(parallel post with wordpress.)
American
christians are not persecuted. That’s bull. If that were so, why do we
have Christians coming from other countries and saying things like, “It
is impossible to survive in this land and remain a Christian. The time
is just not there to practice your Christianity” (reference below).
Sure, we’re not getting physically beaten and tortured and risking our
lives. No, instead, our minds are constantly beaten and lied to, and we
end up forfeiting our lives. How is that not persecution?Just because
Satan wasn’t able to impose physical persecution on us doesn’t mean he
is not trying to persecute us. If that were the case, then either 1) we
are not really Christians, according to Jesus, or 2) we are being
persecuted and don’t realize it.
Is there essentially any difference between a government that
arrests Christians and beats them, demanding that they renounce their
faith and a society that surrounds Christians with values that a
Christian would have to give up his/her faith to embrace? People get
the persecution idea real quick when you start beating them, and I am
by far not minimizing the suffering of those who are. But people aren’t
as keen to identify persecution when it comes in the form of being
comfortable.
Yeah okay fine, I am speaking from some experience, but I just
cannot accept that my best efforts to walk with Christ here in America
are fundamentally inferior to the best efforts of a Christian in
another country. If that’s true, then why was I, in Romania, able to
spend hours upon hours a day with just a tiny pocket new testament and
a notebook, reading, writing, and praying…and yet still struggled with
same things, the same thoughts, and the same ideas about God I struggle with now?
It cannot be true that we are inferior Christians, and as long as we are belittled into thinking that, we will never rise above.
Lambasting American Christians and piling on the guilt will only make
them sink deeper into their comfort. That’s why we need examples. And
for sure, we have a lot. But I would say we need missionaries.
Whenever I say that, people are like…United States? How do we need
missionaries? What are you talking about? Some missionaries plant
churches. Others encourage existing churches. I say we need the latter.
We have enough churches, and enough resources among us to plant all the
churches we could ever want or need.
But we don’t.
You know how when a Christian comes from another country, everyone’s
like oooh and ahhh, and is eager to hear what they have to say? And for
the week or whatever they are there, we drink in all the stories and
reports on how it is over there. So…what if we had missionaries like
that come to us for a longer term basis, to encourage us? In the book A Heart for the City,
contributing author Sunday Bwanhot writes, “No nation in this world is
so spiritually sound that it does not need help from outside its
borders.”
I think we need missionary exchange programs. We need to stop thinking
we’re such bad Christians but it’s okay because we’re so good sending
out missionaries. We need to be encouraged in our faith and discouraged
in our smugness about how much we do for the world. I can’t see
anything negative about that.
Fuder, J. (1999). A Heart for the City. Chicago: Moody Publishers.
