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The puritan John Miles (1621-1683)   founded the first Baptist Church in Wales. He then emigrated to America shortly after the Act of Uniformity (1662) when 2,000 ministers were ejected from the Established Church. With a large proportion of his church, Miles settled at a new Swansea, about ten miles from Providence in Rhode Island. The church grew in face of persistent opposition.   Once, when Miles was brought before the  magistrates on some charge, he asked for a Bible. He then quoted Job 19:28 - Ye should say, Why persecute we him, seeing the root of the matter is found in me ? (KJV). He stopped there and sat down. The court was so convicted by the content and context of the passage that their cruelty gave way to kindness. ( Source : An Introduction to the Baptists, Erroll Hulse)  

Over Christmas I read Nik Ripken’s challenging book ‘The Insanity of God’ . It is built around his experiences with Christians in persecution, as he sought to understand how their faith has survived under intense evil. The book is writter a pseudo name to protect the identity of many followers of Jesus around the world suffering under severe persecution. Here is one quote from the book: I asked the question this evening: “If I were to visit your home communities and talk with the nonbelieving families, friends, and neighbors of the members of your house churches—and if I would point out your church members and ask, ‘Who are those people? What can you tell me about them?’—what answer would I get?” Many people started to answer at once. The response that jumped out at me, though, was the answer of a man who told me that his church’s neighbors would probably say, “Those are the people who raise the dead!” “REALLY!” I blurted out involuntarily. Several of the men in the room, especially...

David Suissa writing in the Jewish Journal quotes this startling statistic of the level of persecution of Christians around the world.  ....But hidden in all the chaos is a monstrous injustice that has received very little media attention: The rampant persecution of Christians. “Few people realize that we are today living through the largest persecution of Christians in history,” Bruce Thornton, research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, wrote on the institute’s Web site. “Estimates of the numbers of Christians under assault range from 100 [million] to 200 million. According to one estimate, a Christian is martyred every five minutes.”..... Copyright © Chola Mukanga 2013

Fiorello Provera (Foreign Affairs Committee, EU Parliament) recnetly wrote an article in Project Syndicate noting that increasing persecutions of Arab Christians in the wake of the Arab spring. For many Christians in these lands the spring it certainly is not : The Endangered Arab Christian, Fiorello Provera, Project Syndicate, Commentary : The recent abductions of Syriac Orthodox Archbishop Yohanna Ibrahim and his Greek Orthodox counterpart, Paul Yazigi, reflect not only the increasing brutality of Syria’s civil war, but also the escalating crisis for Christians across the Arab world – one that could end up driving them away altogether. According to the International Society for Human Rights, 80% of all acts of religious persecution worldwide in 2012 were directed at Christians. This surge in discrimination against Christian communities in countries where they have lived for many centuries can be explained largely by increasing Islamist militancy and the rise of political I...

Good practical advice from Open Door’ s Jan Vermeer on praying for North Korea and Christians in the persecuted world: The apostle Paul also taught me valuable lessons about how to pray for North Korean Christians. His prayers are legendary. He prays so differently than us. We are used to pray for suffering to end, prisons to open and regimes to fall. Paul says in 2 Thessalonians 1:11: “To this end we always pray for you, that our God may make you worthy of his calling and may fulfill every resolve for good and every work of faith by his power….12….so that the name of our Lord Jesus may be glorified in you, and you in him, according to the grace of our God and the Lord Jesus Christ.” What is the calling of this church? Paul says so in verse 5, that the Thessalonians suffer for His Kingdom. This teaches me that when we do intercession for other believers we need not only identify with the person you pray for, but especially with God. What is He after in this circumstance? How...

Rupert Shortt has fascinating article in the   Daily Telegraph  on the growing persecution of Christians around the world  : Imagine the unspeakable fury that would erupt across the Islamic world if a Christian-led government in Khartoum had been responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Sudanese Muslims over the past 30 years. Or if Christian gunmen were firebombing mosques in Iraq during Friday prayers. Or if Muslim girls in Indonesia had been abducted and beheaded on their way to school, because of their faith. Such horrors are barely thinkable, of course. But they have all occurred in reverse, with Christians falling victim to Islamist aggression. Only two days ago, a suicide bomber crashed a jeep laden with explosives into a packed Catholic church in Kaduna, northern Nigeria, killing at least eight people and injuring more than 100. The tragedy bore the imprint of numerous similar attacks by Boko Haram (which roughly translates as “Western educa...

The whole fury of crowd, governor and soldiers fell with crushing force on Sanctus, the deacon from Vienne; on Muturus, very recently baptise, but heroic in facing his ordeal; on Attalus, who had always been a pillar and support of the church in his native Pergamum; and on Blandina, through who Christ proved that things which men regard as mean, unlovely and contemptible, are by God deemed worthy of great glory, because of her love for Him, shown in power and not vaunted in appearance. We were all afraid, and Blandina’s earthly mistress (herself facing the ordeal of martyrdom) was in agony in case she should be unable to make a bold confession of Christ due to her bodily weakness; but Blandina filled with such power, that those who took it in turns to subject her to every kind of torture from morning to night were exhausted by their efforts, and confessed themselves beaten – they could think of nothing else to do. They were amazed that she was still breathing, for her whole boy was m...