World

The group Open Doors USA figures that in 2023, 360 million Christians lived in countries where persecution was “significant.” Roughly 5,600 Christians were murdered, more than 6,000 were detained or imprisoned, and another 4,000-plus were kidnapped. In addition, more than 5,000 churches and other religious facilities were destroyed.

American Christians talk of persecution, but that is what real persecution looks like. Every year Open Doors USA releases its World Watch report of the 50 states most likely to punish Christians for their faith. Last year 11 nations were guilty of “extreme persecution.”

Afghanistan took over the top spot from North Korea in 2024. Open Doors explains that it long was “impossible to live openly as a Christian in Afghanistan. Leaving Islam is considered shameful, and Christian converts face dire consequences if their new faith is discovered. Either they have to flee the country or they will be killed.”

Unfortunately, the August 14, 2023 collapse of the U.S.-backed Kabul government made the situation immeasurably worse. According to Open Doors: “Christian persecution is extreme in all spheres of public and private life. The risk of discovery has only increased, since the Taliban controls every aspect of government—including paperwork from international troops that may help identify Christians.”

No. 2 on the list of the worst persecutors was North Korea, usually in the news for its nuclear weapons program and missile launches. Christianity was strong in Korea before the Soviet occupation after World War II of what became the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. The Kim dynasty—Kim Jong-un represents the third generation—then created a personality cult that treats its members as semi-divine. Consequently, the North views Christianity, which claims a higher loyalty, as particularly threatening.

According to Open Doors, another 48 countries are guilty of “very high persecution.” Christianity is the most persecuted faith, but most religions face persecution somewhere, and some religious adherents, such as Jews, Baha’is, and Ahmadis, are targeted with special virulence.

For some governments, persecuting Christians is the default mode. Matthew Luxmoore reports that Evangelical churches are being targeted by Moscow in Russian-held cities in Ukraine. In occupied Ukraine, some evangelical churches continue to operate after pledging fealty to the Russian authorities.

Others, such as Melitopol’s Church of God’s Grace and parishes in the villages surrounding Melitopol, continue to meet in secret at followers’ houses, scrambling to hide their Bibles and their instruments as soon as they hear a dog bark or a gate creak open. One evangelical minister who now leads clandestine prayer services at his home said: “We have gone underground.”

Underground services have become a necessity because of incidents like this in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine. Moments after the band struck up a song of praise at a Christian church in a Russian-held city, Russian soldiers stormed in wearing full tactical gear. One of them mounted the stage and told the congregation to prepare their documents for inspection.

In Iran, Anooshavan Avedian, an Iranian Armenian pastor, started the 10-year prison sentence he received last year for “propaganda contrary to and disturbing to the holy religion of Islam.”

Avedian was arrested while leading a worship service in a Tehran home in 2020. The Assemblies of God meeting place was shut down 10 years ago for holding services in Farsi. Iranian security forces have arrested thousands of Christians in the past few years.

Editor’s Note: Worldwide persecution of Christians is rising. In a 2024 listing of the top countries which persecute Christians, Iran is #9. The complete 2024 top 10 list is: North Korea (No. 1), Somalia (No. 2), Libya (No. 3), Eritrea (No. 4), Yemen (No. 5), Nigeria (No. 6), Pakistan (No. 7), Sudan (No. 8), Iran (No. 9), and Afghanistan (No. 10).

You can view the full report here.

Almost 5,000 Christians were killed for their faith in 2023. Almost 4,000 were abducted. Nearly 15,000 churches were attacked or closed. And more than 295,000 Christians were forcibly displaced from their homes because of their faith.

The latest annual accounting from Open Doors ranks the top 50 countries where it is most dangerous and difficult to be a Christian. Nigeria joined China, India, Nicaragua, and Ethiopia as the countries driving the significant increase in attacks on churches.

Overall, 365 million Christians live in nations with high levels of persecution or discrimination. That’s 1 in 7 Christians worldwide, including 1 in 5 believers in Africa, 2 in 5 in Asia, and 1 in 16 in Latin America.

And for only the fourth time in three decades of tracking, all 50 nations scored high enough to register “very high” persecution levels. Syria and Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, entered the tier of “extreme” persecution.

When the list was first issued in 1993, only 40 countries scored sufficiently high to warrant tracking. This year, 78 countries qualified.

North Korea ranked No. 1, as it has every year except for 2022 when Afghanistan briefly displaced it. The rest of the top 10: Somalia (No. 2), Libya (No. 3), Eritrea (No. 4), Yemen (No. 5), Nigeria (No. 6), Pakistan (No. 7), Sudan (No. 8), Iran (No. 9), and Afghanistan (No. 10).

The deadliest country for Christians was Nigeria, with more than 4,100 Christians killed for their faith—82 percent of the global tally.

Editor’s Note: You can view the full report here.

Religious minorities, including Pentecostals, Anabaptists, and Armenian Orthodox Christians, were accused of spreading COVID-19 or secretly profiting from lockdowns in at least 45 countries in 2020.

Pew Research Center found that the accusations, often made with little or no evidence, led to physical violence on every continent except Antarctica. The most significant increase in harassment was against Jews, who faced intimidation and threats in more countries in 2020 than they had before the pandemic.

Change In the Number of Nations with Religious Harassment:

+6% Jews

+4% Folk (Traditional religions)

+1% Christian

-1% Muslims

The world we live in now offers us a glimpse of the joys and pleasures that we will experience when God brings the new heaven and the new earth (Rev. 21).

In his book Heaven, Randy Alcorn explains, "All our lives we've been dreaming of the New Earth. Whenever we see beauty in water, wind, flower, deer, man, woman, or child, we catch a glimpse of Heaven. Just like the Garden of Eden, the New Earth will be a place of sensory delight, breathtaking beauty, satisfying relationships, and personal joy.”

We will not live in a sterile environment or float about among endless clouds with nothing to do. We will live on an all-new earth—just like this one, except free from storms, earthquakes, drought, floods, or any other disasters. Things will grow easily, and weeds and thorns will not exist. Animals will not harm us but rather look to us benevolently as their leaders and benefactors.

There are heads growing on Tony Dighera's farm, and they're not made of lettuce. They're called "pumpkinsteins," and they look a lot like the Frankenstein creature that actor Boris Karloff made famous more than 80 years ago.

"It's so new, and it's so unique that demand has been off the charts," Dighera said. "A lot of people thought I was nuts. When I first started doing this I think every farmer in the world looked at me like I was a complete lunatic."

Dighera carefully builds a strong mold that encases the pumpkin yet permits air to reach the growing gourd inside. The pumpkin variety has to be just right. They can't be too big or they'll burst from the molds. Too small and the pumpkins won't fill the molds. Dighera still recalls the first time they squeezed that pumpkin head into the mold and it worked. Out came a re-formed (or should we say "de-formed") pumpkin that looked like Frankenstein's head.

Dighera doesn't know whether he has a thriving pumpkinstein until he removes the nuts and bolts from the mold and successfully removes the pumpkin. But don't expect pumpkinsteins to boot jack-o'-lanterns off the porch completely. They're not cheap. It costs 100 bucks to squeeze those pumpkins into a mold and reshape them into a monster.

Possible Preach Angles: Conformity; Renewing the Mind; Worldliness—What is molding your life? Don't let the world press you into its mold. The world constantly pressures the believer to conform to its image.

Here's an object lesson that you can use to explain how our children inherit a sinful nature, and how it is activated, tempting them to act on their sinful desires and disobey God.

On a table lay out the following ingredients that are used for making bread: a bowl, flour, milk, salt, sugar, a mixing bowl, a jar of warm water, and yeast. Make sure everyone knows what you have on the table.

Then ask the following question: "What is wrong with our children or youth?" Call their attention to the ingredients on your table. Explain that the Bible uses yeast (a single-cell fungus) as a way of speaking about sin, with its ability to permeate. Then demonstrate that in the making of bread, different ingredients go into your bowl. In like manner, when parents conceive a child, they are not just adding the parents' individual DNA; they are also mixing in the yeast of their sinful nature.

Then explain that you must take your dough and place it in a bowl of warm water, cover it, and place it on the stove. The particular environment of warm water has now placed the yeast in an environment where it will activate. You then explain that our children live and grow up in an environment or a culture that the Bible calls "the world." Satan uses the world to activate our children's sinful nature and tempts them to act upon their sinful desires and disobey God.

In his book Over the Edge: Death in the Grand Canyon, Michael P. Ghiglieri chronicles the nearly 700 deaths that have occurred in the Grand Canyon since the 1870s. Of course most people aren't shocked that fatal mishaps occur there. After all, the Grand Canyon is 277 miles long, up to 18 miles wide, and attains a depth of over a mile (6,000 feet). The extreme temperatures (which often exceed 100 degrees) can quickly lead to heatstroke and dehydration.

So how did most of the deaths occur? Air crashes account for the largest number of deaths at the Grand Canyon. Floods have claimed the lives of some of the river rafters. Other despondent souls have taken their own lives. But according to Ghiglieri, a number of people have gone "over the edge" and fallen to their death through their own carelessness. Specifically, they ignored posted warnings and confidently walked out on to dangerous precipices.

For example, in 1992, a 38-year-old father jokingly tried to frighten his teenage daughter by leaping on to a guard wall. He flailed his arms as he pretended to lose his balance. Then he comically "fell" on the canyon side onto a ledge he assumed was safe. But sadly, after ignoring numerous warning signs, he lost his footing and fell 400 feet into the void below.

Then in 2012, an 18-year-old woman who was hiking on the North Rim Trail decided to venture off the beaten path to have her picture taken at a spot known as Inspiration Point. As she sat down on the ledge of the 1,500-foot deep canyon, the rocks gave way, and she plummeted to her death.

These deaths were not just tragic; they were also completely avoidable. Does anyone truly want his or her last words before "AAAAHHHHHH" to be, "Look at how close I can get to the rim without fall …. ?" Call me overly cautious, but without a hang-glider or parachute attached to my body, I can see the Canyon just fine 10 yards back from the precipice.

And yet many of us approach sin by asking the question, "How close can I get without crossing the line?" We avoid God's warning signs and then edge right up to disaster, confident that we—unlike other people—can avoid the crash. Like the child who listens to a parent's warning and then does everything to push the boundaries, we rush to the edge of sin with a false sense of security.

I imagine you're familiar with the phrase "ship of fools." It was a common medieval motif used in literature and art, especially religious satire. One such satire is Hieronymus Bosch's famous oil painting by the same name, which now hangs in the Louvre in Paris. [See an image of "Ship of Fools."] This marvelous work, which is filled with symbolism, shows ten people aboard a small vessel and two overboard swimming around it. It is a ship without a pilot (captain), and everyone onboard is too busy drinking, feasting, flirting, and singing to know where on earth the waves are pushing them.

They are fools because they are enjoying all the sensual pleasures of this world without knowing where it all leads. Atop the mast hangs a bunch of dangling carrots and a man is climbing up to reach them. Yet above the carrots we find a small but significant detail: a human skull. This is the thirteenth head in the painting, unlucky in every imaginable way. The idea is that these twelve fools, who think all is perfect, are sailing right to their demise. The only pilot on board, the only figure leading the way, is death.

In his book Life: The Movie, cultural critic Neil Gabler claims that People magazine has became the archetypical magazine of our times. Gabler writes:

Inspired by a section of Time magazine that chronicled celebrity milestones … People expanded the concept to include anything a celebrity did, on the canny principle that ordinary people were fascinated by extraordinary ones. Within ten months of its launch on March 4, 1974, the magazine had a circulation of 1.25 million.

Although People made a point of including noncelebrities in its pages … its success was unmistakably a testament to the enchantment of celebrity. People editor Richard Stolley even devised a set of rules for a successful cover: Young is better than old. Pretty is better than ugly. Rich is better than poor. TV is better than music. Music is better than movies. Movies are better than sports. Anything is better than politics. And nothing is better than a celebrity who has just died. It was a bracing description of not only what sold magazines but of what values the media now sold to the country.

In his book Tempted and Tried Russell Moore recounts an NPR program about a scientist named Temple Grandin who is researching new ways to gently kill cows. It's an important issue because if the animals experience high stress levels prior to death, hormones get released that lower the meat quality. Thus, Grandin has been exploring how to keep the cattle calm as they are being led to slaughter.

Grandin's research has led to one simple insight: novelty distresses cows. The key is to keep everything in their lives feeling and looking as normal and natural as possible. Russell Moore summarizes Grandin's techniques for gently killing the cows:

Workers shouldn't yell at the cows, [Grandin] said, and they should never use cattle prods, because they are counter-productive and unneeded. If you just keep the cows contented and comfortable, they'll go wherever they're led. Don't surprise them, don't unnerve them, and above all, don't hurt them (well, at least until you slit their throats at the end).

Along the way, [Grandin] devised a new technology that has revolutionized the ways of the big slaughter operations. In this system the cows aren't prodded off the truck but are led, in silence, onto a ramp. They go through a "squeeze chute," a gentle pressure device that mimics a mother's nuzzling touch. The cattle continue down the ramp onto a smoothly curving path. There are no sudden turns. The cows experience the sensation of going home, the same kind of way they've traveled many times before.

As they mosey along the path, they don't even notice when their hooves are no longer touching the ground. A conveyor belt slightly lifts them gently upward, and then … a blunt instrument levels a surgical strike right between the eyes. They're transitioned from livestock to meat, and they're never aware enough to be alarmed by any of it. The pioneer of this technology commends it to the slaughterhouses and affectionately gives it a nickname. [Grandin] calls it "the stairway to heaven."

Moore goes on to warn us about the spiritual forces at work in our lives:

Forces are afoot right now, negotiating how to get you fat enough for consumption and how to get you calmly and without struggle to the cosmic slaughterhouse floor. The easiest life for you will be one in which you don't question these things, a life in which you simply do what seems natural. The ease of it all will seem to be further confirmation that this is the way things ought to be …. You might feel as though your life situation is like progressing up a stairway so perfect it's as though it was designed just for you. And it is. In many ways the more tranquil you feel, the more endangered you are.