The Story From Barmen to the Global South
The churches under the states of the century, and the growth beside them, from the documents and the counts.
The Confessional Synod of the German Evangelical Church met at Barmen, in the Gemarker Kirche, from 29 to 31 May 1934. The Rhineland church counts 139 delegates, 138 men and one woman.
Its first thesis, drafted mainly by Karl Barth, names Jesus Christ "the one Word of God which we have to hear and which we have to trust and obey in life and in death."
Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.
Barmen set this verse at the head of its first thesis.
John 14:6BSB
In April 1933 Bonhoeffer wrote that the church might have to fall into the spokes of the wheel itself, as well as bind up the victims under it.
Barmen said nothing on the persecution of the Jews, and Barth later called that silence a fault of his own.
Open your mouth for those with no voice, for the cause of all the dispossessed.
The command to speak for the voiceless is the measure of Barmen's silence.
Catholic pulpits read Pius XI's encyclical Mit brennender Sorge on Palm Sunday, 21 March 1937.
It condemned whoever "exalts race, or the people, or the State" to an idol's place, and the Gestapo seized copies from diocesan offices.
You shall have no other gods before Me.
The encyclical answered a state that claimed the worship owed to God.
Exodus 20:3BSB
The Gestapo arrested Martin Niemöller on 1 July of the same year and held him at Sachsenhausen and from 1941 at Dachau.
Bonhoeffer was arrested on 5 April 1943. After a summary SS court he was hanged at Flossenbürg on the morning of 9 April 1945.
Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Instead, fear the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell.
Both pastors were held by a state that could take their lives.
The Soviet law of 8 April 1929 required twenty believers for a congregation and forbade religious teaching in every school.
The memorial at the Butovo range near Moscow, opened in 2017, carries 20,762 names of those who died there, by its parish's count.
And when the Lamb opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of those who had been slain for the word of God and for the testimony they had upheld.
The Russian church glorified the dead of these years as martyrs in 2000.
Richard Wurmbrand, a Romanian pastor, was kidnapped by the secret police on Sunday 29 February 1948, and he spent fourteen years in prison.
In the same year Romania dissolved the Greek Catholic Church and gave its parishes to the Orthodox Church, as the European Court of Human Rights recorded in 2016.
Remember those in prison as if you were bound with them, and those who are mistreated as if you were suffering with them.
Here the prisoners are a pastor and a whole church taken by the state.
Hebrews 13:3BSB
Wang Mingdao of Beijing would not join the Three-Self movement.
His article "We, because of faith" ends that his church acted for the sake of faith, and he was arrested in 1955.
But Peter and the other apostles replied, “We must obey God rather than men.
Wang gave the apostles' answer when the movement asked him to join it.
Acts 5:29BSB
In September 1938 Korea's Presbyterian General Assembly, under police pressure, resolved to take part in Japan's shrine worship.
Ju Gi-cheol, a Pyongyang pastor who refused it, died in prison on 21 April 1944.
But even if He does not, let it be known to you, O king, that we will not serve your gods or worship the golden statue you have set up.”
Korea's shrine question was the question the three faced in Babylon.
Daniel 3:18BSB
Jim Elliot and four other missionaries were killed by Waorani men on the Curaray river in Ecuador on Sunday 8 January 1956.
In October 1958 Elisabeth Elliot, her daughter Valerie and Rachel Saint went to live among the Waorani at Tewæno.
Then Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” And they divided up His garments by casting lots.
The return to the Waorani followed the prayer Jesus prayed for His killers.
Luke 23:34BSB
Billy Graham's tent campaign in Los Angeles was planned for three weeks in 1949 and ran eight, from 25 September to 20 November.
At Lausanne about 2,300 members of the Congress signed a covenant that says "World evangelization requires the whole Church to take the whole gospel to the whole world."
And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in all the world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come.
The campaign and the covenant both aimed at the preaching this verse foretells.
Kampala radio said Archbishop Janani Luwum died in a car accident in February 1977, and Westminster Abbey records that he was murdered.
Archbishop Óscar Romero was shot in the chapel of the Divina Providencia hospital as he ended his homily.
Truly, truly, I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a seed; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.
Romero's last homily spoke of the grain of wheat that dies.
John 12:24BSB
Twenty-one Coptic Christians were killed in Libya in February 2015, and the Coptic Church keeps their feast on 15 February.
Pew's count for 2020 puts 30.7 percent of the world's Christians in sub-Saharan Africa and 22.3 percent in Europe.
After this I looked and saw a multitude too large to count, from every nation and tribe and people and tongue, standing before the throne and before the Lamb. They were wearing white robes and holding palm branches in their hands.
The vision's every nation and tongue is the church Pew now counts mostly outside Europe.
Exodus 20:3, Matthew 10:28, Revelation 6:9, Hebrews 13:3, Acts 5:29, Daniel 3:18, Luke 23:34, Matthew 24:14 and 2 more