Thoughts on a depressingly rainy Monday morning

At the North Korean border

Since yesterday was the International Day of Prayer for the Persecuted Church* and also the start of Prisoners' Week, our evening service last night focused entirely on the plight of Christians in various parts of the world who are oppressed, imprisoned and persecuted because of their faith.
Following on from my recent visit to South Korea, we included a special focus on North Korea.
North Korea is, as most people will know, a very closed society out of which it is very difficult to get accurate impartial information but the estimates are that there are about 400,000 Christians in North Korea and anything up to a quarter of them are currently imprisoned, many of them subjected to torture and some to execution.
Religious persecution is, of course, nothing new, and down through the centuries the Christian Church itself has often been guilty of horrendous abuses of power, especially in relation to Jews, and to Muslims at the time of the Crusades.
There is something very dark and dangerous in our human nature that is able to pervert the thoroughly wholesome desire for a sense of belonging and togetherness into the brutally destructive impulse to cast out those who seem to be different, or to attack those who do not belong to your tribe.
The attitude of Jesus himself was directly opposed to this sectarianism and he deliberately, and provocatively, stepped over boundaries in the company he kept and in his willingness to embrace the stranger. Of course, we know where that led him.
It has never been easy to stand up for the truth.
I was disturbed this morning to read a number of articles in the Herald that indicated that all is not well even within our so-called 'free' world.
In the first of them is the shocking statistic that one in four children have been bullied because of their faith.
Another article reported on the intolerant attitude of many adults in our society to children in general. (Apparently, half the population believes children are dangerous and behave like animals!)
In a third is reported the sadly predictable reaction of some people in the USA to the election of Barack Obama in a wave of racially-motivated crimes all over the States.
As well as praying for those (of all faiths) being persecuted around the world simply because of what they believe, and praying for those who persecute them, we also have to be constantly vigilant about what is happening in our own back yards. Somehow we have to 'stamp out' the small fires of intolerance that could easily be whipped up into the wildfires of outright hatred.


*in some places Sunday 9th November was observed as the Day of Prayer for the Persecuted Church