Why we should care about the persecuted church, and what we should do
It’s really easy to be a Christian here in America.
We take that for granted most of the time, I think. This is the most religiously devoted nation in the developed world. Our politicians proudly talk about their faith in God. I hear Christian music all the time, in stores and on the radio. When I go to a restaurant, I’m never at all surprised to overhear the people in the next booth over discussing a Bible passage. Occasionally getting made fun of or being argued with is about all the difficulty we have in this country.
That’s not the case in most of the world. There are dozens of countries where Christians are frequently in danger of persecution. Whether it’s sponsored by the government, or whether it’s mistreatment by a majority anti-Christian local population, it is very hard to be a Christian in many parts of the world. In many places it’s life-threatening. It’s estimated that somewhere from 10,000 to 100,000 Christians are killed every year, just for being Christians.
Can you imagine? Probably not, and neither can I. There’s just no analogue in the United States to compare it to. And their stories are incredible, including many of the stories of those who survived. Our pastor talked about many such stories in church this morning. But this is nothing new for Christianity. For 300 years, Christianity was a suffering small sect in the Roman Empire, hated by the majority of the populace and subject to intermittent periods of intense persecution. In the last 100 years, Christians have suffered tremendously under the boot of Communist governments and other dictatorships. We would recoil in horror at hearing some of the things that have happened to them, but it doesn’t surprise them. Jesus warned us that the world would hate us, just like it hated him.
But we should understand something: In many of these places, if you keep your head down, quietly worship in private or with a small community, and keep your religion to yourself, you might be just fine. But Jesus told us to go into the world and preach the gospel. As such, many Christians in these regions don’t see laying low as an option. And it’s not so much for believing in Jesus that so many are punished, but for refusing to stop telling people about him.
That is amazing to me. Tens of thousands of Christians who live in places where they can be punished severely and even murdered for their faith just cannot help telling people about Jesus. It’s hard for me to do that here, but it’s that important to them. The solution to avoid persecution is, for many of them, so simple, but they just cannot employ it, because there are so many people out there who need eternal life.
And I know that for some of us, it’s very hard to really invest our emotions in caring for people on the other side of the world, especially a collective group of millions. But Hebrews 13:3 urges us, “Remember those in prison as if you were bound with them, and those who are mistreated as if you were suffering with them.” After all, we are of the same family in Christ. But if that’s not enough, here’s something else we can consider: We owe our very faith to these people — or at least people like them.
We, our parents, our ancestors, heard the gospel from someone. And whoever shared the gospel with us heard it from someone else, and they heard it from someone before them, and the line keeps going farther and farther back, all the way back to Jesus himself. And I guarantee that at some point in that line there is someone who shed their blood and sacrificed their life so that that message could be passed down as far as it would go — all the way down to us. And our brothers and sisters around the world are doing exactly the same thing. If we care at all about the fact that we have eternal life, then we should care very much about the people who are suffering and dying so that people just like us can also have eternal life.
So what does that mean for us? Today is the International Day of Prayer for the persecuted church. Our family around the world desperately needs our prayers. There are countless organizations — my favorite is Voice of the Martyrs — devoted to bringing the message of Christ into hostile areas and bringing aid to Christians there. They need our generosity. But they aren’t suffering and dying for people’s prayers and generosity. They’re suffering and dying so that other people can have eternal life, and share the gospel with a world that desperately needs it.
So I think the best way we can honor them and stand in solidarity with them is to do exactly that: Embrace that eternal life, and share the gospel with a world that desperately needs it. We can make sure their sacrifice, and the sacrifices of our spiritual ancestors, were not in vain. We can utilize our freedoms to the fullest, and make disciples. We can make sure that we don’t get so caught up in the modern world that we forget about the One they suffer for.
That, I think, is what they would pray for us.
