“You can’t leave the Church. You are the Church.”

Without getting into the details of the challenges of being a rationally minded person of faith, let us just state the obvious: it is sometimes hard to spend your academic and professional life making rational decisions and your personal life trying not to react when your mom, who lives in the suburbs, tells you that Abu Sefein is protecting her house from the riots.¹ This is what makes some people skeptical that the Coptic Rejinmisi² is even possible, since it sometimes feels as though anyone with a shred of common sense is making their escape from the logical inconsistencies found in some of the superstitions and cultural norms of our community.

The reason I am writing this article is to share my perspective on how it is possible to be an active, faithful member of the Coptic community without always feeling comfortable with what is happening around you. It is possible to be uncomfortable and still be home. There are some assumptions that I make that I will declare up front: 1) God exists, 2) God created us in love, and invites us to grow in our love for God and for each other, 3) God was incarnate not only to save us, but also to reveal to us what it means to be created in God’s image and likeness, 4) we experience God through the Sacraments of the mystical Church, and 5) the way that I choose to participate in these Sacraments is in the Coptic Church. If you disagree with any of these premises, this article may not be meaningful to you if you do not at least suspend disbelief enough to accept the possibility that this perspective is at least internally consistent if not externally valid.

Many of us share a vision of hope that the future of our Coptic community is one of passionate parishioners, thriving families, unified communities, and ecumenical dialogue with other faiths. To participate in the spirit of reform that was sparked by Saint Pope Kyrillos VI, our communities must know what to do, be motivated to do what needs to be done, and have a clear path of action to follow.³ While there is clearly an important top-down role for the synod and the clergy to delineate how to satisfy these three criteria, there is an equal if not more important grass-roots responsibility that the youth and the laity must take up in the co-creation of our Christ-loving community.⁴ Even after knowing what needs to be done and being motivated to do it, there will no doubt be many obstacles in the path that lie both within our own hearts and within the relationships we have with other members of our community. More often than not, these difficulties arise from the good intentions of wanting to contribute in a positive way to the community but falling into the trap of making service just another form of ego gratification that does not serve others, but instead uses them as objects that function to validate our positive impression of ourselves.⁵ What makes this problem so insidious is that the more “successful” we are in our service, the more likely it is that everyone will look to us as irreplaceable members of our community. This becomes problematic not only for our ego, but also for a community that is now in the unfortunate position of relying on one individual for the success of a group.⁶ This creates the necessity that we strive for a perpetual state of repentance from egocentric service in favor of a team-based approach, working together towards becoming love so that the goal is no longer to “do great service,” but to submit to the much simpler yet more difficult calling to love everybody always, which Christ shows us is possible even in the worst of circumstances.⁷

The death of the ego for the sake of the other is the essence of the kenotic way of Saint Pope Kyrillos VI, who took the helm of the church in a very tumultuous time that many consider to be a low point in the modern history of the Coptic Church⁸. Kenosis is the self-emptying of oneself for the sake of another. It is an attribute of God who gives love liberally and without reservation in creating us, loving us, redeeming us, and showing us what it means to be human in the life of Jesus Christ⁹. In delegating authority to his spiritual children, Pope Kyrillos faced the hardship of helping them manage through interpersonal struggles and conflicts over jurisdiction in overlapping services. Perhaps his life would have been easier had he kept power for himself, but by empowering others he willingly took on the necessary personal sacrifice that allowed for the reform of social systems, education, the arts, higher research, Coptic culture, and monastic revival in the works of Bishop Samuel, Bishop Gregorious, Bishop (future Pope) Shenouda, and Father Matthew the Poor. If we are to follow his example, we must share this spirit of John the Baptist who recognized that he must decrease so that Christ may increase (John 3:30). For sure this is easier said than done, but it is impossible to climb Everest without a plan of how to scale it, or a map of how to get to the top. We will not accidentally stumble upon a life of kenotic service. Even if we know that this is exactly what we want to do, and even if we have clear examples of how to do it, it will take us a lifetime to grow in the discernment and wisdom needed to be even imperfectly kenotic.

Before I let you go, I would like to share with you some ways that certain groups in our community could consider interpreting their service through a kenotic lens. The goal is not to prescriptively lay out what everyone needs to do, but simply give an example of what kenotic service could mean for each of these groups, with the invitation for each person in each group to figure out what it means to him or her:

1. Youth – Stick around. Don’t go. You are wanted. You are needed. Even just to witness without speaking. Just attending liturgy is a service to your community. You are the future.
2. Sunday School Servants – There are no silly questions. Understand the point of departure for your students and try to discern whether you yourself have sufficiently struggled with the questions they are asking. If you haven’t, maybe you should.
3. Deacons – Oh, the deacons, my brothers, the deacons. So much to say and so little space. Put down the microphone. Pick up your eyes and look around. Ask yourself how to take the beauty of the liturgy and make it participatory and accessible, while at the same time preserving the sanctity and musical tradition of our services. This may be difficult to do, but it is at least worth trying.

For each of these groups and others that are not identified by name here, we could ask what happens if they serve in kenosis, but instead I would like to pause here and ask what happens if they don’t. The answer is “nothing.” Nothing happens. We stay the same and we do not grow, and when you stop growing you start dying. If all of the youth leave, then we are left with the same bimodal distribution that we have today: 1) tons of kids that attend until they get to the age where they happen to get their driver’s license in that state, and 2) married people who bring their kids to church and stick around long enough to pester their kids to bring their grandkids. The same “nothing” scenario plays out if the Sunday School servants do not wrestle with difficult questions, or if the deacons continue to be more concerned with their voices in the microphone than the voice of the congregation. However, if you think about it, you can come up with some examples of what happens when people do serve in kenosis and help their community extract itself from the status quo to grow into a new normal that is appreciably better than the way things had always been until that point in time.

So far in this article, I have made an appeal for you to stay active in the Coptic community in a spirit of self-sacrifice, which I think is the only way that any organization is able to benefit from the vast potential of its diverse membership. I say this knowing full well the personal cost that is necessary to do so, and with great love and respect for those who have calculated the cost and decided that it is just too difficult to be physically present members of our community. It is to this group that I also say: “You can’t leave the Church. You are the Church.” Whether or not you are physically present you are still members of the mystical Church. You may have found a different Christian community where you are better able to put the cultural challenges aside to see Christ more clearly, making us still connected in Him. You may be a self-professed atheist, but I am sure you still love at least some members of our community and they love you, making us still connected in this love. Therefore, whether you are physically present or not, you need to know that you are loved and connected to our community, and I do hope that you engage actively in some way because I am not the only one who is grateful for your sacrifice.

Mena Mesiha