Love Your Enemies: The Persecuted Church Today

by Mathew Block

The year is approximately 34 A.D. A young man named Stephen stands before a crowd in Jerusalem. He confesses that Jesus is the Messiah promised by the prophets of old and that, though He was killed, He now stands alive at the right hand of God. The mob is enraged and drags him from the city. There he is stoned to death—the first Christian to die for his faith.

"St. Stephen" by Spanish painter Luis de Morales (c. 1575). Museo del Prado, Madrid, Spain.

The year is about 203. A father pleads with his imprisoned daughter Perpetua, a young woman in her twenties, begging her to renounce her faith in Christ. She refuses. A few days later she is led out with her fellow Christians to the amphitheatre in Carthage. Wild animals are released, and Perpetua is wounded by a wild cow. Shortly thereafter, a soldier approaches with his sword and takes her life.

The year is 1523. Two monks named Johann Esch and Heinrich Voes have been tied to a stake in the city of Brussels. A year earlier they had been convinced that Martin Luther was right: that Scripture alone held authority over the church and that that the church had lost sight of the Gospel. The fire is lit, and the men die proclaiming their faith in the words of the Apostles’ Creed and the Te Deum.

The year is 2015. A group of men—twenty Egyptians and one Ghanian—kneel on the shore of the Mediterranean Sea in Libya. Each is held captive by a terrorist for the crime of being “people of the cross.” After the leader makes a public threat against Christians worldwide, the victims are beheaded.

These are just a few stories of the martyrs, those who have remained faithful to Christ even at the cost of their lives. As Christians in Canada, we enjoy many freedoms. As a result, it can be easy to think of martyrdom as a thing of the past. Nothing could be further from the truth. The 2021 World Watch List, published by Open Doors, reports more than 4,700 Christians were murdered for their faith over the previous year. More than 4,200 were arrested or imprisoned without trial. And nearly 5,000 churches and associated buildings were attacked.

A far greater number of Christians suffer under more general forms of persecution. The 2021 World Watch List reports that more than 340 million Christians live in places of persecution throughout the world. That adds up to roughly one in every eight Christians.

Christians in Canada generally do not face institutionalized persecution of this sort. But Canada’s Christians are increasingly the victims of intolerance. As we observe our country become increasingly hostile to the faith, we must learn from our persecuted sisters and brothers in other countries to more faithfully bear the cross. At the same time, we should also do what we can to support persecuted Christians around the world—to encourage them in the midst of their suffering, to advocate on their behalf, and to name them in prayer before our Father in heaven.

Persecution Around the World

If we wish to support and pray for our brothers and sisters who are suffering throughout the world, it is important to know who they are. To that end, Open Door’s annual World Watch List is a good guide. It ranks the fifty most dangerous nations in the world to be Christian based on the severity of persecution.

In 2021, Open Doors again declared North Korea the worst persecutor of Christians worldwide—a position it has held now for twenty years. What makes the country so dangerous? The answer is simple: being discovered as a Christian results either in immediate death or imprisonment for you and your family in a brutal labour camp. There are an estimated 50,000 to 70,000 Christians currently in such camps throughout North Korea. And these are not prisons as we know them in Canada: in North Korea, prisoners regularly die from starvation. The few who are released or escape from these places tell terrible tales of suffering.

Afghanistan is ranked second on the 2021 World Watch List, with Open Doors noting it had nearly tied North Korea for first place over the past three years. But the list came out in January—before the evacuation of Western forces and the government’s fall to the Taliban. Even before the regime change, it was dangerous to be a Christian in Afghanistan. Those discovered to have converted to Christianity from Islam could face death if caught—though the former government often opted, as The New York Times has reported, to instead expel Christian converts from the country. But the Taliban’s return to power increases the danger for Afghanistan’s small Christian population. Already there have been reports of Taliban soldiers going door to door, checking smartphones for the presence of Bible apps, and killing any Christians they find.

In places like these, Christians must often go “underground” in order to practice their faith. Consider China, for example, which appears 17 th on the 2021 World Watch List (its first time in decades to appear in the top twenty). There are in China many state-sanctioned churches but it is common knowledge that the Communist Party of China wields strict control over what these churches teach. For that reason, many Christians in China—perhaps the majority—are members of underground or house churches not approved by the government. As authorities discover these groups, they are shut down and pastors imprisoned and tortured. And the threat of discovery is only increasing as China rolls out widespread surveillance systems to track the movements of its citizens.

In fact, China’s crackdown on religious groups of all types—Christian or otherwise—has accelerated in recent years. The widespread arrest and “reeducation” of Uyghur Muslims, for example, has been widely condemned by other countries, including by Canada’s House of Commons, as genocide. The horrific crackdown on the Uyghur—and the anemic response to it by other nations—led Forbes to ask in an article earlier this year whether Chinese Christians might be next in line for such “reeducation.”

Love, Not Hate

In a world where such atrocities are committed, it is easy for Christians to grow weary—to despair of things ever getting better. It is easy to begin to hate the enemies of the Church, those who work so diligently to destroy the Christian faith.

And yet, this is not how many victims of such persecution have responded. Consider the experiences of Richard Wurmbrand, a Lutheran minister who spent 14 years in prison for sharing the Gospel in communist controlled Romania. His own suffering was severe—he once famously took off his shirt during a U.S. Senate committee to reveal the scars upon his back—and yet Wurmbrand could say that he loved those who hated him. “It was in being tortured by them that we learned to love them,” he writes in his classic book Tortured for Christ.

“I have seen Christians in Communist prisons with fifty pounds of chains on their feet, tortured with red-hot iron pokers, in whose throats spoonfuls of salt had been forced, being kept afterward without water, starving, whipped, suffering from cold—and praying with fervor for the Communists,” he says. “This is humanly inexplicable! It is the love of Christ, which was poured out in our hearts.”

St. Stephen, the very first Christian martyr, shows something of the same love in his dying words. Falling to his knees beneath the stones, we read that he cried out: “Lord, do not hold this sin against them” (Acts 7:60). There is an echo here of Jesus’ own words as He hung on the cross: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34).

It is this very love—this offer of forgiveness to those who have wronged Him—that draws us to Jesus in the first place. For we all are sinners. We have all rebelled against God. We are all guilty of nailing the sinless one to a cross. And yet Christ receives us as His own. He ransoms us through His death and resurrection, taking upon Himself the punishment for our sin. “He was pierced for our transgressions,” the prophet writes. “He was crushed for our iniquities; upon Him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with His wounds we are healed” (Isaiah 53:5).

God wishes to bestow that same healing upon those who persecute the Church. Consider St. Paul. This hero of the faith was present for the execution of the first Christian martyr, St. Stephen. And he wasn’t just an innocent bystander; Scripture tells us directly that he approved of the murder (Acts 8:1). And yet God would call him in time to turn from his sin and believe the Gospel.

That puts St. Paul’s words in his epistle to the Romans in a somewhat different context. “Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them” (12:14). The Apostle knows what it is to be the persecutor; he knows they also need our prayers.

Jesus commands us: “I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matthew 5:44). It is a difficult thing. And so we pray that God would soften our hearts for this work too. Dear God, help us to love those who hate You that they may come at length to know Your love.

Into the Fray

We must remember that, ultimately, our battle is not against human foes. There is a deeper evil at work in this world. “For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood,” St. Paul explains, but rather “against the cosmic powers over this present age, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places” (Ephesians 6:12). For that reason, our weapons must be the weapons given us by the Spirit: truth, the Gospel, faith, salvation, and the Word of God (6:13-7). Armed with these, Christians conquer even in dying; for the devil cannot snatch by force any who abide in the hands of Christ (John 10:28).

These are the weapons which persecuted Christians bring to bear in their sufferings. And we are called to join them in the battle. It is no accident that St. Paul closes his meditation on the armour of God with the exhortation to pray for others. We are to wield these weapons, he says, “praying at all times in the Spirit, with all prayer and supplication” (Ephesians 6:18). In particular, we are to make “supplication for all the saints,” especially those who, like himself, are “in chains” for Christ (6:20). Those on the battleground need our prayers—that they would remain faithful under trial, that they would draw comfort from the love of Christ, and that they would be delivered, if possible, from earthly suffering.

You can find out more about the persecuted Church from organizations like Open Doors (the authors of the annual World Watch List highlighted above) and Voice of the Martyrs (a group founded by Wurmbrand, whose story was also highlighted above). Congregations may also wish to make the observance of the International Day or Prayer for the Persecuted Church (taking place this year on November 7, 2021) an annual event in their churches.

Mathew Block is editor of The Canadian Lutheran magazine and communications manager for the International Lutheran Council.