It’s great to be with you and I’ve been blessed just being with you, worshiping, and praising the Lord. I told John it was worth coming just for the table talks we had during meals. As you listen to me this morning, I’d like you to think of a 16-year-old foreign high school student who came to North America, specifically Montreal, on his own. I came from a nominally Christian background. I was lonely. My grandparents had been here, my grandfather died, I was left alone. Through the love of a local church in Montreal, I was brought into the kingdom. As you listen to me speaking this morning, I want you to think of all the foreign students and young people from other countries you may know and what impact you may have on their lives and how their lives may, by God’s grace, impact their countries.

Paul’s Vision

The Apostle Paul, in the beginning of Romans, in defining his vision said the following in Romans 1:14–16:

I am under obligation both to Greeks and to barbarians, both to the wise and to the foolish. So I am eager to preach the gospel to you also who are in Rome. For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek.

If you as a church are going to think of your world mission as a congregation, you need to have these three convictions: to feel obligated, indebted to the world that does not know Jesus; to be eager and enthusiastic in sharing the gospel; and to not be ashamed of a gospel because of a deep conviction that it is the power of God for the salvation of those who believe.

Obligated, eager, and not ashamed. That is what should characterize an alive church and the leadership of a church. You as pastors of those who are going to communicate this. The goal of my talk this morning is to inspire you with some stories of men whom God used to bring the gospel in Egypt in the past and in the present. Then to empower you, I hope, with some leadership principles which were foundational for these men and are foundational in my life. I believe one of the main tasks of a leader, of a pastor, of a teacher is to communicate from the Scriptures principles which are transferable and which can mark and shape people’s lives.

If we just give information, if we just teach material, if we just give points and people leave without having been grounded in biblical principles, we’re not going to impact them for a lifetime. Many of the principles that I’m going to share with you this morning are principles that have marked my life for the last 40 years of ministry.

They were deeply ingrained into me as a young student at McGill University and they’re still the principles I go back to. I only share five. There are many others. The outline of my talk is that I’m going to share first about Christianity in Egypt, how the gospel was planted there. Thus by hearing my own testimony, I’ll give a bit of insight about Egypt today, even though I don’t need to do it because as Pastor Piper said, you can read it in the newspapers. I noticed yesterday’s USA Today had a lot of news about Egypt. It’s all true and I’m going to give you a different perspective on it, what you don’t see in the newspapers.

Finally, I’m going to talk about our ministry in the Bible Society and something about my wife’s ministry among the garbage collectors. It’s a tall order. If I speak too quickly, forgive me.

Principles of Pastoral Ministry

What I want to leave with you, and I’m going to begin with it, are these five principles. If there’s anything that I want to communicate, as someone who’s been in ministry who’s older than many of you, it’s the following.

A Christian leader, a pastor, has to have a vision. My definition of vision is that he has to see things other people don’t see and he has to empower people to capture, incarnate, and appropriate that vision for themselves. So it’s a vision which empowers others. That’s one of the hallmarks of leadership.

He has to also trust in God’s sovereignty, which gives meaning to seeming failures, to walk through the valley of a shadow of pastoral death, the kind of struggles you face with your elders, the struggles you face with fellow Christians, the opposition you receive. You have to have the gumption, the strength, the belief that God is sovereign and will carry you through the hard times. So you have to trust in God even when things go hard.

You have to also have the creativity which can transform obstacles into opportunities. Your congregation, the people you minister to, will always face obstacles. Your task is to come up with the solutions under God’s guidance with the Holy Spirit. You have to have a faith which respects people who are eccentric, who don’t fit in the tidy boxes of your church’s systems, of those who are marginal, who would feel uncomfortable in your congregation because sometimes these eccentric or marginal people God uses more powerfully than those who we would think are fit and the right people for ministry. Finally, you need the humility which allows you to be mission rather than gift oriented. I’ll come back to that later.

An Unlikely Missions Candidate

Egypt was evangelized by a very unlikely mission candidate. Any of the mission boards today would’ve turned him down. He streaked home naked on the night when Jesus was arrested. He ran home to mommy in the middle of his first mission trip. He was the cause of a first major church split between Paul and Barnabas. John Mark was not a likely candidate to be the missionary who would evangelize one of the most powerful nations of the world and the center of Greek philosophical thinking in Alexandria.

He went to Alexandria in the year 43 AD with a burden and a passion to reach Egypt for Jesus. Now that’s a tall order for a young man who’d failed before and who didn’t have a good record and whom Paul had written off as being a bad missionary. His sandal broke as he walked around Alexandria and he must have been very frustrated. You don’t carry a spare sandal in those days. He went to a cobbler named Anyanos to have it fixed. As Anyanos was fixing his sandal, he stubbed his thumb and said, “God is one.” And having been trained carefully in contextual evangelism, John Mark used that as an opportunity to share the gospel to Anyanos.

It was in Anyanos’s home that the first church in Egypt was established. One of the first churches in the world. Anyanos and his family were baptized. Anyanos became the pastor of that small church. And from that time on, the church in Egypt grew so that by the Council of Nicea, it was Athanasius the Egyptian who formed the School of Alexandria, that famous theological school, defended the deity of Jesus against Arias, the heretic. It was Athanasius who defined the Trinity in the way we understand it today. It was Athanasius who compiled the first list of the 27 books of a New Testament that we use today. When John Mark went back to Egypt after his first mission trip, he was expecting to be welcomed as a hero, but there was enough opposition that he was dragged through the streets of Alexandria until he died by his enemies.

He died a martyr. But the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church, and the church in Egypt grew and we believe that the church in Egypt had an impact all over the world. Egyptian tentmakers recruited by the Roman legions are said to have evangelized the pagan Swiss. Do you know a place called St. Moritz in Switzerland? It was evangelized by an Egyptian called Mauritius whose head was cut off and the symbol of that Canton in Switzerland has three people holding their heads in their hands. They’re three Egyptian, Christian martyrs who were used to bring the gospel to Switzerland. The Celtic Church is supposed to have been evangelized by Egyptians also. The architecture of that church and the Celtic Cross represent very much the architecture and the cross of a church in Egypt that we call the Coptic Church.

So that church grew, it evangelized and it became an evangelistic church. Why? Because of one unlikely candidate, one marginal young man, one missionary dropout who was faithful and whom God used in spite of his weakness to evangelize that country. Egypt became one of the first Christian nations, and the church in Egypt is now one of the oldest churches in the world — 2,000 years of history. But by the seventh century, the Egyptian church had become weak. There had been internal dissensions. And when the Islam came, it swept like a cloud and took over Egypt so that only 10 percent of Egyptians remained faithful to the gospel. The north of Egypt mainly became a hundred percent Muslim. The South remained a bit Christian, but only 10 percent of Egyptians remained as Christians and their 10 percent is still the same number now.

Revival in the Coptic Church

In the 19th century, Catholic and Protestant missionaries came to try to revive the old Coptic Church. The student volunteer movement sent a host of people with the catchword of the day, “the evangelization of a world in our generation.” Among them was a Scotsman, a big, tall young man who was called John Hogg. He came and joined the American Presbyterian missionaries. He came from Scotland. There were Americans there too, and their goal was to revive that sleepy Coptic Church. They knew the tradition, they knew that this was a church that had faced opposition for many years. They knew that the church that had lasted and they wanted to revive it to bring it back to the scriptures. They didn’t know how to move around the country. Transportation was not that good, so they bought a boat and went up the Nile, and they went south to where the majority of people were still Christian. They moored their boat in the city of Ashut.

In Ashut, John Hogg began a Bible study in the home of a Coptic Christian and slowly more and more people came until the history books say there were 25 people meeting in that home, studying the Scriptures with the missionary. Well, as you can imagine, the local priests and bishops were not very happy. Protestant missionaries were unknown. They were the way we would see Jehovah Witnesses or worse today. The bishop said he was going to make a declaration about the missionaries in church on Sunday. Everybody came to church on Sunday. John Hogg walked in and sat in the front pew. A bit embarrassing for the bishop, but the bishop went on. He made a statement that anybody who would have anything to do with these heretic missionaries would be excommunicated from the church. Now, to be excommunicated in 1850 meant you couldn’t be baptized, you couldn’t be buried, and you couldn’t be married.

It meant you had nothing. There was no alternative to that church. So if you are excommunicated, you are a Muslim, you’re out. Well, Hogg walked out of that service at the end when the bishop got a bit rude, but some friends called the meeting in the bishop’s quarters and said, “We need to negotiate, we need to hear.” Hogg went to that meeting and had the opportunity to share the burden that he was coming with. He shared how he believed in the trinity, in the deity of Jesus, how he represented the historic faith and that the only reason the missionaries came was to help the Coptic Church, to encourage it, not to replace it. They were not going to establish Protestant churches in Egypt. They were there to work.

Of course, the bishop was very embarrassed by this. It was a tense time and in those days the clergy were not very well-educated. So the bishop did not know how to respond. So the people called for Tenasa. Tenasa was a carpenter, a deacon, a man who whenever they had problems with Muslims would argue from the Scriptures, a man who knew the Scriptures and who would argue fervently for the true gospel. They were sure Tenasa with lambaste John Hogg, put him back in his place and answer for the true Coptic faith.

Tenasa was a short man, a very powerful speaker, and the people waited in silence to see what he would do. He looked very embarrassed. He got up very quietly and he said, “There must be a misunderstanding.” He stuttered, he hummed and hawed, and people just didn’t know what was happening. People were extremely disappointed in their hero. He did not do a good job. Eventually their meeting ended with the attempt to do some kind of reconciliation. They said, “Let’s meet again.”

Captured by the Force of the Scriptures

Why was Tenasa so hesitant? It was because the Bible study that John Hogg held was in Tenasa’s home and Tenasa was convinced by the biblical depth in teaching of his missionaries, and he was slowly being bought into what they were believing. When that was found out, Tenasa and his family were excommunicated from the Coptic Orthodox Church, which was a devastating price to pay.

Reluctantly, very reluctantly, the missionaries began the first evangelical church of Ashut. In 1870, Tenasa was ordained as the first elder of that church. Later on they found the pastor also. Tenasa continued his work. He was a carpenter and he built waterwheels. Building a waterwheel is a very complicated job and it would take up to a month. While he worked on building his waterwheel, during coffee breaks, he’d evangelize the people in the village where he was building the waterwheel.

Many small evangelical churches were planted as Tenasa, a carpenter turned evangelist, would build water wheels and evangelize people in that area. Later on in his life, in his eighties until the age of 99, he went and worked as an evangelist in a mission hospital. His heart passion was to regain the church from which he had been excommunicated and to share the gospel with the Muslims who came as patients to that hospital.

The Impact of the Bible

The work of the missionaries revived the Orthodox Church in ways that were unexpected. The schools, the hospitals were a help, but what the Coptic Church did, which was very smart — the Catholics could have learned that lesson in South America — was that instead of fighting the missionaries after that, in the middle of the 20th century, they decided to compete with the missionaries. They studied what the missionaries did, how they were able to steal some Coptic children from their faith. Basically what they did was have Sunday schools. So the Coptic leaders said, why don’t we have our own Sunday school? That was something unheard of in a church. So they came to the Bible Society and brought lots of bibles, got their best laymen and women, and got this man who was an engineer and a woman who was a nurse. They said, “Here’s a Bible. Here are 50 girls. Teach from a Bible so they don’t go to the Protestants.”

Well, these poor lay people had never opened the Bible in their lives. They had this book in their hand. They don’t know what to do with it. They didn’t know where to start. The kids are waiting to hear something, and they want to do something better than what’s happening in the Protestant Sunday schools, and they have no curriculum. So one of their number got the bright idea of translating some of the major classics of the day, FB Meyer and Matthew Henry into Arabic and publishing them as orthodox texts. So they were published by an orthodox publisher. They probably never got copyright from Matthew Henry or FB Meyer, and they were published in Arabic and became the textbooks of the Sunday school teacher.

So think of that scenario. Intelligent, educated doctors, lawyers, engineers, nurses, and teachers were opening their Bible to prepare Bible study every week using Matthew Henry and FB Meyer to prepare. What happened? I’m talking about maybe 10,000 people. They were revived. What do you do in Sunday school? You teach your Scriptures. What do you do in Sunday school? You answer difficult questions. What do you do in Sunday school? You memorize the Scriptures. And they had to be ahead of their kids. So these professional people became deep in the Scriptures and their lives were revived. They were faithful to their church, but they were deepened in the Scriptures. Then they go to church on Sunday and hear these inane sermons by his uneducated clergy. So the men of that generation, a very large number of them, decided to go into the ministry and they became the monks, the priests, and the bishops of the church today.

As I go around and visit some of these older bishops and priests in my work at the Bible Society, I ask them, “When did you get your call to ministry?” Invariably they say, “As a Sunday school teacher, God called me to ministry.” It meant that you had a very educated clergy, an intelligent clergy, and the clergy that knew things. Most of the churches in a local church, a pastor would have a weekly Bible study where he would teach the Scriptures to his people and answer questions. One of the patriarchs, who’s now in his late eighties, had a weekly Bible study. He’s had it for 35 years. Every Wednesday he teaches from the scriptures, he answers questions from the scriptures and he usually does not open his Bible to do so. He’s just about memorized the Bible.

He can answer any topic, any verse, Scripture and verse, without having to open the Bible. He just has a little outline and he’s memorized the verses. That’s the way the Bible has impacted the Coptic Orthodox Church in Egypt. It doesn’t mean they’re friendly with Protestants, it doesn’t mean they’ve changed some of their main things, but they do say, “We have tradition and the Bible, but tradition is under the Bible. The Bible is what is our constitution. If our tradition contradicts the Bible, we will not have it. We have things in tradition that are not in the Bible, but we don’t have things in tradition that are contrary to a Bible according to them.”

A Personal Narrative

Now, I knew nothing of this. I knew nothing about the history of a church. I was brought up in a nominal episcopal church. My maternal grandfather was a very wealthy and successful businessman and he had the misfortune of having no sons. That was a big disaster in those days because a businessman’s first thing to think is, “I want to have two or three sons to run my businesses.” He had many different businesses, five or six factories. He was in the transport business, in the textile business, and he was a very successful businessman. So when his eldest daughter had a baby boy, he decided unilaterally what that boy would be. So from the time I was five years old, I knew what I was destined to be. I didn’t have any identity crisis.

I remember at the age of five being dragged to grandpa’s factories along with him. There was no question. He tried to get his sons-in-law to work with him in the business and they turned him down. So he figured he’d start young with me and I wouldn’t have a choice. I even remember when I was 10 that he planned for me to go to university in Switzerland and train as an engineer. He had my life charted. He hijacked me from my father. My father was a wonderful man, by the way. When we spoke about fathers yesterday, he was a man who had really unconditional love for me and who was a very stable person, but he didn’t have a chance. Even though he was a successful dentist, it never occurred to me in a million years as a child that I would become a dentist.

My dad was one of the first orthodontists in Egypt. He was a famous dentist. He was a dentist of all the embassies. He was a dentist of a queen. You’d think that I would think of wanting to be a dentist. It never occurred to me. I think back, it’s because of this very entrepreneur, powerful grandfather of mine who just wasn’t going to let me think of anything other than take over his businesses. So that’s what I was brought up as.

Smuggled from Egypt

In 1959, my grandfather was told by people he had in government that in two weeks time he would be nationalized. Nationalization means the government takes over all your companies and pays you 200 dollars to run them by force. So you remain the CEO, but you don’t own them and you run them for the socialist government. He was devastated. He’d served the government well. He believed he was in with them and he couldn’t believe this would be happening to him. So he escaped. Unfortunately because he hadn’t expected this, he escaped penniless to Canada, borrowed some money, started a business, and began planning for our family to join him. We couldn’t all go, but they figured out a way to smuggle me out. In January of 1962, I was smuggled out of Egypt. I couldn’t tell anybody but I was leaving. They were spies all over.

I found myself leaving my grandfather in Montreal, finishing my last year of high school. I was 16. In May, my grandfather died from a heart attack. My grandmother left back to a family in Lebanon and I was left to wind up his two businesses, to finish my last year of high school, and to figure out how to survive as a 16-year old completely alone in the big city of Montreal. It was frightening. It was difficult and it was not easy. It was during that summer that through the love of a local church, I was won over to the kingdom. I’d been to church, but I never heard that Jesus died for my sins. I never heard that I could have my sins forgiven. I never heard that I could believe I was going to heaven because Jesus had forgiven me. It was on August 19th at an evangelistic meeting in that church that I stood up and made that decision that transformed my life.

It just was so incredible to me that I’d been to church all my life and hadn’t known the wonder of a gospel. When I really came to understand it, I said, “That’s what my people of Egypt need.” Now I knew nothing about the church. I just used to go to this little Episcopal church. I knew nothing about the history I’ve just shared with you. I knew nothing about that. But I said that’s what I want to do. I determined that I would go back someday, but of course I couldn’t tell my parents because by September they’d come. My dad had left his practice. He and I were in university together. He had to go back to school. We were penniless and we struggled. My mother had a nervous breakdown. It was a very difficult time. You can’t go and tell your parents you’ve suffered, you’ve done all this, and I’m going to go back. Then you couldn’t go back. We left illegally, so we couldn’t go back. So it took me 18 years to go back.

Return to Egypt

During these 18 years, I was discipled through the university group at McGill University and I was taught as a student to have a vision for the whole campus. The campus was my responsibility. We as students would meet together and think of how we could evangelize this university of 14,000 students? That helped us tremendously in our Christian [inaudible 00:26:52]. We studied the Bible inductively together. With InterVarsity on one side, my local church on the other, I was discipled and brought up.

I had the good fortune of marrying a wonderful MK, Rebecca. Her parents were missionaries in Haiti and she was a young wild American at the university and a little bit less tame than some of the Canadian girls. When we began getting interested in each other, I told her, “There’s no way we can get married.” She said, “Why?” I said, “Because you’re an American.” And she said, “What’s wrong?” I said, “America is the enemy of Egypt.” We did not have an American embassy in Egypt. We were on the other side. Egypt was aligned with Russia. So I said, “How can I go back as a missionary to Egypt, married to an American?” That’s like being a traitor. So we found a very creative solution. She became Canadian. But before she became Canadian, I abused my wife and had her pay my wife through Gordon Conwell Seminary as an American.

We went back to Montreal and we pioneered French student work there. It was a time in the seventies when they say one evangelical church or at least a home cell group that became a church was being formed every week in Quebec. There were exciting days. We saw God work among French Canadian students. It was a very moving thing. But I was still determined to go back. It was very hard to leave successful student work to go back. In 1980, Rebecca and our two children went to Egypt. I don’t have time to tell you about how difficult these years were. I was a known personality in Canada by this time I was already on the Committee for World Evangelization. I had done a lot of things, but I went to Egypt. I was a nobody. I didn’t know anything, didn’t know the church, didn’t have anything to offer.

I was there as a student worker. The Lord led me to think of the idea of pioneering inductive Bible study as the image of InterVarsity in Egypt. Because I first met the pastor whose church I was going to, he said, “What’s your group doing?” He has never heard of InterVarsity. I said, “We’re here to help the church.” And he looked me straight in the eye and said, “Tell me another one.” Basically he was saying, you’re a liar. This man had had bad experiences with parachurch groups. He said, “You have a plan. You want to recruit me to implement your program in my church? You don’t want to help my vision. You want to impose your vision on me.” These were very devastating words. I stayed two years in the pew as a faithful member of our congregation trying to prove that I didn’t want to do that.

I began thinking about what approach would not threaten the Egyptian church. The Evangelical church was quite powerful in Egypt, quite big. A lot was going on. I figured inductive Bible study would be a good way to do it. So the approach was very simple. I would come, no textbooks, no materials, nothing. I had three questions that I helped young people do. One, you observe a text. Now InterVarsity’s second point usually is to interpret, but interpretation is a red herring. It’s a very dangerous thing to tell pastors that were getting high school students or young university students to interpret the Bible is very presumptuous. So we change that to “understand.” So you observe, you understand, which makes pastors happy, and you apply. It seemed innocuous. It seemed like you couldn’t do much harm doing that. I said, “I only need a few weeks with your young people’s leaders and I’m gone. They don’t need me. I’ve helped them to have keys to study the Bible.”

Leading Leaders in Inductive Bible Study

Through God’s grace, the Coptic Orthodox Church had appointed a new bishop of youth and I was invited to do inductive Bible study at an ecumenical conference. That bishop met me and he saw his young people who’ve opened Bibles studying the Scriptures. He said, “Have you come only to do this with Protestants?” I said, no. He said, “I will bring some of the key youth leaders from my churches in Cairo to my office. You train them in this inductive Bible study work.” So by God’s grace here, I found myself with 18 of the sharpest young Orthodox leaders with my task of helping them in inductive Bible study.

Eventually we established the St. Timothy Center for Inductive Bible Study in the Orthodox Church. Well, the important thing of all this long story is that when the post of director of a Bible society was opened, my nickname had become Ramez Bible Study. There are other Ramez’s, but to identify me, they said “the Bible study guy.” So it was an easy switch from Bible study to Bible society. And because I was one of the very few Protestants whom the Orthodox had accepted and knew and trusted, my appointment was also with a blessing of the Orthodox church.

But my staff who worked with me, students who’d worked with me really felt that I was out of my mind. They said, “You must be absolutely crazy, stupid.” Why on earth would one want to be the director of a Bible society, three dingy bookshops, a little black Bible we print in Korea, and when it turns out we make another print order. How uncreative, how dull. There’s nothing you could do. Then my chairman was over 80 and most of the other people on the board were quite old. The organization had been going on for 105 years. If you’ve gone to a church that’s been going on for 105 years, there are a lot of people who tell you that’s not the way we do it here, or that’s the way it’s done.

Praying for an Earthquake

I told myself the only way we’re going to be able to do something in this Bible Society if we have an earthquake. I was appointed in 1990 and I prayed for an earthquake for two years. In 1992 we actually had an earthquake. Our building nearly collapsed. As I was driving home with one of my colleagues and saw the devastation in Cairo, the first idea came to me, “Let’s do a tract. Let’s do a portion of scripture that we will share all over the country.” They said, “You’re crazy. Why?” And I realized that my student training at McGill, when we face crises situations, that’s what we do. We as students would write up a track, print it, and give it out to the students.

So we got that idea and I went to the production man and said, “We need a tract.” He said, “Okay, take about a month. We need a committee. We need to discuss it. Then when you print something, you print on one side and let it dry for two days, then you print on the other side.” I said, there must be a better way of printing than that. You can see what kind of technology we used in those days. So anyway, I got a young man we just hired and I said, “I’m the boss. If you don’t want to be fired, I want that tract out by Thursday.” This was Monday.

This young man went out, found the print shop that would do it, and by Thursday afternoon we had 300,000 of these printed. We got two of our staff, one to take the train north, one to take the train south. We found all the pastors, we knew all the churches. We said, “When the train stops in your town, there’ll be a man standing at the door. He’ll throw you a couple of boxes of his tracts.” So by Thursday night and by Friday in most of the churches in the country, there were these tracts and people were using him and giving him out.

One of them says, “But for the grace of God, Cairo would’ve been all destroyed if the earthquake had continued.” So there was a message. Inside we did a study of earthquakes and Paul and Silas in jail. The earthquake came. The jailer asked them, “What must I do?” And what did they say? “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you’ll be saved.” So earthquakes are supposed to make you want to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and be saved.

Working with a Muslim Majority

That same week I found out my bookshop manager had been embezzling us. I fired him and hired a new one. Since then, we’ve gone on. We live in a Muslim majority country. The Muslim context upholds many of the moral values that would be dear to us and that’s wonderful. But they also provide a lot of restrictions to the situation. For example, you can’t build new churches, you can’t repair them without a presidential decree, and that’s a very difficult thing to get. Every single piece of material, every piece of literature I’ve developed at the Bible Society had to be passed by our sensor. That was not easy. That was not easy. We had to hire full-time staff just to go through work with the sensors. It takes months and it is very difficult to get licenses for products and places. So these were the obstacles that we faced and they were not easy.

Now we found we were restricted in giving out free scriptures. The government, when I checked with them said, “You can’t give out free Scriptures.” So what would you do if you can’t give them out for free? We found a good solution. We sell them. It doesn’t matter what the price is. As long as you’re selling Scriptures, you are not proselytizing, you are not evangelizing. So we sell Scriptures to evangelize in Egypt. It’s very simple and it’s also good on the budget.

Even if you lose on what you do. So right now, the Cairo International Book Fair is taking place and we have a sale on New Testaments for one pound. That’s about 17 US cents. It’s fine. People come in, they get the money out of their pocket and they get the Scriptures. Thousands of Scriptures go to people this way all over the country by selling them. Now we can only sell from Christian outlets. So what we do is we multiply outlets all over the country. When I first came, we had three bookshops and we could only sell from these bookshops.

What do you do? You have more bookshops, more outlets. We began, as I said, with three dingy bookshops. I soon realized if a Bible bookshop looks ugly and the store next door which sells shoes looks fancy, something is wrong. If we have the most precious commodity, the most precious item in the world, we have to wrap it and put it in a context that shows we’re proud of it. So that’s what we did. We began making very nice looking bookshops on the street so that people would come in and feel proud that they’re Christians, proud that their book is being valued. Now we have about 700 Bible products. Because we serve the whole church, we have to be very careful that all our products are purely biblical. That’s not an easy task.

So we work very, very hard to make sure that all our products are completely biblical. That is, they don’t smell Protestant or Catholic or Orthodox, but they are generically Christian. We’ve learned a lot from that. We’re not allowed to proselytize. But in the nineties, Egypt got taken over by the free market. Everybody began advertising. So we advertised and we put billboards up all over the place. We put ads on the front pages of newspapers. We flooded the country with messages. Now we don’t put all these ads to sell Scriptures. We have two reasons for these ads. One is to put the Bible in the marketplace. With 10 million Christians in Egypt, it is not over the top to put billboards on the main highway advertising Bibles.

With 10 million Christians in Egypt, it’s not extravagant to put the most expensive ad in the country, which is on the front page of the main newspaper in the country. Nobody else would do that. It sounds crazy. But by putting the Bible there, we encourage Christians, we put the Bible in the market square, and we make people feel that Christians do exist in this country.

For the Rights of Egyptians

Now we’re praying and you can pray for us that we can continue to do this. We don’t know what’s going to happen. The recent revolution has raised many questions and there’s still a debate whether it was a revolution or a coup. I won’t go into this, but just to say that we are in a difficult situation. All through the revolution, there was never any criticism of Islam as a religion, as in any way being oppressive. They’re talking about democracy and freedom. Well, when you have theocracy, you don’t have that kind of freedom.

The other thing you need to realize is for the Arab Muslim, their identity as a Muslim is as closely linked to their personality as your gender identity. So it did not occur to these brave revolutionaries who risked their lives and stood in Liberation Square for days on end — many of them got killed for doing that — that they could change their religion. Freedom meant that they’d be free as people. Freedom meant that they’d express themselves. Freedom meant maybe that they could reinterpret their religion, but hardly any of them would think that freedom meant that they would change their religion.

That’s an important thing for you to realize when you talk about what’s happening. The revolution was hijacked by the Muslim parties that were very well organized and that took over the parliament. Now two thirds of our parliament is Islamic. We don’t know what the future will hold. Most Christians today want to immigrate. They want to leave the country because they’re scared. What you read in the newspapers is all true. But there’s a different perspective and I’ll be sharing a bit more of it. Those who are going to suffer the most are moderate Muslims. Christians will be left to do what they want in their churches. Moderate Muslims will not be left to be moderate because they’ll be more and more only one kind of Islam. So they will be forced. So the people who are more scared than the Christians are the moderate Muslims.

So if you want to in any way campaign for Egypt, campaign for Egyptians, not for Christians, because if Egyptians have freedom, by definition Christians will. But too much of the West talks about the freedom of Christians. Were concerned about Christians. It sounds partisan. It sounds racist. It sounds like you’re only caring for your own. But if you say we want Egyptians to be free, we want Egyptians to have democracy, that is a much, much better approach. We are more comfortable as Egyptians in Egypt if you do that for us rather than fight for the Christians. It’s better to fight for the rights of Egyptians than for the rights of Christians. Now there’s a lot I could share with you and I won’t have time to do it.

Restored to Default Setting

What we’re trying to do since that revolution is to flood Egypt with God’s word. Here are some of the things we’ve done. I think we should be coming up right here. We agreed with 250 churches to put big banners, enormous banners on the outside of a church. These banners talk about rebuilding Egypt. We took the verse from Nehemiah when he was rebuilding that says, “Let’s rebuild together.” But we took the values that the revolutionaries were calling for and used the Christian terminology for them. So we spoke of righteousness, justice, freedom, love, and forgiveness. All these values are values that the revolutionaries called for. We’re saying these are values found in the Scriptures. It’s been an exciting campaign and it’s still going on. We’ve developed lots of portions of Scripture that are suitable for the situation, but the challenge is still there.

Now a lot of our ministries are with children. I want to close by giving you a feel, a sense, because I can’t take you to Egypt with me, of what we are doing among children because of my time. We do festivals for children, and through these festivals, we’ve reached now about half a million kids. Please pray for us. The last one we did was in a main square during Ramadan in Luxor. The governor of the town was there as the host. It was an incredible way of reaching children with the gospel in a country that is closed.

Now, I think you see a picture up here. That’s a family picture. I happened to come across it when I went back to Egypt and was rummaging through old things of a cousin who died and he left these. Why would I show you a family picture? You see, until then, until I went back to Egypt and a few years after that, I thought that I had made a 180 degree turn, left my intended plan by my maternal grandfather, and was determined to follow Jesus and go to full-time Christian ministry.

It was a shock for my mother who had always dreamed of me taking over father’s business, and it was very surprising for all my friends who saw me in the light of my maternal grandfather. But you see, I realized that this programming by my grandfather was the wrong program. You know when you get a computer and you fool around with it and you don’t know much about computers, and then you get desperate, everything goes wrong. You have a wonderful ingenious application that the computer software people have done. What is it? Restore default settings. So you push a button and everything goes back the way the owner, the creator, had planned.

I realized what God had done for me on August the 19th when I came to know Jesus. He had pressed that button. You see, this is my great-grandfather in the picture. You see a circle around him. I always knew my great-grandfather as Athanasius. What’s he holding in his hand? If you look carefully, he’s holding a Bible. Why would a family picture have a man holding a Bible? Because Athanasius was his name and his nickname was Tenasa. He was that evangelist. He was that evangelist that came to know Lord through Hogg and who had a passion to share the gospel with his Coptic Church that had kicked him out. What I do daily today is share the gospel. I’m accepted within the Coptic Church. He had a passion to share a gospel of Muslims, and today we sell Scriptures to Muslims. I had never intended to be the heir of my grandfather’s industrial empire. I had been intended by God to be the heir of my great-grandfather, Tenasa.

A Church Plant in a Garbage Village

So don’t underestimate what God can do. Effective leaders should have Vision which empowers others, trust in God’s sovereignty that gives meaning even to failures, creativity that transforms obstacles into opportunities, faith that respects people who are eccentric or marginal, and humility that allows them to be mission rather than gift-oriented. You’ve seen some of these principles and what I shared. I now want to close with the story of the most effective church plant I’ve ever seen. That’s the one at the garbage village.

When we first moved to Egypt, I had a bad cold and was in bed. The doorbell rang. My wife Rebecca opened the door and there was this barefoot straggly young man standing at the door saying something. “What does he want?” she said. I said, “He wants our garbage. He’s the garbage collector.” He was stinky, smelly, and he looked more like an animal than a person, and she was very sorry for him. She went and got him a glass of water. I won’t take time to read these Scriptures because of our time together, but God works with poor people. God works with those whom we think don’t count for much.

This is how the garbage village looked two years later. Rebecca decided to go there. She studied Arabic for two years and then decided she was going to help these people. I thought she was absolutely crazy. What could she do as an American woman? But I forgot that she was brought up in rural Haiti among poor people. She loved the poor. She knew how to relate to the poor. This is how it looked. The extended family would dump the garbage in the middle and each of the sons would have a little tin shack and they’d go and collect the garbage and bring it home.

I’m going to go through these quickly just for you to get a feel of what the garbage village looked like. This is how some of the people looked in those early days. They went by donkey cart all over the country and then they would bring up water with the same donkey cart because they had nothing. They had no water, no electricity, no services, no stores, no plants, no trees, absolutely nothing. Here’s the garbage truck on one of Cairo’s streets and here they are sorting. They would then sort the garbage by hand and feed what they could to the animals and recycle the rest. There are some of the best recyclers in the world, but when you live with garbage, when you’re treated as garbage, when you’re seen as garbage collectors, you think of yourself as garbage.

God’s Love for the Poor

They knew nothing of God’s love. God used one man, Pastor Simon. He wasn’t a pastor at the time. He was just a layman, a printer. He dropped out of high school, but he had a heart for evangelism and he led his garbage collector to the Lord. He ended up going to this man’s home and leading a Bible study. The family was converted. They cleared out the place to have services. Week by week as he went, more and more people, normally Christian people, came. These garbage collectors raised pigs and were disenfranchised Christians. Christians would come from the south and the best job they could find was collecting garbage. They were squatters where they lived. He began sharing with him. One day, this young man was in a cave praying and a little piece of paper fell in front of him. He spent two days praying in that cave.

He read these verses from Acts. It said:

And the Lord said to Paul one night in a vision, “Do not be afraid, but go on speaking and do not be silent, for I am with you, and no one will attack you to harm you, for I have many in this city who are my people” (Acts 18:9–10).

In those days it was dangerous. It was dangerous to go. That was his call, and he agreed to become the pastor of their church. Now, to become a pastor, you have to go to seminary. When they told him he’d have to do that, he said, “No way.” Well, the leaders of the church were smart. They said, “In the Coptic Orthodox Church, when you ordain a man, you ordain him to a church for life. It’s a marriage with no divorce.” You guys don’t have that. I don’t know if it’s good or bad. He figured, “What harm? If we ordained this guy to the garbage collectors, there is absolutely no harm he can do. All he can do is some good.” So they gave him a cash course in theology and made him the priest of the garbage village.

A Transformed People and Community

There was a very quick church growth. They built a church, a school, and people, as they got changed from the inside, began changing their environments. We saw the gospel physically changing a whole city. As people began having dignity, as people began thinking that God is their Father, they are children of a king of kings and Lord of lords. The pastor would tell them, “You have to be proud of yourselves. You are the children of a king. You’re not garbage collectors.” As they began believing that, they began wanting to educate their kids, they began wanting water, they began wanting electricity, and they began wanting not to live with their garbage. It’s a long story and my time is running out. So they built this church. And you can see the garbage village around the church, how low it is. That was this big building.

Here’s another picture of a church. That’s my wife’s car there. Her car and the pastor’s car were the only two cars there in those days. She went there to volunteer, to teach Christian education in the little school that was on the top floor of that church. Then God began doing some more miracles. The Finnish government came along and that’s actually the inside of the church. Many changes took place. This is a church school. The Finnish government came and built this fantastic school for them. Nice clean classrooms, lovely kids. You can see the difference in the kids now from these early pictures. These are kids who know the Lord and kids who are blessings in their family. The reason the pastor wanted a school is he wanted someone in the family to be able to read the Bible. He’d go to a home and nobody could read.

So he said, “I want a school so the kids can read.” And they began reading. Here’s my wife Rebecca with some of these teachers who are lifelong friends. She just loves them and they love her. Some of them were little kids when she began. This is a family of new believers there you can see. But Rebecca got the idea. She wanted to get them away from the garbage. She knew that there was a place above the garbage village, like a quarry, the bottom of a quarry where they could go. They went up this tin can alley because there were steam cans up it. They would take the kids after their Sunday school lesson and she built a playground for them. Then they would sometimes tell them Bible stories on the mountain.

This is now what the village looks like. Remember those tin shacks? They’ve built houses now. They put the garbage on the bottom or even on the windows, on the balconies and they’ve built. This is how the village looks today. It’s like an inner city part of Cairo. It’s still smelly. It’s still stinky, but it’s extremely different from what it was many years ago. Now the trucks have replaced the donkey carts. A church was planted among the garbage collectors.

The Making of the Cave Church

Is this the end of a story? Well, remember this picture of a Bible story, the story is being told on the mountain? One day Rebecca came home absolutely livid, fuming, furious. I had to calm her down. If you get your wife coming home all upset, you don’t know what to do. She said, “I’ve had too much. I’m going to quit. I can’t do it. I can’t work with this man.” It wasn’t good chemistry between an American woman and a Coptic Orthodox priest, but they’d managed to be able to manage just because of the love of Christ all these years. She said, “I just can’t take it.” I said, “What’s wrong?” She said, “He’s raking up my new soccer field!” Right where the picture is here was a soccer film she’d helped do.

I said, “Why is he raking up your soccer field?” She said, “He’s digging.” I said, “Digging your soccer field?” She said, “Yeah, he’s digging up the soccer field. He’s crazy.” I said, “What’s he digging for?” She said, “He said something about a cave.” Under that mountain they discovered this cave and he turned it into a meeting room church. It now seats 3,000 people. Rebecca had to eat humble pie. Rich and poor began coming to those meetings on Thursday night, praise and worship like we’ve had here. The rich and poor, Protestant and Catholic Orthodox would come and worship together. The garbage village began becoming the center of a lot of Christian activity in Cairo. This is how that place looks now. Do you remember that picture of this guy teaching kids? This is the front of a cave today. They found a Polish artist who began carving the quarry walls all along with these beautiful carvings. So people come and look at these enormous carvings that are on the walls. But Pastor Simon wasn’t satisfied with the caves. He wanted to build the cathedral, and so he built his cathedral.

That’s the front of a cathedral. That’s the inside of a cathedral. It now seats 15,000 people. They’ve expanded. Actually, when I took that picture, it’s the largest church in the Middle East. So the man who’d been ordained to be the pastor of the marginalized, the nobodys, the disenfranchised, is now the best known pastor in the country. When people come from all over the world and have trips to Egypt on the itinerary, they will see a pyramid, the museum and the cave churches.

On November 11th of 2011, Christians in Egypt were very discouraged. They were feeling that they were being marginalized. They rallied together from all the churches and said, “We are going to have a night of prayer and fasting. We’re going to meet together and praise the Lord together.” They chose to go up to the garbage village as their place. They say 50,000 people came. They filled every single one of the caves. There are seven caves there. They took the whole parking lot and I wanted you to hear what it felt like.

Mission Oriented, Not Gift Oriented

Now you understand my five point vision. I shared with you people who had vision, and vision which empowered people to do things that we could not possibly ever have imagined. If you told Rebecca 30 years ago when she was beginning with these poor little garbage collectors, that someday she’d be on the staff of the most famous church in Egypt in the Middle East, and there’d be thousands there, she would have said you’re crazy. I’m glad to work one to one with people, which she still does. If you thought that this young man, this pastor could have done more than John Mark could have evangelized Egypt no one would have believed you. We need vision that empowers others, trust that believes in God’s sovereignty and gives meaning even to seeming failures, creativity that transforms obstacles into opportunities and caves into churches (all sorts of things), and faith that respects people who are eccentric and or marginal.

Most of the people I’ve mentioned to you today are either eccentric or marginal. They would not be chosen by a search committee and God used them. Don’t despise them. Believe that God can use even those whom you think are losers.

Finally, I want to close with this: humility that allows you to be mission rather than gift oriented. What do I mean? That’s my final message to you. We have a sense that what God has called us to is fulfillment. Most of you want to be fulfilled. You look at the gifts you have, and when you’re looking at a church or ministry, you say, “I want a ministry that can use all my gifts or that can best choose my gifts.” I want to submit to you brothers and sisters, but this is unbiblical. This is modern day narcissism.

God has never promised that he’s going to put you in a place where you can use all your gifts. And because of that, we are extremely frustrated. We’re going right, left, and center. We are exhausted. We burn out because we want to use all the gifts that we have. God works very differently. He calls you to a mission, a task. He puts you in a responsibility, and then he wants you to muster and develop any gifts you have that may serve that responsibility. Now, they may not be your main gifts. My main gift is not running an organization of 220 staff with budgets and government licenses. I’d much rather teach the Scriptures. I’d much rather do small group Bible study. But God has called me to this position and, as a result, I have to say no to other gifts I have without feeling sorry for spilled milk, or that kind of thing. I have to believe that where God has put me is more important in his agenda than my fulfillment.

So let’s not go after our gifts. It is the trap of the devil. Go after God’s mission for you and, if it is in the area of your main gifts, praise the Lord. But if it isn’t, help him as he did with people like Mark and people like Father Simon. These are people who looked as though they didn’t have a gift. He’ll develop gifts for the task he has assigned you. So that’s my message to you today, to not run after your gifts, but run after God’s calling for your life. We close with Paul’s reminder. You are obligated to those who don’t know the Lord. You and I are obligated. We need to be eager to share that gospel and we should never be ashamed because, as we saw and as we know, it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes.