CHRISTENDOM is under threat – under threat from radical Buddhism, from Hindu nationalism and, most barbarically, from Islamism.
In this land, cocooned as we are by the wide sea, you wouldn’t know it, for our church leaders remain silent, as they always seem to be in the face of the things which really matter.
The persecuted church simply can’t compete with what a man wears on his feet in the pulpit or the irrelevant fulminations against the hypothesis of gay marriage. Does our Christian love. whatever that means precisely, really end at Grantley Adams?
Well, next week is Suffering Church Action Week and, if nothing else, we can at least pray, and in and through those prayers stand beside all Christians who suffer. And pray too, if nothing else, for wonderful organisations like the Barnabas Fund, which do so much in practical ways to assist our brothers and sisters in Christ in foreign lands torn apart by religious tyranny. Search them on the Internet.
Think especially, perhaps, of the carnage perpetrated by Boko Haram in northern Nigeria; for Asia Bibi sentenced to death for blasphemy in Pakistan, and Christian migrants who find life in the European, and mainly Muslim, holding camps no different from what they experienced in Syria and for the same reason – that they are Christians.
Please don’t say it’s all happening in a different part of the world and not our business. The bottom line is that we are the world, each and every one of us, for we all contribute to it. Each of us, like Nehemiah, can play a part in rebuilding the city of God and bringing comfort to God’s people.
Each of us can proclaim, with St Paul: “Yes, we may be hard pressed on every side, but we’re not crushed. Yes, we may be perplexed, but not in despair. Yes, we may be persecuted, but not abandoned. Yes, we may be struck down, but not destroyed.”
And yes – all this in the name of Christ. One world. One humanity.
– Fr Clifford Hall
