Listening to the news during August 2013, the situation in Egypt seemed to go from bad to worse. Within the conflict between the army, the Muslim Brotherhood and the wider divisions about what kind of state the population of Egypt desires the country to be stands the Coptic Church. It rarely appears in Western news, yet the Coptic Church is one of the oldest Christian communities. Coptics make up at least 10% of the population of Egypt and trace their roots back to the first century CE.
Within Europe, Christianity is often seen in terms of Catholicism or Protestantism. These two branches of Christianity came about through a growing rejection of papal authority after Martin Luther challenged aspects of Catholic teaching in 1517. Reformers like Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, Tyndale and others expressed a desire to create the Church in a way that they saw as more faithful to the early Church of the New Testament than the state institution they perceived the Church had become in Catholicism. Protestantism has itself given birth to a bewildering array of movements: Baptists, Methodists, Brethren and Pentecostals to name just a few.
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