Nearly 8,000 Choose to Follow Jesus During Egyptian Outreach

[Vambram]

'A Foretaste of Heaven': Nearly 8,000 Choose to Follow Jesus During Egyptian Outreach

It's been called the largest Christian event in Egypt's history as more than 17,000 attended a Gospel crusade and more t

www2.cbn.com

It's been called the largest Christian event in Egypt's history as more than 17,000 attended a Gospel crusade and more than 7,800 people made a decision to put their faith in Jesus Christ.

Dr. Michael Youssef's Leading The Way ministry held the evangelistic event in Cairo last month and told CBN News he is praising God for the thousands who came forward seeking hope, healing, and change.
"It was an amazing experience," he recalled. "Past midnight, people did not want to leave and said, 'We just feel the Holy Spirit here' and it was a foretaste of Heaven. Just praising God."
The 75-year-old pastor of the Church of the Apostles in Atlanta, Georgia said he was invited to Egypt to preach by a cross-denominational coalition of pastors and leaders nearly a year ago.
"Twelve months ago I received an invitation from pastors and leaders representing 27 denominations and they said, 'We have never had an evangelistic outreach of that kind of magnitude. Would you pray about it?' I prayed about it and I felt, 'Of course, I will come.'"

Youssef said nearly a year of prayer went into preparing for the event. At the start of the Israel-Hamas war, he was urged to cancel because of mounting pressure in the Middle East.
"God knew 12 months ago when this was planned that this [war] was going to happen," he explained. "This is not taking Him by surprise. Can you imagine an announcement made that the evangelist is not coming because he is concerned about the situation in the Middle East?" Youssef asked. "What kind of a God do I worship? I am going no matter what. And I knew that I could trust God, this was God's plan and we want to be on His plan."
The executive president of Leading the Way went to Cairo last month on a mission to share a message of hope with Egyptians.

"I think there are many things that are going on right now. The war on the Northern border with Hamas, inflation is 40% in Egypt. People are really suffering and some are losing hope and they want something to hang their hope onto. They want to have peace and this is exactly the message I brought them. You can have peace in Christ, regardless of the circumstances and regardless of the surroundings, and it just resonated with them and I praise God for that because it was a simple message of the Gospel and the hunger was there," Youssef said.

Youssef attributed the event's unprecedented attendance to the power of prayer.
"There have been people who have been praying around the clock for nearly 12 months," he explained. "I always say this is God's answer to the prayers of the faithful people there....He responded to their prayers and their faith and gave them what is going to be now an igniting of a movement that is going to continue. It's not going to stop. We praise God for all those people."

Youssef, a native Egyptian who lived in Lebanon, says he is passionate about seeing the Middle East embrace Jesus Christ.
"The church is booming. It is amazing what God is doing. The evangelicals and Protestants may have been 250,000 or 300,000 back when I lived there 55 years ago. Now there are over 2 million evangelicals in Egypt and about 10 million Coptic Orthodox [Christians]. God is doing an amazing work and bringing people to Himself," he said.
Youssef added, "Please pray that God will keep that movement that was ignited to keep going for many years to come."



I praise the Lord that people are coming to a saving knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ. The Gospel of Christ is far more powerful than anything else in the world. Please pray that more and more and more people in the Middle East, and all over the rest of the world, accept the Lord Jesus Christ as their personal Savior.

 

[mourningdove~]

I love what the Leading the Way ministry has been doing, and continues to do, to reach the lost.

Awesome!

 

[The Liturgist]

But as @dzheremi and others can attest, Cairo already has a huge population of Coptic Orthodox Christians. 10 million of the 80 million citizens of Egypt are Christians, of whom 100,000 are Alexandrian Greek Orthodox and the rest are mostly Coptic Orthodox, and of those, the largest concentration of Coptic Christians has long been in Cairo, So its unlikely that any significant percentage of the attendees were converts from Islam.

If this was happening in, say, Tripoli or Khartoum or Riyadh or even Amman in Jordan, which has a Christian population but a small one compared to Egypt, that would be more interesting.

Also calling this the largest Christian event in Egypt’s history strikes me as a bit pretentious since as members such as @prodromos @HTacianas @Valletta @chevyontheriver and so on would agree, that event was probably when Christ Himself lived in Egypt for the first few years of His life as Saints Mary and Joseph brought him there to protect him from the mass infanticide conducted by King Herod, which most churches commemorate shortly after the Nativity, on the Feast of the Holy Innocents, which is December 28th or 29th on the Gregorian Calendar depending on the church, and which will be on Thursday January 11th for Orthodox churches on the Julian Calendar and Coptic Calendar, such as the Coptic Orthodox Church. See Matthew ch. 3

Aside from that, which by virtue of being in the Gospel and involving the presence of Jesus Christ in Egypt personally and this being integral to his survival, for all other male infants in his demographic group were murdered at Herod’s orders, other important events that occurred to the Christians in Egypt more important than this involve the Diocletian persecutions, the deposition of the heretic Arius, the restoration of St. Athanasius as Pope of Alexandria after he was deposed for many years, the reign of St. Cyril the Great as Pope during which time he removed the non-Christian population from Alexandria, the later Muslim invasion and the beginning of the persecutions, particularly under the Mamluks when Coptic and Greek Orthodox Christians heard speaking in a language other than Arabic would have their tongues cut out, and more recently, the removal of Muhammed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood because of his severe measures many of which were particularly injurious to the Christian population, and just as Coptic Orthodox Christians had rallied together with their Muslim neighbors to depose the former dictator Mubarak and call for free elections, at Tahrir Square in Cairo, many Muslims rallied together with Copts to force the removal of Muhammed Morsi, who had been elected but whose actions towards implementing an Islamic government in Egypt post-election were extremely unpopular with both the Christian and Muslim populations.

Other important Christian events in Egyptian history include the retreat of St. Anthony in the desert, the founding of the monasteries by the Desert Fathers, the schism between the Coptic and Greek Orthodox after Chalcedon, the theft of the Codex Sinaiticus from St. Catharine’s Monastery in Sinai in the 19th century by a Belgian adventurer who sold the fragments to the French, British and Russian governments, where they were subsequently used, along with the Codex Vaticanus and Codex Alexandrinus, to establish the “Alexandrian Text Type” which formed the basis for the “Minority Text” from which several modern editions of the Bible were translated, in part or in whole (I think the NIV used the Minority Text for its translation of the New Testament), the discovery of the heterodox writings at Nag Hammadi in the 1940s, and so on.

Also the 17,000 figure of attendees is even less overwhelming when one considers that St. Mark’s Cathedral in Cairo accommodates thousands and is frequently full, on any major feast. There is also a smaller church adjacent to it, at St. Mark’s Square* where a terrible terrorist attack happened a few years ago.

*The fact that enough Christians live in Cairo for one neighborhood of Old Cairo to be called the Coptic Quarter and for there to be a large public square named for St. Mark the Evangelist, the first Bishop of Alexandria, should also give a sense as to the true scale of things.

And at St. Mark’s Square there have been demonstrations of Christians against persecution and terrorism that had well over ten thousand attendees

 

[RileyG]

Glory to God!

God bless all Coptic Christians who are persecuted.