Are Christians Being Persecuted? - by Pastor Rod

Recently, I had the privilege of meeting a young Chinese woman who has been studying in the states but will soon be returning to her homeland as a university professor.  She introduced me to two other of her family members, as well.

The young mother has become a Christ-follower – and has been praying for her family to also become believers.  All three have now become Christ-followers and affirmed that commitment this weekend by being baptized.  It was a God moment.

But in the joy of the Sacrament was also a note of caution.  They are cautious about proclaiming their belief publically for fear that when they go back to China there will be persecution.  Religious persecution is a fact in many places of our world today.

Last week we read of the Yazidi sect (a Kurdish-speaking ethno-religious group living in the mountains of northern Iraq that draw from Christian, Muslim and other neareastern religious beliefs) that is under siege in Iraq by the Islamic State jihadist group. “We are being slaughtered, annihilated,” Yazidi MP Vian Dakhil declared. “An entire religion is being wiped off the face of the Earth. I am calling out to you in the name of humanity!” she said. “In the name of humanity, save us!

Tens of thousands of Yazidi members are trapped on Mount Sinjar in Iraq without food and water. With summertime temperatures nearing 100, they are dying of thirst.  If they choose to descend, they face being killed by Islamic State fighters, formerly the ISIS, which has taken control of vast swaths of Iraq, eliminating anyone who won’t join them, particularly Christians and other non-Muslims.

There are now are only a handful of Christians, if any, left in Mosul, where believers have lived for two millennia.

Archbishop Athanasius Toma Dawod of the Syriac Orthodox church said that Isis's capture of Qaraqosh, Iraq's largest Christian city, had marked a turning point for Christians in the country. "Now we consider it genocide – ethnic cleansing," he said. "They are killing our people in the name of Allah and telling people that anyone who kills a Christian will go straight to heaven: that is their message. They have burned churches; they have burned very old books. They have damaged our crosses and statues of the Virgin Mary. They are occupying our churches and converting them into mosques."

Another news story that hit the headlines recently spoke of managers of a shopping mall in Dublin, Georgia, who told a group of visitors they were not allowed to pray in the facility – not even over their lunches in the food court…but have starting to backtrack after headlines exposed the policies of the facility.

From verbal harassment to hanging, persecution for professing faith in Christ is as old as Christianity itself, often comingling with ethnic violence and geo-political conflict.

Most people in the West would be surprised by the answer to the question: who are the most persecuted people in the world? According to the International Society for Human Rights, a secular group with members in 38 states worldwide, 80 per cent of all acts of religious discrimination in the world today are directed at Christians.

The Centre for the Study of Global Christianity in the United States estimates that 100,000 Christians now die every year, targeted because of their faith – that is 11 every hour. The Pew Research Center says that hostility to religion reached a new high in 2012, when Christians faced some form of discrimination in 139 countries, almost three-quarters of the world's nations.

All this seems counter-intuitive here in the West where the history of Christianity has been one of cultural dominance and control ever since the Emperor Constantine converted and made the Roman Empire Christian in the 4th century AD.

Yet the plain fact is that Christians are languishing in jail for blasphemy in Pakistan, and churches are burned and worshippers regularly slaughtered in Nigeria and Egypt, which has recently seen its worst anti-Christian violence in seven centuries.

Persecution is increasing in China; and in North Korea a quarter of the country's Christians live in forced labour camps after refusing to join the national cult of the state's founder, Kim Il-Sung. Somalia, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and the Maldives all feature in the 10 worst places to be a Christian.

The reality of being a Christian in most of the world today is very different. It only adds to their tragedy that we in the Western church fail to understand that – or to heed the plea of men such as the Catholic Patriarch of Jerusalem Fouad Twal when he asks: "Does anybody hear our cry? How many atrocities must we endure before somebody, somewhere, comes to our aid?"

So how should we respond?  What can we in the church do?  I’d like to hear your ideas?

Brother Andrew, founder of Open Doors, offers this challenge:

“Christians have an answer in those situations that the world does not know anything about. But as followers of Christ, we must take a bold step: we must shed the “enemy image” we have of those who persecute us. Because the moment we have an enemy image of anyone, God's love can no longer work through us to reach them! We must pray for and even love those who hate us.

So in reality, the way Christians live out their lives before others is the most powerful message we can share. It far transcends the words or methods we may try to employ to impact a needy world in the face of the challenging question, “Who is God?” Christians must be able to point to our hearts and say, “Here is God! He lives in me. And I'm willing to die for Him, and I'm also willing to die for you because that's what He did for us on the cross at Calvary!” Nothing else will work in this age of confrontation unless and until every Christian is not only willing to give their lives, but one day actually does it.

I challenge the Christians of the world to pray for their persecuted brothers and sisters, to act on their behalf and to live out the life of Jesus in this needy world around us. Only then we will see a radical change take place in the lives of people. Only then we will see the love of Christ replace the hatred of this world.”