seen as irrelevant by the majority, can shroud the freshness of Jesus’ central message: God is with the poor.
This was brought home to me when we visited a specialist school for children with disabilities tucked away inside a network of narrow streets, just a few minutes’ walk away from the sparkling Mediterranean Sea and tourists of Alexandria. Seeing the tenderness and devotion with which the Christian staff loved and cherished Muslim and Christian children with severe mental or physical disabilities, children whose needs would be deemed too great to meet by society at large, especially in the time of a pandemic, was overwhelming.
I witnessed the tenderness and devotion with which Christian school staff cared for pupils with disabilities.
A few kilometres along the same jam-packed coastal road, in another hidden enclave, a group of young Egyptians in their late teens and early twenties spoke to us of how little self-esteem they had after leaving the education system, and how few opportunities there were in Egypt to better themselves. The level of state school education in Egypt is poor – “it makes clones and kills creativity” said one – and life choices for young people can be few. The result can be stagnation and depression. One by one they described how their despair and lack of hope had been transformed when they had been taught some extra multi-media skills in a diocesan project, to help get them jobs and given opportunities to do grassroots peace building in Egyptian society where they felt mutually supported and useful. “Before I worked here,” said one girl, “I couldn’t imagine a future for myself. Now I am doing things I never thought I could do.”
Their excitement and hope was palpable as they spoke of finding themselves not only personally empowered but in a supportive community where they had learned to live and love together.
“The thing that changed the most is our idea of partnership” said one of the young leaders. “Each of our households depends upon the other.” They went on to describe the close teamwork and their shared sense of identity which powers them forwards to face challenges together.
These grassroots projects which result in a strong sense of identity and fellowship begin to impact on wider Egyptian society. “It is a very important part of our ministry to make reconciliation between families. This is our main job as a church to be reconciled with others,” said another senior partner of Embrace in a context where communal relations in villages along the Nile is of key significance to development.
The same sentiment of communal empowerment was present when Muslim women in an Upper Egyptian village spoke of their joy at being able to learn to read enough to be able to read medical prescriptions, sign documents and even know when they were being cheated!
Women told me of their joy at being able to learn to read and write and how it empowered them.
All the women we met who partook in literacy classes in this village and in the poorest desert slums on the edge of Alexandria - a mix of completely veiled Muslim women and Christian women wearing headscarves, were eager to tell us how much being able to read had changed their lives by giving them some influence and social power to improve their lives: literacy being not just a benefit in itself but enabling relationships to flourish between different faith communities.
The Christian God is a God of the poor. The poor encompasses all those without hope. The richness of spending time in a culture where such faithful and simple application of the gospel has such an obvious and profound effect on those who are loved and given some hope is immeasurable. It has caused me to think again about what believing in a God of the poor means in our own society and what tangible acts of faith and goodness the church and Christian believers can make to offer hope to those without any.
