Scott Redd (president of Reformed Theological Seminary’s Washington campus) lectured at Providence Magazine’s Christianity & National Security Conference on Nov. 2, 2018. Transcript forthcoming.

Thank you, Mark, and thank you, IRD in Providence Magazine, for holding this forum. I think this is an incredibly important issue and very relevant, obviously today, and something about which I think many in the church aren’t quite aware and need to have more awareness of. So, if this is quite important in how we think about these things, I love those words of Mark Tooley’s. I’m going to quote them and put them on our website about being the most important Protestant institution. And I’m a graduate of Catholic University, that’s where I got my PhD, so we can handshake on that.

What I’m going to do today is just offer something of a biblical theology of caring for the persecuted Church in terms of religious liberty. Now, the way I’m going to do that is I want to start with just three vignettes about religious liberty, three vignettes related to religious persecution. I want to talk just briefly about some overarching categories that we can keep in mind, and some of them have already been brought up. So, I’m happy that I can just quickly go through those.

Some basic theological categories to keep in mind as we’re considering religious liberty writ large, not merely for Christians, okay, but for all religions. I think there’s an argument to be made out of the Bible. However, I would caution us, the Bible isn’t primarily asking the question about religion, religious liberty, and we need to be aware of that. However, as we go to it, we’re going to find that there are sort of assumed systems of theology, there are assumed doctrines and background against which we can project some basic categories for thinking through religious liberty.

But let me first talk about some of these vignettes related to the church. And the reason I bring these up is to remind us that when we talk about religious liberty globally, we’re not merely talking about foreign policy, though that is, of course, the interest of this conference. But we have to remember, there’s more than just policy. These are issues related to culture. These are issues related to personal experience and narrative. As a matter of fact, I think we’ll find that some of the ways in which religious liberty has moved forward the most significantly has been in the course of narratives and relationships being built.

But it’s a complicated issue. I’m going to focus on the two countries I’m most familiar with just because of my work over the last 10 to 15 years. And that’s, in two countries, two regions, China being one and North Africa being the other, just working with pastors working in persecuted churches, not government-supported churches in those regions. And one thing you’ll find quickly is that everyone’s experience is different. It’s quite complicated how these issues get worked out on the ground level.

It was told to me when I was going to China for the first time, I said, “What should I expect? Will I have a government minder? Will my cab be tailed?” And my friend very wisely, and I’ve thought of this over and over again since then, he said, “You have to remember, China has 1.4 billion people.” He said, “Everything you can say about China is true.” Okay, that’s the application of this, is their religious restriction and religious persecution in China, absolutely. Are there also areas of relative religious freedom? Yeah, actually, there are. You know, will the government be aware of you being there? Probably. Will they care? Probably not. Okay, so there’s all kinds of things we have to keep in mind when we’re talking about this. It’s not necessarily the most extreme version of everything that we think of.

One example, when I was first in China, I was in the western region there, and I remember going to a house church, and I remember walking up to a building with a large cross over the door. Inside, we sang worship songs with the volume on the amplifiers turned up loudly, with the windows open. This is a surprise to me. I walk outside, and I ask the pastor, I said, “This was kind of not what I expected.” And he said, “Well, there’s a saying, ‘The mountains are high, and the Emperor’s far away,’ and we’re on the western side of China, not on the eastern side of China. And basically here, religious liberty or religious restrictions are used when you’re doing something to annoy your neighbors. In another way, they’ll use the religion rules about religion to maybe kind of affect, you know, winning a court case against you or something like that. But actually, generally speaking, we experience a certain amount of freedom. Now, I should say I’m talking about Han Chinese here. This is not talking about the minorities who have quite a different experience in western China.

Another story, another vignette from China, and this was just recently told to me when I was in the country. A Christian surgeon comes into the office, and he has a high-ranking party official from his district coming in for surgery, coming in for heart surgery. And the official does, as his common practice, as he’s about to go into the operating room, he’s about to do prep, he says, “Here’s an envelope full of money.” Okay, just to make sure you take care of me, well, you do a good job. And the surgeon says, “No, I can’t take that. I can’t take the bribe.” And the official says, “Oh, come on. It’s okay, you know.” And he goes, “No, no, no, sir. I don’t take the bribe.” “I’m a Christian.” To which the party official says, “Oh, good,” puts the money back in his pocket and basically says something along the lines of, “I know that you’ll take care of me because it’s a part of your religion to do that, right?” And this story was told to me by a friend of the surgeon, and he said, “This was both an encouragement. However, it still raises this problem of, now they know who I am, right? Now they’re aware of me.” So, it was both kind of a happy story and a sad story. It’s complicated, isn’t it?

Well, the way I can say the same is true in areas in the Middle East where there’s severe religious restrictions. In the 1990s, my father was stationed there as the commander of the 5th Fleet in Central Command. And there were several military officials there who were known for being very difficult for American operatives to get through to. And because my father was what’s called the senior officer present afloat in the region, he was often the one who was sent to go meet with them. And there’s one particular Saudi admiral who everyone had a hard time getting through to. He would play on his Xbox when military officials would come to visit him. He’d play on the Xbox and talk to you over his shoulder. And my father goes, hearing all of this from the protocol officer, “This is what’s going to happen. Just be ready. He doesn’t like talking to Americans.”

And my father walks in, sure enough, he’s playing an Xbox, but he puts the controller down, and he turns around. And my father was known for being a Christian. He was a member on the board of Officers Christian Fellowship and a variety of other ministries. And this gentleman turned around and started talking to him. And at the end, my father said, “This was a very fruitful meeting.” You know, “Can I ask you why this went so well?” And the Saudi admiral said, “Well, I know that you are of the people of the book.” Okay, and so even though there’s extreme religious persecution in some of these countries, we also have to remember there are these personal relationships that sometimes speak through some of these policy issues and give us an opportunity for advancement.

Let me move them to a discussion just briefly of a biblical theology of religious liberty. Why are we to care about it? And then I’m going to move to caring particularly about the persecuted church. I’d like to highlight four categories: one being divine justice—it’s already been brought up; one being wisdom literature, which is related to divine justice; one being the importance of personal faith and conscience, which we’ve hit on a couple of times this morning, and that’s been wonderful. Actually, in Walter Russell Mead, highlighted wisdom literature too, talking about Solomon and the importance of wisdom. I think that’s actually a key doctrine, a key idea here in this discussion. And then, lastly, the love of neighbor.

So, first of all, let me just talk briefly about divine justice. Okay, as we think about God as being creator and King, as he’s presented in the Bible, we remember that this is not because his people establish him as such, but it’s because that’s how he is in relationship to the world. The Psalmist says in Psalm 24, “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof, the world and all who dwell within it. He’s founded it upon the Seas; he’s established it upon the rivers.” God does not relate to the earth as a deity who needs to be stood up by his own followers. Rather, he stands up the world, that’s all of the inhabitants of the world. Notice there’s no qualifier in those statements about God’s authority. And honestly, there’s no qualifier about Christ’s statements of authority either. If you remember, the beginning of the Great Commission, Christ says, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.” That’s quite an expansive claim. Because, however, we recognize that God is King and that justice is in the hands of the Lord, and that God is both a transcendent God and that he exists above and beyond and over and against creation, not merely as a part of it like the pantheists hold. He’s also an imminent God, which is interesting. So he’s not like the deistic God who is separate and apart. However, he’s within, he comes into creation, he speaks and as a part of it, he’s aware of it, he knows the way of the righteous.

To quote the Psalmist again, “but the way of the wicked will perish.” Because God is a transcendent and imminent king, and he does the work of justice, which is always the work of the king. You know, remember that from the Bible, Solomon shows he’s maybe going to be the great king we’ve all been waiting for by doing great cases of justice and judging wisely. Because God is king and judge, we can therefore believe in this radical idea of religious liberty.

As the Apostle James writes, “there is only one lawgiver and judge, he who is able to save and to destroy. But who are you to judge your neighbor?” You see, because God is king and because God is just, and that we know that his justice will come to bear in this world, we are actually free. We’re given this position of freedom to care for others and to allow justice to be in the hands of the Lord. So that’s one of the outpourings of the divine kingship.

Because of divine kingship, we recognize divine justice. Because of divine justice, we know that the Lord acknowledges the work of the righteous and the work of the wicked. And therefore, it does not fall to us to judge people on their individual beliefs. That’s also connected, by the way, to wisdom literature as was brought up earlier. Wisdom literature is really established on the idea of creation theology, this idea that God’s character interwoven into creation.

As a matter of fact, in Proverbs 8 where Lady Wisdom is calling in the simple person to receive her wisdom, she describes herself as sometimes sadly translated as a craftsman. It’s actually like a little girl, because this is working with the imagery. She’s like a little girl at creation, dancing and being woven into the fabric of creation. That’s the reason why the sage can say things like “go to the ant, you sluggard, and learn about his ways.” You see, God’s woven his character, he’s woven wisdom into him.

And that’s the reason why the father and mother of the Proverbs can call their children to pursue wisdom. Notice in the Proverbs, wisdom’s never legislated. They’re always calling out. You have these three main characters: you have the fool, you have the wise, okay, and the fool, remember, and as the Psalmist tells us, the fool’s the one who says in his heart, “there is no God.” You have the wise who are following in the fear of the Lord, and then there’s this third character who’s interesting and he’s referred to as the simple.

The simple as the person who hasn’t made a decision either way. But if you notice how wisdom literature works, the process assumes that there’s a choice, that this is a personal belief system that’s being followed, whether you go into folly or go into wisdom. And so it assumes a religious liberty. Of course, that leads us to a discussion of personal commitment, conscience, personal faith. Paul says in Romans that it’s not just confessing with your mouth.

We’re not like some religions, those of us of the biblical faith who think you just have to say it a few times in front of witnesses. You have to not only confess with your mouth, you have to believe it in your heart. This is not merely a Christian and New Testament idea. This goes all the way back to Moses himself in the culmination of the Mosaic Covenant. “Write these words on your heart, believe in them, love the Lord your God, not merely just do this stuff, don’t just go through the motions, right, but love the Lord your God.”

The assumption is for freedom and personal conscience and faith. I know this for some of you may be surprised to hear a reformed person talking about freedom and faith in that way, but we do have a way to do it. And then lastly, let me just end with this. There is this idea of the love of neighbor, and that’s also been brought up as well. If you remember when Christ was asked the question, “who is my neighbor?” He notably does not highlight a Judean, right? He doesn’t highlight one of his apostles.

As a matter of fact, he makes a point to highlight someone who would be considered an outcast class, who even would we would say had kind of a bad theology, wasn’t going to Zion but maybe going to Gerizim to worship. He chooses a Samaritan and he says the Samaritan is the neighbor who shows true love. And we too are called to love in that way. This is unique because he’s not merely talking about loving other Christians like we find elsewhere in the scriptures.

Caring for the least of these is quite possible. He’s referring only to those within the Christian Church we talked about who we ought to care for in the Mosaic Covenant were told to care for the widow and the orphan and the Sojourner. But again, all those categories and we’ll talk about this in a minute, would be a part of the covenant community. What’s interesting about the Samaritan parable is that he deliberately goes outside of the covenant community.

Okay, so how do we love those who are outside of our belief system? And we do it in this self-sacrificial, self-giving way, just like that Samaritan. And I would say there’s a connection to that for us who live in democratic societies where we also have this thing called a vote. When we talk about the king in the Bible, people often make a one-on-one connection between the king, you know, in Romans 13 for instance, and the President or the Congress or Supreme Court.

But we have to remember in this system, we are the king, right? We’re the molecules on the hand of the king making law and we are just molecules. We have these little votes, but yet as we think about how we’re going to be kings, we need to be mindful of these larger categories that we find in Scripture. So that’s a brief category. I’m working on a larger article that’s sort of a biblical theology of religious liberty writ large, but I think for the church, often the way to come into this issue is really to come at it to approach it from the position of dealing with Christian persecution in particular.

And so I’d like to focus the rest of this discussion on how Christians ought to think about the persecuted church. Particularly, this and this is going to be my main thesis. As we see the persecuted church, we have to recognize that this is not somebody else’s problem. This is our problem, right? This is as if a family member is being persecuted. This is not something that exists just to the area of cable talk shows and Talking Heads.

This is something that’s very intimate and close to us. Christians must struggle energetically to bring relief to the church suffering persecution while also recognizing that persecution is indeed a constituent part of the life of the Christian faith. In other words, we need to approach persecution with the sort of bifocal perspective. On the one hand, we are, contrary to Cain’s protestations, our brothers and our sisters’ keeper, and we owe to them not only our prayer but our actions on their behalf.

On the other hand, we need to recognize that the life of the follower of Jesus Christ is ordained by God to be one of persecution and sorrows. As our Lord reminds us, “a servant is not greater than his master. If they persecuted me, they will also persecute you.” Put it in another way, we are called in Scripture to uphold solidarity with the people of God. And that includes divine justice and union with Christ solidarity with one another as members of the body and union with our Lord.

But we must remember that our Lord is the Lamb who was slain and he is the head of the church. First, let us consider solidarity with the members of the body. Not much time needed to pass after the fall of humanity before persecution came into the picture and martyrdom entered onto the stage. Cain’s jealous murder of his brother Abel after Abel’s righteous offering of the best of his flocks is an immediate and pure example of true faith leading to persecution and indeed martyrdom.

Having encountered brutal persecution himself, the Apostle John evokes the memory of Abel’s death as just that, an act of martyrdom. Drawing a conclusion for Christians in his day, he says, “don’t be surprised, brothers, that the world hates you.” Well, argue this is, by the way, the same way Moses is using the Cain and Abel story to write to ancient Israel. He’s saying this conflict between the shepherds and the farmers goes way back.

It goes way back to Cain and Abel. Don’t be surprised, brothers, when the world hates you. In the Hebrew Bible, the persecution and martyrdom of followers of the Lord are presented as an expected outcome for anyone audacious enough to proclaim the truth about God. Persecution of the faithful is on display throughout the ancient texts where we read of Israel’s suffering at the hands of its Egyptian slave masters. We read about Canaanite oppression of the tribes during the time of the judges.

We read about Samuel’s fear of reprisals from Saul, having to go secretly to Jesse’s house to anoint this son David and we read about Elijah and Elisha confronting their own King and countrymen because they spoke the word of the Lord. As a matter of fact, we find that in Elijah’s day, those seven thousand faithful prophets who had not yet given in to the Baal-worshipping sensibilities of their day had to hide, lest they be found and persecuted. The canonical prophets, those who wrote books, were persecuted as well for their inconvenient truths.

Daniel and his Judean friends suffered fits of rage from their kings. Jeremiah’s thrown into a cistern because he talks too much, imprisonment happens even in some of the extra-biblical context we hear about prophets like Isaiah being sawn in half, an issue that the author of Hebrews brings up in his letter of chapter 11, verses 36 through 38. He says this of the Old Testament prophets: They were suffered, they suffered mocking and flogging, even chains of imprisonment. They were stoned, they were sawn in two, they were killed with a sword. They went about in skins of sheep and goats, destitute, afflicted, mistreated—those of whom the world was not worthy—wandering about in the deserts and the mountains and in dens and caves of the earth.

You see, the Lord knows and acknowledges the suffering because He identifies with those faithful who suffer. Moses repeated the injunction to care for the orphan and the widow and the sojourner—those disenfranchised from social, political, and financial support structures—highlights the divine care for the suffering. And the logic goes something like this: Your thermostat for your faithfulness will be how you care for these who are disenfranchised, those who are outside of the support structures of society. And the Lord says in Exodus and Deuteronomy, “If you don’t care for them, then I will. And you don’t want me to be the one who has to care for them because it won’t be for your good.”

Each of these social types would have been members of the covenant community. The sojourners would have been converted Gentiles like Ruth and Rahab living in the community but not a part of the land distributed and enjoyed by the people of Israel. You see, the Lord identifies with them, saying that if Israel will not care for them, then perhaps He will. The sense in the Hebrew Bible is that whether it is Israel as a whole or the prophets or King David himself giving voice to persecution, their suffering will not go unnoticed. And Psalm and the psalms attributed to David, the psalmist writes this in Psalm 59, “For deliver me from my enemies, O my God! Protect me from those who rise up against me, deliver me from those who work evil, and save me from bloodthirsty men.”

He goes on to describe the actual circumstances of his persecution, and as he does it, it reminds me of accounts that I’ve heard from Iraqi and Syrian Christians escaping ISIS-controlled regions in the Middle East. He says, “Each evening they come back, they’re howling like dogs; they’re prowling about the city. There they are, bellowing with their mouths with swords in their lips, for they think, ‘Who will hear us? Who will do anything?'” You see, the men who come in the night don’t care how much noise they make because they believe no one will hear them or care. But the psalmist reminds them: God hears; God cares. Such reckless lack of regard belies the guilt that they are heaping up for themselves as the psalmist cries out to the Lord to notice his suffering even when no one else does.

For those acquainted with the New Testament accounts of Jesus Christ, you realize that this theology of suffering continues into the New Testament faith. The divine care here for the persecuted finds poignant and vivid expression in the life and suffering of the Messiah Himself. Jesus is presented as the embodiment of faith; He is the very Word of God (John 1:1). But He is nevertheless born into persecution under King Herod, forced to migrate to Egypt as a refugee, dogged by religious and political police throughout His ministry, and ultimately crucified as part of a political ploy with the reigning Roman authorities. As an enemy of the state, He truly was, as the prophet Isaiah foretold, “a man of sorrows.”

You see, Christians believe that as a preeminent man of sorrows, Jesus fully acknowledged that the persecution that He faced was not an arbitrary fact of culture and history. He was born into persecution because of who He was—the revelation of God incarnate—and the world could not tolerate His presence. He also knew that those He sent out would suffer because of their association with Him. He also knew that the greatest act of persecution the world has ever known—the unjust crucifixion of the Son of God—would result in the greatest act of redemption that the world has ever known: the salvation of all who believed in Him.

In a recent conference sponsored by the Institute on Religion and Democracy, we were asked the important question, a provocative question: Why don’t Christians care about the persecuted Church? Well, let me answer the question with why they should. First of all, God is a God of justice, and those of us who claim to follow Him should find ourselves more and more enamored with His just character. If we remember, when God reveals Himself to Moses in that rock of ages segment of Exodus and He passes for Moses, He equally represents and celebrates the Lord who goes before him and sings a song about Himself. That’s what’s happening. The Lord, the Lord, right? He is equally relishing of His mercies and grace as He is of His justice, and we need to remember that as people of the book, as people of the Lord, we should find ourselves more and more enamored with justice as well. We cannot confess Christ only to form our lives around the comforts and conveniences of modern Western life without paying minds the injustice of Christian persecution around the world.

To whom much is given, much is required. We have been given much in the form of financial security, education. I’m aware of this as someone who teaches in theological education. It’s amazing, the glut of theological education we have in the United States and in the West. And you have to go to countries where the church largely outnumbers the Western Church and yet has very few resources available to them. You see, we have these things in the West, particularly in the United States. We’ve been given a part as voters in one of the most powerful countries in the world. How can we say that we participate in the gospel of Christ when we do not deliberate about how these resources can be used to the benefit not only our brothers and sisters in Christ but all who suffer and are afflicted unjustly? After all, it was Jesus who taught that “where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” And we should ask ourselves, where do we use the treasure of our relationships, of our finances, of our creativity, of our intellectual wattage, and of our votes? Where do we put our treasure? How are we expending our treasures of time, money, and influence for the sake of the church and the oppressed?

This is another reason, by the way, why Christians should care about those who suffer for their faith. The Apostle Paul describes Christians as those who are in Christ. He says they are increased to their in Christ in his letter to the church in Philippi. He goes beyond that to say not only are we just in Christ when we suffer and are persecuted, we are sharing in his sufferings. An amazing thing! We are sharing in the sufferings of Christ Himself. You see, around the world, Christians are given the opportunity to actually be the body of Christ and His sufferings, and so we in the West should seek opportunities to come alongside them and care for those who experience persecution more acutely than perhaps we ever will. We should consider it a privilege to do so as a result. That cannot be enough for us to complain about the annoying anti-Christian forces in our own country. It’s not enough for us to wish that we were properly represented in the centers of cultural production like the academy and media and government. We are called instead to initiate what resources we have to the encouragement of the global gospel movement.

And when that calling means that we must sacrifice, we can be thrilled that we have the opportunity, just like those apostles, the opportunity to suffer for the same cause as our Lord. So, what can we do? We can pray. I don’t say that lightly. This is, as a president of a seminary, you know that’s the way you’d fundraise, right? You ask people to pray first and then you ask for money. I don’t say pray lightly. This isn’t me trying to move in and ask for the main thing. That’s the main thing. We need to start with prayer. Those of us who believe in an act of transcendent and imminent God need to be committed to prayer on behalf of those who suffer religious persecution both in the church and outside of it. We should pray first for our own hearts that they would desire safety and peace for those who suffer persecution.

Second, we can pray for the power structures of this world to be foiled in all of their efforts to persecute the body of Christ. We can financially support ministries that work for persecuted Christians. We can research the persecuted church, learn their stories so that our hearts are enlarged to love them as our Lord loves us. And of course, yes, we can use our political influence. We can get knowledgeable. That conference, size the conferences like this one about the issues that need to be concerning legislators who support policies of religious liberty we need to pray for those who are doing that work.

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ver the course of my time with persecuted Christians from North Africa, the Middle East, China, and Indonesia, I’ve experienced again and again the incredible witness of men and women for the sake of the gospel. I’m reminded of our spiritual shared DNA. I mean, I’m reminded of our shared body of Christ. I’m reminded that we have the same place where we’re going, as the hymn writer writes, “When we’ve been there ten thousand years, bright shining as the Sun, I realize I’m gonna be standing next to, odds are statistically, a persecuted Christian.

You know, I’ll have no less days to sing God’s praise in the presence of that saint. So, we can become aware of the stories, we can learn about those with whom we will spend eternity. To be honest, I don’t want to wait until the eschaton. I don’t want to wait until the new heavens and new earth to get to know them and to work on their behalf. I want to get to know them now. Thank you.

Hi, thank you so much for your talk. I have a question on the theological end of religious liberty. You mentioned Proverbs and the pattern of the three characters therein and how that implies religious freedom. How does that interact with the injunction in Proverbs to train children up in the way they should go? Yeah, this is great because, you know, a lot of especially non-Christian thinkers would say, “Oh, that’s very unfree to kind of force your own views on your children.”

Absolutely. And that’s great. And actually, it’s not just in Proverbs, of course. It’s throughout. In Moses, you know, that injunction right, “These words on your heart,” it says right after that, “And when your children ask, ‘Why are we doing these things?’ you say, ‘Because the Lord also led us out of slavery in Egypt.'” You know, and I think as we think about religious liberty, and this could be a whole other conference topic, we move into the idea, of course, what is freedom and how do we know things?

We move into the area of epistemology. I think we can posit this: You will never be, and nor can you be, absolutely free of outside influence. Okay, so we’ll never have to posit that there’s no, I mean, I kind of reject the Rousseauian idea of tabula rasa. I don’t think that’s something that actually really happens. Okay? And I think that’s because of who we are as humans, and I have theological reasons for that as well.

So, of course, as we’re talking about parents or teachers or anyone influencing children, there are going to be a variety of influences that come in that cannot be denied or rejected or minimized in any way. And yet when we talk about religious liberty, I think, writ large, no one is, hopefully, no one is saying therefore we don’t teach children anything from any point of view. Okay? That’s impossible. That’s not something that can be done just because of how humans think and how thought processes happen.

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o, I think it falls to the two bodies like the church, schools, bodies like parents. And of course, I mean, there’s a theology for why family is central to all of this that we can kind of spend time on. But in actually the situation in Proverbs is reflecting some kind of school that may or may not have begun in the home. Some people posit that because father and mother and son and daughter are used in Proverbs, that it assumes a family background. It’s quite possible we know very little about how Israelite educational, you know, the educational process worked. Could be quite likely talking about schools.

You could call your teach, you would call your teacher a father, a teacher would call his students sons, but it still doesn’t get us away from this epistemological question. Can you ever have complete, utter lack of influence from the outside world? And no, that’s not possible. Now, of course, those of us in religious bodies believe that. Yeah, when you come into the church and you come to a community of faith, the covenant community as you’re part of a family. And by the way, covenant communities are always described as families in the Bible, either through parenting language, father and son language, or husband and wife language.

There’s a great article called “Covenants Make Families.” As you move into that, you realize this is a realm you talk about subsidiarity, if you want to at this point or something, but this is a realm where education has to take place. And this includes moral and spiritual formation. Thank you very much, sir.

Hi, Chandi Martin, adjunct professor from Oral Roberts University in theology. And I also am on the advisory board of a nonprofit called God’s Vision Ministries. And we help persecuted Christians in places like, well, it started in Pakistan. We actually established the first Christian University in Pakistan called Vision University. And we help other persecuted Christians in places like Saudi Arabia, Oman, UAE, India.

My question was specifically you going over to places like China, how do you specifically help and encourage these persecuted Christians? How do you see that it would be the best practice for us as Christians to help them? Maybe not just like giving money to our organization, but what can we do, you know, boots on the ground kind of thing besides prayer, besides giving money? Yeah, that’s great. I mean, I honestly don’t take this negatively, not you, but everyone here who’s Western. I think really the only thing we have to offer that are the most important things, we’ll put it this way. Most important things we have to offer are money and teaching.

I think they’re doing quite well in terms of the persecuted Church. They’re doing quite well on zeal for the gospel. They’re doing quite well on growing. I mean, the crazy numbers that you hear out of China, so they’re cosmically larger than anything you hear about in the West. So, I think the primary issue is going to be that second-generation church, that they don’t, there’s a lot of charlatans out there. So, now I’m getting into my area of theological education. I think we need to make sure that they are aware of the 2000-year-old history of the church and can see themselves as part of that body.

It’s both beautiful to see a new group. So, in Algeria, for instance, I mean, you have a really burgeoning group. Their churches have their own worship music because they didn’t have access to any other hymns or songs. Now they do, you’ll hear translations of Western hymns, but they have all of their own stuff and qabil style worship, which is amazing. And yet you also want them to know about the rest. You know, we had some fights in the past, and it’s kind of good to know about some of the stuff we’ve worked out and glean from that wisdom.

So, I think that’s one big thing. And then, of course, the Western Church is very wealthy, and I think we can use our wealth and our influence to help the persecuted Church in a variety of ways. Just these are things that they don’t have available to themselves. Do you see that the Western Church could help educate persecuted Christians or even, I guess, us as Christians? We should be educated about their plight in their own context.

Yeah, but then also, how can we help them with education? I know that GVM, who I work with, we’ve established Bible schools in places where Christians are minorities, they’re persecuted. But I think that what you said, education is important on our parts and perhaps we could give that to the persecuted Christians as well. Absolutely, I think that’s what we need to do. That, I mean, we want to help them see themselves as part of the larger body of Christ, not only in the present world but also in history.

Right now, they’re a part of the body of Christ in history. There are saints that came before them, even persecuted saints, to whom they can turn for hope and help. I also hope that as we train them up and in most the places I go, there aren’t already Bible teachers there. If there are, this what I teach. I teach Old Testament, Hebrew Bibles, Semitic language and literature. From CUA is my degree, you know, when I go there, if I find there’s a person who can teach, then I’m like, you go in peace, brother, you’ve got it, okay?

I don’t, the only reason I’m there is because I’ve got this training that I think can be a benefit to them. But as soon as a leader or another professor comes up who can do it, I think it’s helpful for us to move on and find other places where that’s not being done. I definitely think that’s crucial for us, absolutely. So, you advocate providing curriculum but having a person in their own community teach it to them because they would know the best ways to get to them and the indigenous leadership is always better than outside.

No, okay, thank you. That’s not to put down missionaries. Okay, right, we understand that. I’m all for that too. Hi, I thank you for your speech this morning. And I want to introduce myself, my name is Belinda Wilson, and I’m from Tennessee, but I’m a student of the Robertson School of Government at Regent University online. And I have a question in regard to China.

I had the opportunity to visit China several years ago, and I stayed there for a couple of months studying their culture. And I had the opportunity, I feel that God opened the door for me to be able to attend an underground church for the whole period of time that I was there. And so, becoming acquainted with their persecutions that I heard them discuss during the services, and there was a translator, so they were able to help me to understand in English.

I know they have a problem with proselytizing, and that if they were to try to proselytize, that it would create a position where they could be imprisoned. There was one missionary that was there from North Korea that had just been caught passing out tracts on a corner and was in prison for two years. And he had come to China to talk to them. But my question, in the course of me staying there, I was at NCU, and I was exposed to a lot of students, Chinese students that were Christians.

And they were trying to study law and do things that would try to help internally to help change the laws that govern religion in China. And I know there’s been some liberty as far as in the Catholic Church, but in the Protestant movement that’s underground, how do you see indigenous leadership rising up from the Christian students in China that would help to actually advocate and change their religious freedoms internally? Yeah, so I mean, again, everything you can say about China is true.

So, I’ve talked to, I’ve heard from people who say, “Yes, I feel very restricted in terms of evangelism,” and other people who say, “Hey, we’re allowed to discuss ideas. And as long as it’s not jamming a tract down their throat or something, I can completely evangelize and talk about the gospel of Christ.” Here’s another added element to it culturally. Christianity is not seen like many of us in the West are sort of used to thinking of it as sort of a backward or older cultural tradition. It’s kind of a new and exciting thing.

So, a lot of people do want to talk about it. I’ve had groups of students pray for me going back to the States because they say, “Well, we have this government problem, but you all have this cultural opposition.” And I haven’t even told them about it, they just picked this up from the internet. Okay, so there is a lot of evangelism going on in China, obviously, at the amount of conversion. We see happening and the leadership is clearly being formed. But what’s interesting is it is being formed, and I’m not an expert on China, so someone who is can clarify some of these things.

But what I’ve learned is that even the leadership is rising up in kind of a, they call it a family style of churches. That’s the networks, Jorma Presbyterian, so I’m like, that sounds kind of Presbyterian, but it’s also kind of Episcopalian too or Catholic. You have a sort of dad, there’s the pop, you know, who’s in charge of the family. But it does reflect a kind of philia lionie of Confucianism that wasn’t eradicated during the Cultural Revolution.

But as you see the leadership developing they’re looking to their past Christian ancestors. So here’s another interesting aspect. I’ve met a couple of young church leaders who are very close with their grandparents who experienced the Cultural Revolution. They feel like they’re the heroes of the faith and their parents, okay, that intervening group who really lived during the boom of China, they see them more as kind of consumerist, looking capitalists.

This is really interesting, kind of cultural thing happening in there, raising up of the church leaders. Now again, these are all anecdotal, and I’ve learned not to say anything across the board about China. But in these experiences, I mean, I’m seeing young men and women rise up to positions of authority quite well. But they’re also a part of this family structure, so you usually have older pastors with churches underneath them. Thank you, thank you.

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