CAIRO, Egypt — Father Sama’an has possibly the most unusual parish in the world. It is located on Muqattam Mountain, home to 30,000 garbage collectors in Cairo. But this extraordinary man has brought a wonderful beauty to the ashes of this area teeming with narrow dirt lanes—a parish church that is a modern marvel not just for the garbage collectors, but for all who visit it.

His incredible "Cave Cathedral" is the largest church in the Middle East. It seats 20,000 and would do justice to the Hollywood Bowl with its modern sound system and closed-circuit television. Its pulpit has attracted not only the Coptic Orthodox pope, but also Western evangelicals.

Clad in Orthodox garb and sporting a beard, this humble cleric—who preaches like Billy Graham and also prays for the sick—met with me and a few friends recently before the regular Thursday services, attended by thousands of believers from Cairo.

Many in the congregation had spent the day collecting and sorting through garbage. Cairo’s 14 million people daily produce an estimated 7,000 tons of garbage, but trucks collect less than 50 percent of the city’s refuse. During the past 35 years, thousands of Christians, fleeing poverty in rural Upper Egypt, have congregated into villages within Cairo’s garbage dumps, collecting trash and recycling metal, plastic, paper, and bones.

Through an interpreter, the priest explained that his ministry began "because of one Egyptian garbage collector. Through him, I became a changed man and eventually a worker for the Lord.

"I was living in Cairo, and was a counselor in one of the big companies. I had lost one of my precious watches. It was very expensive and I was very sad. One day, I received a knock at my door. A man in a long dirty dress, carrying a bag, asked me if I had lost something. I asked him how he knew that I lost something. The garbage man told me he had asked at all of the apartments in the building and everyone had denied that they had lost something. But when he took the garbage from here and was separating it at home, he found something. ‘So, sir, please tell me what you lost.’ I told him I lost a watch.

"He took it out and said, ‘Is this the one you lost?’ I was shocked. This watch cost about $11,000. I asked him, ‘Why didn’t you take the watch for yourself?’ He replied, ‘My Christ told me to be honest until death.’ ‘You are a Christian?’ I asked him. He said he was. I didn’t know Christ at the time, but I told him that I saw Christ in him.

"I told the garbage collector, ‘Because of what you have done and your great example, I will worship the Christ you are worshipping.’"

So began the Christian life of one Farahat, who eventually became an Orthodox priest and took the name Father Sama’an, after an 11th-century saint. He began visiting the Muqattam area and was confronted with a terrible state of affairs there, with drunkenness, sickness and violence.

He said, "At that point I started to work here in homes and on the streets, in open areas here in this area, then meetings in homes, and then in bigger churches, then in this church. It’s not our work, or by our strength, but by His power. All this work is the work of the Lord. The secret is the Holy Spirit."

The priest said that he believes very much in the supernatural aspects of his ministry, especially among the poor. "The Lord is doing miracles and wonders here," he said. "In 1974, a 6-year-old boy who somehow got behind a big truck bringing water had his head crushed under a wheel. He was dying. His family took him to the hospital. That day we held a meeting and we prayed only for the boy. We prayed, ‘Give the boy a new head.’ The next day a doctor at the hospital said that unless there was a miracle, he was completely dead. We kept praying, ‘Lord, give Adam a new head. We believe.’

"Nine days later, we went to see Adam, but they said he had been sent home. We went to his house to see him. He was not sleeping or lying in bed, he was playing with the other kids. His new head was now bigger than his old one. And today, he’s a great worker for the Lord, he’s married and has two children, a boy and girl, and his head is still a witness. This is our God. We did not heal him with science or brains, but by faith. God will do the impossible by faith."

Bible Societies distributed 585 million Bibles and Bible portions worldwide last year. The United Bible Societies said its affiliates distributed 20,751,515 Bibles in 1998, about 500,000 more than in 1997. Most of the Bibles went to Latin America, ALC news said. The societies distributed 23 million more Bible portions and about 1 million more New Testaments than the previous year. "It is a truly global effort, and there is great cause to praise God for the increases," UBS General Secretary Fergus McDonald said.

Religious signposts at the close of the 20th century are full of surprises.

• In a 1998 Gallup poll, more than two-thirds of Americans said religion could "solve all or most of our problems."

• While the world's population has grown by 60 percent since 1970, the number of evangelical Christians has risen by 126 percent.

• The Internet now carries some 140 million pages related to religion; "spirituality" is the fastest growing field in US book publishing.

Those who chart the course of religious trends--and communicate with believers across the United States and on other continents--see a religious transformation taking place that indicates we are entering a new era. An intense search is under way by millions to find a spiritual center for their lives.

Christianity's growth pattern (about 1.9 billion adherents) has now made it a majority non-Western religion, says Dr. Harvey Cox, who visited hosts of churches on four continents researching his book Fire From Heaven, the story of the remarkable rise of Pentecostalism around the world.

Pentecostals have spurred Christianity's growth in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. A statistical institute in Brazil predicts that half of that country's population will be evangelical by 2045.

The picture differs in Europe and parts of North America. Theologian Martin Marty says a "spiritual ice belt" stretches from west of Poland across western Europe, the northern US and Canada, and includes Japan. "In that part of the world," he says, "there are 3,000 fewer Christians now than 24 hours ago, whereas in sub-Saharan Africa, there are 16,000 more Christians than 24 hours ago."

In Europe where there have tended to be established national churches, religious life has waxed cold and "nobody is much of anything," he says. Polls show that in Britain only 8 percent of the population attends church regularly.

Some sectors of religious life are flourishing while others are struggling. Mainline Protestant churches--the "establishment" of the 1950s--have seen memberships decline. The number of Americans who say they are Episcopalian, Presbyterian, or Methodist is one-third lower than 30 years ago, according to Princeton Religion Research Center. "The mainline lost a lot of young people, partly because of 'coasting,'" Marty says. "You have to win your own kids."

From Generation X downward, young people often find their religious communities in cyberspace. By the year 2010, 10% to 20% of the U.S. population will rely exclusively or primarily on the Internet for religious purposes and will never attend a church again, said David Kinnaman, research director of the Barna Research Group.

One of six teens say they expect to use the Internet as a substitute for attending church within the next five years, Barna found. "You may tell your grandchildren that back in the old days, when people wanted a religious experience they attended a church for that purpose. Chances are good that your grandchildren will be shocked by such a revelation."

The rise of religion contradicts predictions of just 30 years ago. Some theologians said God was "dead." Many observers tended to be condescending toward religion, which was considered declining in relevance, and saw science, reason, and technology as holding the keys to the future.

"I believe the greatest spiritual awakening of all time is taking place today," Bill Bright, founder of Campus Crusade for Christ, told The Washington Times. "More people are hearing the Gospel. More people are responding to the Gospel." There are "many wonderful demonstrations that God is truly working in our time in a way that's truly unprecedented in all of history."

"At some point early in the 21st century, Africa may have the largest Christian population of any continent," the Rev. Konrad Raiser, the general secretary of the World Council of Churches, said in an interview. "Therefore people have been talking about a shift in the center of vitality from the North to the South."

Anglicans, Methodists, Presbyterians and others have all claimed significant growth in Africa. The World Lutheran Federation says membership in Lutheran churches in Africa grew by two-thirds in seven years, to 9.1 million in 1997.

Some detect significant growth among new denominations known as African-instituted churches, which have been founded by independent African religious leaders and may embrace beliefs like the ability of believers to prophesy under divine inspiration.

Others here said church growth was greatest among charismatic congregations that have sprung up in the cities and attract people with high-energy services offering physical and spiritual healing.

Bishop Owdenburg Mdegella, a Lutheran from Tanzania, said that in his country, "most of the Protestant churches have developed their own liturgy, their own music."

One theologian, the Rev. John Pobee, an Anglican from Ghana, said in an interview that for the current growth to endure, the faith must be presented in accord with African needs, as community-oriented and socially involved. Worship services need to be engaging emotionally as well as intellectually. "We've got to learn to couch our articulation of God in songs and in poems," he added.

The Christian church has seen "spectacular growth" in Asia in the past 20 years, and there are 75 million believers on the continent, Christian News reported. Most of the growth has taken place in Indonesia, China, and South Korea.

Countries formerly closed to the gospel, such as Cambodia, Nepal, and Mongolia, are accepting missionaries, and progress has been made in closed countries, including Tibet and Bhutan. Christians from Korea, India, and the Philippines who are working as missionaries are among 25,000 Asian nationals serving in foreign cultures.

"Buddhism is on the decline in South Korea, Malaysia, Taiwan," said Malaysian high priest K. Sri Dammananda Maha Thera, at a recent meeting of Buddhist leaders. "Every day we are losing our youth to Christianity."

Thousands of tribal people have become Christians because of the visions of a Sherpa in the Himalayas. As a child, the man had visions of angelic beings who told him they would show him the Buddhist way, he said. The beings told him about a god named Yesu. "I did not know that Yesu is the Sherpa name for Jesus. I had never heard the name," he said.

Missionaries later began telling him about the Bible. He received another visitation from angelic beings, who told him to stop following Buddha and to become a Christian. "They told me, 'My kingdom in you is now complete. Do what the missionaries tell you and follow Yesu,'" he said. "That was my last vision.

In the morning, I felt that a heavy burden had been lifted from my shoulders. The missionaries explained more about Jesus, and we tore the amulets and chains from our bodies and told Yesu that we wanted to follow him." Christianity has grown remarkably in Nepal, where 200,000 people have become Christians since the early 1980s.