This paper examines the tense communal politics of Egypt’s Coptic community in the later years of the liberal era and early Republic as a study on the impact of changes in a state political system on minority institutions. In the 1940s, as faith in the national political sphere as a functional and inclusive system dwindled, Coptic elites increasingly turned their focus to communal affairs as an arena for political life. The result was a period of heightened tensions within the community, culminating in the dramatic unseating of Pope Yusab II. My research will explore the major topics of communal contestation during this often-overlooked period, investigating how debates were framed and argued in the Coptic press, with particular focus on the power struggles that occurred between communal institutions. Based on these sources, I argue that the strife of this period stemmed from the shift of political energy from the national to the communal, which ushered in a distinct period of communal contestation and a reconfiguration of institutional structures and power dynamics within the community. With their renewed interest in communal affairs, the politically active Coptic elite began to re-envision the communal sphere on political terms, utilizing the rhetoric of democracy and governance to challenge clerical authority. What had once been the Church’s uncontested realm of sacred authority became open for contestation on secular terms, leading to a struggle of legitimacy between the will of God and the will of the people. The politicization of communal affairs however proved a double-edged sword for the Coptic elite, as a new generation of Coptic youth, marginalized by the secular leadership and blocked from ecclesiastical mobility by the church hierarchy, began to challenge the exclusive structures of communal institutions. In the new context of communal contestation, these factions used debates over papal character, awqaf management, and the powers of the Coptic Lay Council as their battleground over the future of the Coptic sphere. For the Egyptian context, this study serves to highlight the communal forces that led to the Church-dominated Coptic political sphere after 1956, as well as the new generation of Coptic voices that would come to shape the institution in future decades. On wider terms, my arguments uncover how developments in state politics not only impact minority interest in communal affairs, but contribute to frameworks for how these affairs are contested.