Don’t Ignore or Idolize the Persecuted Church

I once heard the story of a Chinese pastor who faces frequent harassment by local police. They pick him up for questioning, and he uses the ride to the police station to repent of craving a comfortable, middle-class lifestyle that avoids suffering for Christ.

Those prayers help him face his interrogators with grace and love. He’s a sinner too, and he knows the only difference between him and those who persecute him is the grace of God. He wants his persecutors to see that grace in him.

Wow.

When we hear stories like this, we’re rightly humbled by the grace displayed by those who face far more persecution than we do. We admire their courage and endurance in the face of suffering for Christ. Hopefully, we’re moved to pray for them. And maybe even act. 

But sometimes, we might also be tempted to put these believers on a pedestal. To idolize them. Or at least to idealize them, imagining them as heroes without flaws or failures in their suffering, and in their ordinary, daily lives.

This isn’t helpful.

While it’s better than ignoring their suffering, idealizing the persecuted church isn’t good for them or for us. Why not? And how should we respond instead? 

1. Idealizing the persecuted church hinders our prayers for them.

Sometimes we forget that persecuted Christians are regular people. Like the Apostle Paul, they have “fightings without and fears within.” (2 Corinthians 7:5) Not only do they deal with ongoing concerns about outside threats, they deal with ordinary challenges to internal unity. Just like us, they sometimes argue with each other. They get hurt. They disagree. Leaders fail. Churches split.

These believers also face the ordinary temptations of any sinner in a fallen world. Whatever sin you battle in your own heart, they battle in their hearts too. They have besetting sins. They wrestle with internal struggles that never make the news.

If we only think of persecuted Christians as heroes to be applauded, we might miss praying for their deepest needs: For freedom from sin. For the fruit of the Spirit. For love to each other. For endurance and patience with joy.

2. Idealizing the persecuted church diverts glory from God.

The Apostle Paul often wrote to New Testament believers about the sufferings he endured for Christ. In 2 Corinthians 5, he even makes a list of them. Earlier in the same letter, he clearly states he doesn’t want the Corinthians to be unaware of the afflictions he experienced. 

But this wasn’t to exalt himself. It was to glorify God.

“We were so utterly burdened beyond our strength that we despaired of life itself,” Paul wrote in 2 Corinthians 1:8. “But that was to make us rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead.”

Paul saw every triumph as a testimony to God’s grace. And he saw every trial as an opportunity to know God more deeply. At the end of 2 Corinthians, Paul famously writes about boasting not of his strengths but of his weaknesses, “so that the power of Christ may rest upon me…For when I am weak, then I am strong.”

It’s not wrong to admire the courage of persecuted Christians, but it’s a mistake not to see God’s glory as the driving force and the daily goal of all of our service to him.

Hannah Nation, the managing director for The Center for House Church Theology, knows many persecuted Christians in China. She once reminded me that for all their endurance, they’re not the hero of this story. The hero of this story is Christ. It’s his church, and this is his work.

“I think we can look to the Chinese house churches to be encouraged by what the Lord has chosen to do among them,” she said. “But the question is not how do we become more like the Chinese house churches? The question is: How do we become more like Jesus?”