Ash Wednesday 29 February

‘Guard my life and rescue me; do not let me be put to shame, for I take refuge in you.’ Psalm 25:20

Do not miss our Ash Wednesday service at 7 pm on 29 February. We will celebrate together with our Egyptian and Sudanese congregations. So be prepared for a bilingual service. Would you participate in some form of fasting as well? I have decided to not eat any snacks at all, and to give up on alcohol for this period. And to use more time for reading my Bible. (pastors often suffer from the problem that they only read their bible ‘professionally’, like in sermon preparations. But to let God speak to me personally in this time of Lent is also important!)

Yes, we celebrate Ash Wednesday this week - we follow the Eastern calendar!

BBQ and AGM

Tomorrow after church, we will eat together and have our first AGM.  Is it not lovely? :-)
Please be sure to be there.  This is historic.  Our first one.

Greetings!

Jos

Friday morning with Stephen Sizer

This Friday morning we will celebrate our worship service as usual, but with Rev Dr Stephen Sizer as our guest speaker. We begin at 11 am. Welcome!

Good start of meetings with Rev Dr Stephen Sizer

On Monday evening we had Stephen Sizer speak at St John's in Maadi, where 150+ people showed up for a superb lecture with a great ppp. (The picture is of Rev Paul-Gordon Chandler introducig him) Lots of questions asked afterwards, appointments with some media made for interviews, books sold.

Book club: Aunt Safya and the monastry

This coming Monday, February 6, we will have our next book group meeting. We will discuss the book "Aunt Safya and the monastry" by Bahaa Taher. We will start at 19.00 at our house: 8 Seti Street, Korba. Maggie will lead the discussion.

Looking forward to seeing you.

phone: 01222400821
skype: esterair

Growth figures St Michael's

Here the statistics of attendance of the four congregations at St Michael's.

The first picture is of the Friday morning English congregation that we have begun on 1 September 2011. We The average number of attendants between September and December was 16 adults and 3 children. The trend is slightly upward, which is underlined by visitors in januari (17 adults, 21 adults, 2 kids each time)




The second picture is of our Egyptian Sunday morning congregation. We have an average of 24 adults and 2 children after 1 September. I do not have the stats from before September yet; the impression is that there were usually about 15 people in church. When I have some more precise data, I will publish those here. The trend seems to be rather stable.



The third congregation is our Sudanese, that meets on Sunday afternoon. The third picture represents their church growth this year. The first few months of 2011 were so problematic in Egypt that the numbers of visitors are not representative. Therefore I decided to compare April-August with September-December. The Sudanese congregation grew from an average of 153 to 183 adults, and from 66 to 88 kids in this period. The growth is stable.


Finally, we also started a new Egyptian Sunday Evening congregation on 1 September. The average number of adults is 24, while we had an average of 6 kids. Trend seems a bit downward, so we must work extra hard to knit this community together and get new people.

I thank God for His blessings this year. In our four congregations together, we have 79 new adults and 33 new children- may He continue to increase our ministry in numbers and in depth.

Lute Lessons at St Michael's

One of the members of our Egyptian congregations, Girgis Bishay, is a professional lute player. As from 24 January (Tuesday) he will give 12 lessons for beginners. These will be each Tuesday from 7-8.15 pm in St Michael's. More information on our website.