In October 1949, the Coptic Communal Council, al-Majlis al-Milli, failed to run elections as scheduled in the midst of conflict with the clergy. The following April, the Egyptian government intervened by dissolving the Majlis in favor of an appointed body and by amending its bylaws to allow for the Coptic Patriarch and the state to intervene in the case that future elections were delayed. This prompted controversy in the community, as supporters of the Majlis criticized the intervention for depriving the body of its democratic nature. However, opponents of the Majlis used the legislation to criticize the body for its aggressive posturing and to assert the authority of the clergy over the laity in communal affairs. This paper will consider the 1949-50 Majlis electoral crisis alongside the anxieties of late liberal era Egypt. Growing fears over Islamism, discrimination, and declining Coptic presence in government led many Copts to look to communal institutions for representation, and in turn articulate evolving interpretations of those institutions and the community itself. Based on the conversations that occurred in Egyptian parliamentary minutes and the communal press, I argue that the election crisis served as a flashpoint for various parties to lay claim to their own visions of community, in particular by focusing on communal representation, spheres of sovereignty, and the maintenance of order. While Coptic factions articulated competing civic and spiritual visions of the nature of the community, the Egyptian state used the crisis to draw communal governance further into its orbit of control and to construct its own preferred hierarchy of authority within the increasingly fractured community. My analysis of the electoral crisis complicates the predominant narratives in modern Coptic historiography that understand the 1952 Revolution as a historical rupture that broke the influence of the laity in communal affairs in favor of the clergy. The circumstances of the 1949-50 Majlis electoral crisis reveal that this process was already occurring in the pre-revolutionary state, and crucially, rather than a purely exogenous shock, proceeded in conversation with intracommunal debates. Ultimately, I reveal the critical role that Coptic institutions played in defining the nature of the community in a period of anxiety, as well as the ways in which communal tensions fueled state policies towards the Copts on the eve of revolution. These developments point to a continuous tendency to regulate communal structures in the name of order that transcends manifestations of the Egyptian state.