The Church Under Fire & Into All the World

A pastor in Leipzig held a prayer meeting for peace every Monday evening for seven years while the secret police photographed everyone who went in. The meetings were not illegal, and attending one could still cost a man his job and his child's place at university.

Two things are true about the last hundred years, and you have to hold both or you will misread the century. More Christians were killed for their faith than in any era before it, and the church grew faster and spread wider than in any era before it. The blood and the growth are the same story. You will often hear the first half stated as a hard fact, more martyrs in the twentieth century than in all previous centuries combined, and that line deserves a careful reading rather than a repeat. The figure behind it, around forty-five million, comes from the missions researchers David Barrett and Todd Johnson in the World Christian Encyclopedia, first edition 1982 and second edition 2001, and they counted broadly, including believers who died in wars, famines, and mass killings where faith was one factor among several. At the other end, Thomas Schirrmacher of the International Institute for Religious Freedom counts only deaths documented one by one as killings for confessing Christ, and reaches roughly seven to eight thousand a year. Barrett and Johnson’s own Center for the Study of Global Christianity revised the annual rate down in the third edition of 2019. The two numbers measure two different things; even the narrow one is enormous.

It started with a church that got the test wrong. When the Nazi government came to power in 1933 it moved to absorb the German Protestant church, one national church, one bishop, party emblems in the sanctuary, and a rule barring anyone of Jewish descent from the ministry. Most churchmen went along. A minority would not, and in May 1934 about 139 of them met at Barmen and put their refusal on paper. Their first thesis is the whole of it: the church listens to one Word, Jesus Christ as Holy Scripture presents Him, and it cannot take a second word from anyone, not from a movement, not from a moment in history, not from a leader. Say that out loud in 1934 Germany and you have said everything.

Now the honest part. Barmen defended the church's freedom and said almost nothing about the Jews being driven out of Germany. Bonhoeffer had already written in April 1933 that the church owes its neighbors more than bandaging the victims of the wheel, sometimes it must jam a spoke in the wheel itself, and few followed him there. Members of the Confessing Church resisted bravely and also stayed silent, sometimes in the same week. In October 1945, standing in the ruins, its surviving leaders signed the Stuttgart Declaration and said before the world that they had not resisted, prayed, or believed as they should have. Both the courage and the failure belong in the record.

Bonhoeffer's own road bends in a direction that still troubles people. He began as a pacifist theologian who loved the Sermon on the Mount, taught it, and lived in a house of prayer with his students at an illegal seminary at Finkenwalde. He had a safe teaching post in New York in the summer of 1939 and left it after a few weeks, writing to Reinhold Niebuhr that he would have no right to help rebuild Germany if he had not shared its trial. Back home he joined a conspiracy to kill Hitler. He never argued that this was clean; he thought it was guilt he had to take on and answer for. Arrested in April 1943, he was hanged at Flossenbürg on April 9, 1945, two weeks before the Americans arrived.

Then the map went dark from the Elbe to the Pacific. Richard Wurmbrand was picked up in Bucharest in 1948 and spent fourteen years inside, three of them alone thirty feet underground, keeping himself sane by preaching a sermon every night into the dark and tapping the Morse alphabet through the wall. Released in 1964 and out of the country in 1965, he showed the scars to the United States Senate Internal Security Subcommittee on 6 May 1966 and then spent the rest of his life speaking for people who could not. Meanwhile a Dutchman named Anne van der Bijl was driving Scripture across those same borders in a small car, and Corrie ten Boom, who had survived Ravensbrück after hiding Jews in her family's watch shop, was crossing the world telling audiences that no pit is so deep that God is not deeper still.

China's fifty-year answer is the sharpest thing in the century. Missionaries were expelled in the early 1950s and the remaining churches were folded into one government-supervised body. Wang Mingdao would not join it and went to prison for roughly twenty-two years. Watchman Nee was arrested in 1952 and died in 1972, on the way to the prison hospital in G. Wright Doyle's account. During the Cultural Revolution the last open doors closed and Bibles burned in the street. Everyone assumed the church was finished. It had gone into houses. The state's own figures, as the Pew Research Center reports them, put Chinese Protestants at about 700,000 in 1949 and 38 million in 2018, and those counts leave out the house churches. The surveys read differently: about 20 million adults called themselves Christian in the 2018 Chinese General Social Survey, and Pew finds little evidence in the surveys that the growth went on after 2010. Nobody has a reliable census of a church that spent decades avoiding being counted.

Some of the century's costliest deaths came with no state behind them at all. On January 8, 1956, five Americans in their twenties and thirties were speared on a sandbar in the Ecuadorian rainforest by Waorani men they had been trying for months to reach, dropping gifts from a small yellow plane. They carried pistols and had agreed in advance not to use them, because they were ready to die and the Waorani were not. Jim Elliot had written in his journal seven years earlier that a man is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.

But the killing is only half the story, and it is the half people remember wrongly. Elisabeth Elliot took her small daughter and went to live in the Waorani settlement, and Rachel Saint, whose brother Nate had died there, went with her. They learned a language nobody outside had written down. Many of the men who had held the spears became believers, and years later two of them baptized Nate Saint's son and daughter in the same river where they had killed their father.

In July 1974 some 2,700 Christians from 150 nations met at Lausanne and took stock of the map. Ralph Winter pointed out that most people still without a church were not in unreached countries but inside reached ones, separated by language and culture rather than borders. And the voices from Latin America and Africa were no longer guests at a Western meeting. The biggest change on that map was Africa, where researchers commonly count fewer than ten million Christians around 1900 and several hundred million today; the figures vary by method, but nobody disputes the shape of the curve. It was not safe growth. Idi Amin's Uganda killed Archbishop Janani Luwum in February 1977 after he protested the disappearances, and the official car-crash story convinced no one; he is carved above the west door of Westminster Abbey now, among ten martyrs of the century.

Then in the autumn of 1989 the thing nobody planned for happened. For years a Monday evening prayer meeting had gathered at the Nikolaikirche in Leipzig, small, watched, unimpressive. By that October it spilled into the streets, and on the ninth about seventy thousand people, by the estimates reported at the time, walked past armed police carrying candles and nothing else. No shots. A Communist official reportedly said afterward that they had been ready for everything except candles and prayers. Within a month the Berlin Wall was open, and much of it came down without a battle.

So where is the church growing fastest now? Not where the cathedrals are. Philip Jenkins wrote in 2002 that the typical Christian of this century is a poor woman in the Southern Hemisphere, and the two decades since have proved him right. Congregations in Nigeria, Brazil, Korea, and China now send missionaries to Europe and North America. And persecution did not close as a chapter: Open Doors counts hundreds of millions of Christians living under high pressure for their faith, with North Korea at the head of its list for more than twenty years running.

Hebrews 12:1 says we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses. Notice the tense. The cloud is not a closed roll of the honored dead; it is still gathering, and most of the names added in the last hundred years were never written down anywhere but heaven, a farmer in Hunan, a girl in Sekhukhuneland, a pastor in Pyongyang. They are not spectators in a gallery. They ran the part of the course you are standing on, and they are watching you run yours.