Watching the recent events in Egypt more closely than most, are almost 300 InterVarsity students, staff, and alumni who have spent parts of the last ten summers living in Cairo as part of InterVarsity’s Global Urban Trek.
Global Urban Trek
“We have been sending two teams each summer,” said Scott Bessenecker, InterVarsity’s Associate Director of Missions, who oversees global and urban projects. “One team works in the Coptic garbage collecting community of Mokattam, ministering to children and handicapped individuals. The other team works with Sudanese refugees who have been displaced because of conflict in the Sudan.”
Both teams are involved in short-term ministries of compassion but that’s not the main reason for the Trek. “Participants in InterVarsity’s Global Urban Trek are being called to consider relocating amongst the urban poor long term as ministers of the gospel,” Scott said. “All of the Treks are a discernment opportunity to get students to consider life among the poor.”
Personal Stories
“The Trek is an embodiment of Jesus’ call to serve “the least of these,” writes Michael Drane, a graduate of Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania. “If I tried to measure what I did in terms of tangible contributions, the result would be minimal. Of course, that’s not the purpose. It was the relationships I was able to have with new friends in Mokattam and the Egyptian Bible Society… It was the insight I was given into their lives and the new perspective I have now.”
Clement Yu, a student from Boston College, was on the Trek two summers ago. “The nostalgia that characterizes my experience in Mokattam is more than just a fond recollection,” he writes. “It is an awareness of God’s active dwelling in the midst of all peoples of this world, and my privilege of serving and knowing the Egyptians in Mokattam is only one of the many accounts of Christ’s dynamic presence in even the most disheartening of situations.”
A set-up trip to make arrangements for this year’s Cairo Treks was scheduled for later this month, but has now been postponed. “We are watching the political situation to see what develops,” said Helyn Luisi-Mills, National Coordinator of Global Projects.
IFES
InterVarsity is a member of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students (IFES), which has affiliated student movements in Egypt as well as in surrounding North African and Middle Eastern countries. About 200 Christian students from 10 of these countries gathered in Egypt for a regional conference last September. They shared together how God had changed their lives through reading the Bible.
An IFES contact in the region recently wrote: “There is a longing for peace and democracy in all those countries, and people simply aspire to a better future. Please pray that Christian students and churches there would remain peaceful amidst rising tensions and doubt.”
Ramez Atallah
Ramez Atallah, the General Secretary of the Bible Society of Egypt, was the featured Bible expositor at InterVarsity’s Urbana Student Missions Conference in St. Louis in 2009. In a communication from Cairo earlier this week, Ramez remarked on how Christians and Muslims have been drawn together and become better acquainted as they protected their neighborhoods in the midst of the instability.
Ramez asked for prayer, that Christians would remain strong throughout this crisis, and would be able to creatively testify to God’s grace and protection in the midst of it.
We join our fellow believers in this region in their prayers to God: “Your will be done, your Kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven.”
