I've been thinking about persecution complexes in Christians in the west.
Christians have always been taught that our ‘persecution’ would take the shape of the Roman persecution of the late empire - open oppression from the authorities of the world, as described in Acts and in history books. This has driven a lot of the panic from the Christian Right about culture wars and ‘losing Christian society’.
In fact, however I think the church’s greatest temptation has been, is, and will be to be offered the whole world and lose its soul - “if you take on the power of the world, you will not die spiritually as God has claimed but will be like Him, having the power to define good and evil” - pretty much the exact same way humanity was originally persuaded to rebel against God - convincing them that they knew best.
And I firmly believe that far too many western Christians have just accepted that lie about worldly power - that forcing a largely non-Christian society into a Christian mould will make us safe, will enable our mission to the world, and will bring about the kingdom of God.
Interestingly, I am starting to believe that the reason the church has grown so much across Asia in the last fifty years even as western churches have stagnated, is because ‘Christian society’ doesn’t actually engender true faith - it’s like a shell of a creature: the living being once inhabited it, but has since moved on to something else, leaving behind only the shape of what it once was.
And I can see that our (the church’s) great sin of the 2000s will be that of omission (the things we have not done that we should have done), not commission (the things that we did that we shouldn’t have done): already we have too many people staying silent and safe when injustice and cruelty take place either at a personal level or at a societal level.
God in his Word says:
‘Away with your noisy hymns of praise!
I will not listen to the music of your harps.
Instead, I want to see a mighty flood of justice,
an endless river of righteous living.’
~ Amos 5:23-24 ~
God does not desire worship in the form of music or filled pews, but in the justice and love-for-others of his people.
This theme is frequently repeated throughout the OT prophets: Don’t just look to your own house, look to your neighbour’s house. Don’t just look out for yourself or the people with All The Things, but look out for those who have nothing - no power, no money, no means. Jesus goes on about this in the Sermon on the Mount - blessed are the meek, the poor in spirit, the grieving, the lonely - and his examples through his ministry frequently elevated the acts of the poor and the weak and the helpless rather than the political leaders of the day. The two people commended for great faith were not Jewish at all, but a Roman centurion, and a Syrophoenician woman.
And yet ‘Safety and prosperity’ are the household gods of most Western Christians - the most important thing in their lives is their life and their family’s lives.
Martyrdom in other parts of the world means actually losing your job, your freedom, your life. ‘Martyrdom’ in the west happens when someone challenges your politics, or when people return your ‘Merry Christmas’ with 'Happy Holidays'.
I think we (western Christians) have become so jumpy at anything that smacks of resistance to our faith and our message, thanks to the (actual) persecution of the early church, that we’ve forgotten that our faith is validated in what we do in troubled times: and not just our own times of trouble, but in the time of others’ trouble, also.
And, yeah, the martyrs of the early church lost their lives, but they gained the whole world.
Have western Christians gained the whole world in politics and yet lost the soul of their faith: to love the world as Christ loved us?
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