American Presbyterian Missionaries and the Egyptian Evangelical Church: The Colonial and Postcolonial History of a Christian Community

Abstract

In 1854 American Presbyterian missionaries arrived in Egypt as part of a larger Anglo-American Protestant movement that aimed for worldwide evangelization. Although the missionaries wanted to convert all Egyptians, social circumstances led them to concentrate their efforts on Egypt's indigenous Christian minority, the Copts. These efforts soon led to the establishment of what the missionaries called the "Evangelical" (or in Arabic, "Injiliya") church - named in the hope that members would spread the gospel to all peoples in their midst. Presbyterian in organization and doctrines, this Evangelical Church made its debut against the fissiparous sectarian landscape of Middle Eastern Christianity barely half a century before leaders of the Protestant ecumenical movement began to advocate transcending denominational differences for the sake of Christian unity (Badr 2001; Black 1986:15).