No Distinction Between The Persecuted Church And The Free Church – We Are All Persecuted

Posted on August 17, 2015 by tdillmuth

the_pastors_wife_sabina_wurmbrand-e1330315786813Practically speaking, we in the West have quite a bit to learn from our brothers and sisters who have remained faithful in the midst of extreme persecution and suffering.  Their steady faithfulness to follow God and disciple their families should provide us with a model for our own lives.

But when we talk about these brothers and sisters, we must understand that we are all a part of the same church.  There is no distinction between the persecuted church and the free church.

Mark Dever, Pastor of Capitol Hill Baptist Church reminds us that we are united by saying,

The church is a people, not a place or a statistic.  It’s a body, united into him who is the head.  It’s a family, joined together by adoption through Christ. (What is a Healthy Church, 38)

It is reminiscent of the last stanza of the Nicene Creed, which was penned 1600 years earlier.  It says,

And I believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church. I acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins; and I look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. Amen.

To be sure, there are distinctions worth noting between Individual churches.  Most of the NT was written to individual churches that were quite different:  the church at Ephesus, the church at Corinth, the church at Galatia, etc.   Some of these churches had things they needed to improve upon and some of these church were more of a model for other churches.  The same is still true today.

But as we are reminded through the Nicene Creed, Christ’s church is one church!  In the new heaven and the new earth, we won’t be divided into Methodist/Presbyterian, or Pentecostal/Baptist or underground/free.

In fact this is how Subina Wurmbrand herself considered the underground church that she was a part of for twelve years.  She said,

You won’t find its title in directories, or its building in the cities of Eastern Europe.  It has no cathedrals. Its priests are in worn working clothes. They have no theological training. They know little of sectarian squabbles.  The Underground Church has no name even behind the Iron Curtain. Only after we reached the West did I come to know that we were referred to by this title among the few people abroad who knew what we were doing. If I’d been asked earlier, “Have you an Underground Church in Romania?” I wouldn’t have understood the questions. We simply did our Christian duty. We paid no heed to Communist laws. And we did not need to give our attitude a name. (The Pastors Wife, Digital Copy, 72%)

The bottom-line is that Christians in Iran, Nigeria and North Korea are a part of the same church as Christians in Canada, Finland and the U.K.  There is no distinction, as we often make, of church members who are persecuted and those who are not.  Paul says in 2 Timothy 3:12, “Indeed, all who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted.”  Essentially, we are all the persecuted church!

Glenn Penner, the late C.E.O. of VOM Canada said,

We are all the Persecuted Church and our calling is to reach out and minister to those who are suffering violence and loss for Christ’s sake since we are one Family. If we are not suffering together, we are standing together with those who are suffering (Hebrews 10:32-34).

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North Koreans, Meet Jesus And Please Excuse The Cannonballs: On Protestantism’s Awkward Entrance Into North Korea

Posted on August 10, 2015 by Pastor Foley

Protestant Christianity rumbled into Korea with guns blazing–literally. It arrived aboard an American trading ship, the General Sherman, which pressed its way, unwelcome and unlawful, up the Taedong River towards Pyongang in 1866. After the crew of the General Sherman had killed seven Korean civilians and wounded five (both the Korean government and early Korean Christians agree it was the General Sherman that inaugurated the hostilities), the Koreans launched a burning boat and set the General Sherman ablaze. The entire crew was either shot, burned, or, in the case of missionary Robert Jermain Thomas, beaten to death by the angry crowd once he reached the shore, holding a Bible aloft.

It is not unfair to say that Christianity has always been controversial along the Taedong shores and in Korea generally. First the Japanese and later the DPRK would contend that Christianity and the General Sherman were inextricable. Christianity was subversive, they insisted, but not in the Sunday School, kingdom of God sense. Instead, they insisted, it was politically and militarily subversive, always serving American and anti-Asian interests as its missionaries leapt ashore trying to distract everyone with Bibles. These concerns and accusations were hardly allayed as tens of thousands of northern Korean Christians fled from North to South to become simultaneously Christianity’s greatest proponents and communism’s most trenchant critics.

Those Christians who remained in the north could never overcome that taint, that suspicion, and were hardly ever given the chance. They loved their Lord passionately, and they also loved the land of their birth. They sought to serve the one by serving the other. Their service–in fact, their very identity–was rejected by their land, but they continued to offer it in the hope that it was acceptable to their higher master, to whom they one day would have to give account.

At times as uncertain and ambivalent about the land to their south and its inhabitants as their political leaders were (due in no small part to the information they received from those leaders), they saw and continue to see themselves themselves as true North Koreans. Some serve in high positions in North Korean society, their faith either a carefully guarded secret or a matter sufficiently addressed. Others–a full third of the estimated 100,000 who name the name of Christ in North Korea–accept the full brunt of the punishment accorded to those with this identity, in their nation’s concentration camps. The majority make their way day by day, generation by generation, carefully and faithfully, through life in a country that insists that Christianity must be constrained absolutely lest the General Sherman return and bring far worse weapons with it. They are at one and the same time Christian and North Korean. Whereas everyone around the world regards it as a contradiction, for them it is simply life and calling. Their cry, surprisingly, is not that they be delivered from it but that they receive the wisdom to be found faithful within it.

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Video – Removing the Mystery From Family Worship

Posted on August 3, 2015 by tdillmuth

Regular family worship is an essential part of helping your spouse, your children and even yourself grow in Christ. And yet, what should seem so simple often seems difficult and mysterious. So, how do you do this thing called family worship?

Donald Whitney gives some practicle advice on how to do family worship in his book, Family Worship: In the Bible, in History & in Your Home.  He has also made a four-minute video to help get you started on family worship . . . and getting started is much simpler than it seems. Whitney says that there are three basic elements to family worship – read the Bible, pray and sing. That’s it!

Whitney also answers some important questions on family worship, such as:

How much preparation should I do for family worship?

Should I include other elements in family worship?

Does family worship really benefit babies and toddlers?

If you want to establish a regular “family worship” routine, but are unsure of how to do it, watch Donald Whitney’s video below!

Even though many of our North Korean UU students are single and live alone, they are doing worship with some of their neighbors in their apartment complex.  Some of our friends in the US also take the opportunity to do worship with their co-workers . . . even at places like McDonalds!

We actually prefer to use the term household worship instead of family worship, because worshipping together shouldn’t be limited to a biological family group.  Even single people, who live alone can engage in worship like Whitney described.  A household is defined as those within your sphere of influence . . . those in your workplace, neighborhood, extended family, apartment complex, etc.

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