Last month we prayed for the church in Colombia. This month our focus is on India and China, the one a free democracy, the other still controlled by a communist but more tolerant dictatorship. Both of these huge economically emergent countries live somewhat uneasily with their Christian minorities, China perhaps the more liberal.
In parts of India surveillance of Christian activity is increasingly intrusive and often oppressive. State governors and local officials not infrequently lay aside their powers to condone or even encourage intimidation and attacks on Christian individuals and sometimes do nothing to prevent the pillaging and burning of churches.
As an example, last September in Raipur, [a city in Mahd Pradesh 300 miles west of Calcutta], some 3,000 Christians bravely marched to protest their concern at the intimidation and violence they were suffering at the hands of Hindu fundamentalists. The latter, encouraged by new state anti-conversion laws, had violently broken into Christian gatherings and attacked individuals with staves, threatening to burn, or burning, their churches and taking away younger members, branded as converts’ for forced re- conversion ceremonies in the local temples. One pastor, Sudarshan Singh, told of his own ordeal at the hands of armed men, of his frequent arrests and police interrogations, and of his loss of intimidated families from his congregation. The Christian riposte had been this coming together from all over the state to speak with one voice in pursuit of tolerance and justice. Everyone at the rally had their own experience of intimidation, violence and persecution.
The pastor asked that we pray for all who took part in that rally; that the Church in India and its congregations may be granted the strength to withstand harassment; that the state upholds justice and suppresses forceful intimidation of individuals on religious grounds.
In China, where religion was persecuted almost to the point of extinction, there is a more promising picture. Open Doors, a European mission to the persecuted church since the 1940s, smuggled one million pocket size, translated Bibles over the beaches into China in the 1980s. One recipient in particular, now 85 years old, was in touch with a network of house churches’ and through them each daringly and at great peril arranged their further distribution across the country. One result today, now that there is a limited degree of religious tolerance, is that from such as this small beginning there is a latent, but often vague, knowledge of Christ and a thirst to hear more. As an example of progress one house church’ mainly of university students has grown from nothing to 200 believers in the past two years. Across the land there are many thousands of new believers.
The mission has asked that, in re-arousing the Christian church in China, we should pray that the Word of God should become embedded in the lives of young people, so many of whom have moved into the cities. They have produced, as an adjunct to the pastors teaching, 250,000 Chinese language Youth Bibles’ in magazine form each edition telling stage by stage the story of the New Testament. We are asked to pray that they will be successful in avoiding suppression and in reaching out to the people.
The Persecuted Church
Anthony Hutton