The Power of Real Christianity
T
he Seventh-day Adventist Church’s first missionaries arrived in Egypt in 1899, but they had little success. By the autumn of 1908, there were 10 Adventists in Egypt and three of them were missionaries. Then George and Mary-Ann Keough arrived.
George and Mary-Ann Keough
George was born in Scotland and raised in Northern Ireland. Mary-Ann was from Yorkshire. Both regions are known for producing strong-minded, stubborn people, qualities the Keoughs would surely need!
Keough quickly grasped that Adventist mission work in Egypt “was only for expatriates with no influence on the local people.” On arriving he was told not to learn Arabic—that there was no point—that local people couldn’t be won. Keough did learn Arabic, though, and was able to speak and write it fluently. He also learned the form of Arabic spoken by the fellahin, the rural peasants who made up 90 percent of Egypt’s population.
Fervently desiring to find a way to connect with the fellahin, the Keoughs left Cairo in 1911 and moved 250 miles up the Nile to Asyut in rural Upper Egypt. This brought them closer to ordinary Egyptian peasants, as opposed to the elites in Cairo. Because Asyut lacked archaeological remains, Europeans rarely visited the region. The Keoughs were exceptionally isolated.
Reaching Out
Evangelistic opportunities were still limited, however. Proselytizing Muslims was against the law, while witnessing to native Coptic Christians was difficult because of their tightly knit communities. In 1912, however, God intervened. Keough was contacted by Yacoub Bishai Yacoub, an important figure in his village of Beni Adi and a Christian.
Convicted by the fourth commandment, Yacoub and his family had started keeping the seventh-day Sabbath. Hearing of a European doing likewise, he wrote to Keough, asking him to visit Beni Adi. Soon, Keough baptized Yacoub and his son. Thereafter, Keough had on his side a patriarch with authority over his extended family and status in the wider community. Between November 1912 and May 1913, Keough baptized 18 men and seven women, more than doubling the entire membership in Egypt.
Keough utilized the kinship networks of those whom he had baptized and began working around Beni Adi. Another 16 people were baptized by 1917. Churches were organized in the villages of Beni Adi, Beni Shaaran, Masarah and Tatalya, and in the city of Asyut.
These numbers of baptisms in the Middle East might seem insignificant, but they were unprecedented at the time and have been rarely equaled since. How did they happen?
Incarnational Ministry
George Keough tried to embody Christ to people who were deeply suspicious of his teachings. He had an extraordinary ability to make friends, partly because, for George, friendship was not a tactic. People could sense that he was for real.
Today, Adventist believers in Beni Adi still tell the stories handed down from a hundred years ago of how this European did what Westerners never did. He came into their mudbrick houses, sat on their dirt floors, talked to them in their own language—and ate their food.
In Middle Eastern culture, it’s an unforgivable sin not to be hospitable. Many of George’s hosts were poor and sometimes offered him unappetizing food, including mish. Made by fermenting salty cheese, it had a strong flavor, and, around Asyut at least, a reputation for being worm-ridden. A family in Tatalya treasures the tale of how Keough ate mish with their grandparents and great-grandparents—despite the worms they all saw in it.
By eating whatever the Egyptians put in front of him, George honored their hospitality. By sitting with them, he won their affection. He even moved his family, including a young son and baby girl, into Beni Adi and became part of their community.
Adapting to Context
George Keough not only spoke to people in their own tongue; he also spoke and wrote it so well that he successfully contextualized Bible stories and Seventh-day Adventist beliefs in ways that made them both comprehensible and faithful to the original. He made Seventh-day Adventist Christianity authentic to the Egyptian context. As a result, converts didn’t make themselves completely alien to their culture but continued in it. They were therefore able to remain in their villages, rather than being driven out; and they were also thus better equipped to witness to the members of their communities. As a result, Upper Egypt has always been where the Seventh-day Adventist Church is strongest in Egypt.
In 2012, an elder of the Beni Adi church shared with me what his uncle had told him: “In Keough the people saw the real Christianity, not just claiming about Christianity.”