The Impact of the 2002 Trip on Trip Participants: Some Stories
INSTALLMENT 5 OF THE HISTORY OF THE OUTREACH FOUNDATION IN EGYPT
by Jeff Ritchie
The joint Outreach Foundation-Presbyterian Frontier Fellowship trip to Egypt in 2002 was catalytic in bringing the Church in Egypt onto the awareness of US congregations. The trip resulted in significant, long-lasting partnerships between congregations in the US and the Cairo Seminary, new church developments, and other ministries in Egypt. This chapter will highlight the personal impact of the trip on some of the individual participants and their resulting impact on God’s mission in Egypt.
Lee Mulder: While all the participants on the 2002 trip shared what they had seen, heard, and felt with their local churches, one participant went further. Mr. Lee Mulder, an elder from First Presbyterian Church of Glen Ellyn, Illinois, was a freelance journalist and videographer, and his passion was to document missionary work around the world. Lee chronicled our trip through hours of videos, and when he returned, he wrote an article in Presbyterians Today, the official magazine of the Presbyterian Church (USA). Entitled, “Mission Possible in Egypt,” Mulder’s article highlighted the hope within the Egyptian Church for a new season of evangelism and mission as he introduced our new friends, Swailem, Atef, and Tharwat to a wider Presbyterian audience. He edited his hours of video footage to bring the trip to life for churches and other groups in the Chicago area.
Then Mulder found a new mission field calling him. He devoted the better part of the next decade to missions in Uganda as he spent much time on the field and even wrote a book about his experiences. However, Egypt was never out of his mind and heart. Lee maintained a close connection with Dan McNerney of Frontier Fellowship and with Dr. Swailem over the years. In 2018, sixteen years after he had visited Egypt, he returned to Egypt with McNerney, Swailem, and others to celebrate the completion of a revised Arabic translation of the Perspectives on the World Christian Movement. Mulder brought his video camera again and chronicled the tribute to the impact that Perspectives and Dr. Swailem had on the missional renewal of the Egyptian Church in the 21st Century.
Now living in Florida, Lee Mulder continues to share the amazing work of God in Egypt with his church and with various prayer groups to which he belongs. In 2019, he coordinated a visit of Dr. Tharwat Wahba to Northeast Florida so his friends could hear first-hand what is going on. As we say in The Outreach Foundation, there’s only one thing to do with good news—you share it!
Brice Rogers: A rising senior at Austin Seminary, Brice Rogers received a renewed call to mission service through our trip to Egypt. Before going to seminary, Brice had been a PCUSA co-worker on the border with Mexico. The Outreach Foundation was seeking seminarians to join our vision trips, and we provided a partial scholarship for Brice and another of his classmates, Sharon Bryant, to join us. (Sharon also had a mission background as she was the daughter of long-time Presbyterian missionaries to Thailand.)
During the trip, the Rev. Darren Kennedy brought up a need for the seminary to have an international volunteer to coordinate the visits of groups like ours and to help the seminary develop new global relationships. Brice was interested and told us that he would like to be considered for this potential missionary work following graduation. We became interested in Brice for this position because of his previous mission work and because we saw that he was already making intentional efforts to learn rudimentary Arabic during our two-week trip. Brice had a missionary calling!
On Brice Rogers’ behalf, The Outreach Foundation and the Cairo Seminary communicated his interest to the Rev. Dr. Victor Makari, PCUSA Coordinator for the Middle East. A Mission Volunteer position was approved, The Outreach Foundation agreed to help Brice raise the support he needed, the Cairo Seminary offered housing as their contribution to his support, and Brice was sent to Egypt in early 2004.
From 2004-2009, Brice served as the International Liaison of the Evangelical Theological Seminary in Cairo during which time he coordinated the details of visits by groups like The Outreach Foundation to Egypt, worked with the President of the Seminary to plan the latter’s travel to global partners, and created an office of development for the Seminary to raise funds within and beyond Egypt.
Part-way during his service, Brice met and married Sung Min, a Korean missionary serving in Egypt. When they had a child in 2009, they felt they needed a different work in Egypt. The Synod of the Nile offered them a ministry in southern Egypt in the city of Luxor. There they worked until 2012 when they resigned and moved to Korea to help care for Sung Min’s recently widowed mother.
The Outreach Foundation is deeply grateful to Sung Min and Brice for the bridge role they served in connecting the Cairo Seminary with its global partners and for all their help in making our trips to Egypt go so smoothly. Thank you, friends!
Owen Stepp: The last person to be highlighted in this chapter is the Rev. Owen Stepp. He wrote the following account of the impact of the 2002 trip on his life and ministry.
On September 11, 2001, I had recently completed my first year in ordained ministry as a pastor in Wake Forest, North Carolina. The events of that dreadful day sparked emotional responses from people that ranged from fear to anger to grief to bewilderment. Church folks were no different. Pastors were no different. With so many voices calling for a retreat from overseas ministry in the days that followed, I sensed a particular word from the Spirit that I had a calling to go to the Arab world as a sort of witness of what the Gospel of Christ compels us to do in such times.
One of my mentors told me that he was planning to be a part of the Outreach Foundation’s trip to Egypt that would come in 2002. In fact, they would be visiting the Evangelical Theological Seminary of Cairo where my friends from seminary were serving as professors. It seemed that God was putting all the pieces together in ways that I could not have orchestrated myself. That team led by Jeff Ritchie from the Outreach Foundation and Dan McNerney from Presbyterian Frontier Fellowship became a sort of pilgrimage for those of us who were there. Having conversations with Egyptian professors and pastors, bus drivers and tour guides gave us a sense of the courage and endurance of the Egyptian church. I was also deeply moved by the times of prayer that we shared. It seemed to me that the Holy Spirit was sealing our relationship with brothers and sisters in Christ as only the Spirit can. I had a refreshed, empowered and personal perspective on the vision of Heaven in Revelation 7:9. In addition, I also had new friends and partners in the gospel on both sides of the ocean whose fellowship blesses me to this day.
That trip planted seeds within my life and ministry that grew as I have served other churches. At Signal Mountain Presbyterian Church in Tennessee we had an annual mission conference, and one year we invited a pastor from Egypt to speak and lead in prayer. His ministry among us was a gift from God.
I currently serve at Clairmont Presbyterian Church in Decatur, Georgia. The Outreach Foundation has helped us begin a partnership with a new church development in Egypt, the Evangelical Church in Moassat. We have had three teams visit the Moassat church, and we have taken a special offering to help them finish a portion of their building so that they now have a worship space and a base of operations for community outreach and evangelism in the impoverished area in which they are located. We praise God for this partnership.
Lee Mulder, Brice Rogers, and Owen Stepp are just a few of the many persons whose lives have been profoundly touched by their experience of the Church in Egypt. As we say in The Outreach Foundation, “Follow Jesus into the world, and the first life you change may be your own.”