[Order David Horowitz’s DARK AGENDA: The War to Destroy Christian America: HERE.]
That the Christian Church in the Western world closed in March of 2020 due to fears over the contraction of a corona cold virus was a bridge too far for many of us who had spent our lives attending it.
For the first time in two millennia, and per Caesar’s orders, the Church, on the eve of the Easter season, shut and locked its doors to the faithful. Yet when Caesar murderously persecuted the first generation of Christians, they continued to congregate to celebrate their Risen Lord. Their modern counterparts, in glaring contrast, treated one another like lepers while celebrating Mass remotely—all because of a fear of a cold virus with a survival rate of 99.5-99.9%.
The COVID Scare revealed, in a way that nothing else quite has, the crisis within the midst of which the Church in America and throughout the West finds itself at the present moment.
Yet in addition to their forefathers from antiquity, the Western Church’s congregants can as well turn to their contemporaries in other parts of the world for inspiration. There they will find glaring examples of courage, faith, hope, and, yes, love.
Open Doors, an organization dedicated to serving persecuted Christians around the globe, regularly features accounts of Christians in distant lands who shoulder immeasurable costs—including the cost of forgoing their very lives—for the sake of their faith in Jesus.
Take, as one example, a Sri Lankan pastor by the name of “Indunil.” On March 6, after his congregants had returned to their homes following a church service, a mob of approximately 600 or so people led by Buddhist monks descended upon Indunil’s church, threatening him and his family with death threats as they beat on the church’s gates and smashed its windows. The pastor’s congregants, hearing about the attack, returned to protect him. They did not, however, retaliate with violence, as Indunil, citing Christ’s injunction to “never repay evil with evil,” implored them to remain peaceful.
And they did in fact remain peaceful—even as several were beaten to the point of being hospitalized.
The police eventually arrived to disperse the mob—though several officers sided with it.
A local government subsequently ordered Indunil to suspend church services.
Indunil and the members of his church knew in advance of this attack that they could be subjected to violence, for the environment is inhospitable to Christians. As one anonymous Christian leader in Sri Lanka put it:
Right now, Christians in the area are so afraid[.] However, they are still gathering to worship. They say, ‘It’s difficult, but we know we will have to face these things, and we need to be ready for this. This is God’s work and we will not deny Him.
Even after the government ordered the suspension of his church’s services, Pastor Indunil and his congregants continue to gather—in their homes, and not via remotely, as their Western brothers and sisters had done when Dr. Fauci insisted that they do so in March of 2020. So much more glaring is this contrast between the Christians of Sri Lanka and those of the West when it is considered that Sri Lankan Christians like Pastor Indunil regularly contend with real, violent threats to their lives.
Yet it isn’t just in Sri Lanka that Christians brave grave dangers, real dangers, to profess their faith. In the West African nation of Burkina Faso, for example, the followers of Jesus are given an ultimatum. As Open Doors frames it: “Leave your home, your crops, your church—everything you know—or live every day knowing you could be targeted and killed because you follow Jesus.”
On April 28, 2019, Pastor Pierre Oult was talking in the parking lot of his church with several congregants shortly after he had concluded that Sunday’s service. This was a weekly practice for the 80 year-old cleric. This day would be different, though, as a dozen or so guys on motorbikes converged on the scene and demanded of the Christians that they convert to Islam or die. Pastor Oult and the others refused. In response, the Muslim men gathered them under a tree, where they proceeded to rob them of their cell phones and Bibles.
Then, one at a time, the Muslims directed the Christians to the rear of the church building—where, one at a time, they shot them to death.
A total of six people, including Pierre Oult’s son and a primary school teacher, were killed. A seventh person was “seriously injured” and taken to a nearby hospital.
Their assailants weren’t finished, as they torched the church and stole a sheep and bag of rice from the murdered pastor’s home.
Tragically, this attack is of a piece of a pattern of brutal violence to which Christian communities throughout Burkina Faso are routinely subjected.
And, tragically, the kind of persecution with which Christians in Burkina Faso and Sri Lanka have to regularly live is of a piece with comparable persecution that Christians in dozens and dozens of countries around the world have to daily endure.
Yet—and this is the point—they continue to gather, to brave the hardships, for the sake of their faith.
They should be an example to their brethren in the West who, when confronted with nothing even remotely comparable in March of 2020, and per the State’s decree, shut their churches’ doors and treated their fellow believers as untouchables.
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