This report comes from our good friend, Ramez Atallah, Senior Advisor to the Bible Society of Egypt:
Through its Sunday School movement the Coptic Orthodox Church in Egypt has been very committed to studying, memorizing and understanding the Bible.
In the early 80s a new approach was introduced to Coptic university students which is how to study the Bible inductively. This ministry was under the auspices of His Grace Bishop Moussa the then newly appointed Bishop of Youth.
The prime concern of the Bishopric was to help Orthodox young people study and understand God’s Word.
This ministry was eventually called the St. Timothy Center for the Study of the Bible and has been continuing its ministry of training young people and church workers in inductive study of the Bible.
Several years ago the Bible Society of Egypt signed a memorandum with His Holiness Pope Tawadros II to cooperate with the St. Timothy Center in expanding their ministry nationwide. Because of the Bible Society’s large network of contacts with all the Bishoprics across the nation, we were able to expand the reach of the St. Timothy Center from Cairo and Alexandria to all of Egypt.
The plan was to train church leaders within local churches to know how to study the Bible inductively themselves and eventually lead small group inductive Bible studies in their churches. To accomplish this a four-day conference was organized to train people in observing the text carefully, understanding the text in its context and applying it to our present-day context.
These four-day seminars were held across the country in various places. The condition for attendance was that the Christian workers in the churches would come with their local priest so that he could be cognizant of what they are studying and what teaching they are receiving from the leaders of the St. Timothy Center and therefore encourage his leaders when they return to their church to start small group Bible studies. A few months after this training another conference takes place to help train the leaders in methods of how to lead small groups and how to develop inductive Bible studies themselves.
Until the onset of COVID, the St. Timothy Center, in cooperation with the Bible Society of Egypt, had been able to train around 2000 in 18 conferences.
Our great hope is that this encouraging ministry would continue, now that COVID is abating. A training conference is planned for May 11-14 in Anafora Retreat Center north of Cairo. Please pray for this exciting activity.
(The “inductive method” of studying the Bible in small groups consists of the group first focusing on OBSERVING the Bible text carefully, second on trying to UNDERSTAND it in its context, and finally on APPLYING the principles discovered in the text to our context today)