The persecuted church today

Somewhere in the world this week, a pastor will be arrested, a church will be burned, and a teenager will be told by their family that if they keep following Jesus they will no longer be their child. That is not a slogan. It is the ordinary experience of a large part of the global church.

This article sets out what is known, what is estimated, and what is disputed — and then asks what the Bible says about it and what an ordinary Christian can actually do.

How big is it? Counting carefully

The most widely cited source is the Open Doors World Watch List, published every January since the early 1990s. It ranks the fifty countries where it judges Christians face the most severe persecution.

Its method is worth understanding, because it explains both why the list is useful and why its numbers are sometimes challenged:

• It measures pressure in five areas of life — private, family, community, national and church life — plus a separate score for violence (killings, abductions, attacks on churches and homes).
• It draws on field researchers and local networks inside each country, then has the results reviewed by outside experts.
• It counts discrimination as well as violence. A convert who loses her job and her inheritance counts, not only a pastor who is killed.

On that basis, Open Doors has in recent years estimated that roughly 360–380 million Christians — about one in seven worldwide — experience high levels of persecution and discrimination. It has also reported several thousand Christians killed for faith-related reasons each year, with Nigeria accounting for a large majority of those killings in recent lists.

What is not seriously disputed is the shape of it. Pew's annual tracking has repeatedly found Christians harassed in more countries than any other religious group — well over a hundred.

Who is doing it, and why

Four drivers account for most of what is happening. In many countries more than one is at work.

Not every case is "Christians versus Muslims", and it is unhelpful to describe it that way. In much of Asia the pressure comes from communist governments or from Hindu or Buddhist nationalism. In Latin America it comes from criminals. And in many Muslim-majority countries, the worst pressure on converts comes not from the state but from their own families.

Nigeria: telling the truth carefully

For Nigerian readers this is not distant news. It is the funerals of relatives and the faces of people displaced from their villages. That is exactly why it needs to be described accurately.

The North East: jihadist insurgency

Boko Haram emerged in Borno State in the early 2000s and turned to open insurgency in 2009. It is explicitly jihadist, rejecting Western education and the secular Nigerian state. In 2016 a faction split off as ISWAP (Islamic State West Africa Province), aligned with the Islamic State.

These groups have attacked churches, abducted Christians and demanded they convert — the 2014 Chibok abduction and the continuing captivity of Leah Sharibu are the best-known cases. But they have also killed Muslims in very large numbers, bombing mosques and markets and murdering imams who oppose them. A full account has to say both.

The Middle Belt: land, ethnicity and religion

In states such as Plateau, Benue and southern Kaduna, the violence takes a different form: armed men, often identified as militant Fulani herders, attacking farming villages at night. The Christmas Eve attacks of 2023 in Plateau State, which killed well over a hundred people, are one of many examples.

Here the honest picture is contested, and it is worth stating each side fairly:

• The land-and-livelihood view. Researchers point to desertification pushing herders south, population growth, collapsing grazing routes, cattle theft, revenge cycles, and a security system that rarely arrests anyone. Muslim Fulani communities have also suffered reprisal killings and lost herds.
• The religious-targeting view. Church leaders and many local people point out that the victims are overwhelmingly Christian farming communities, that churches and pastors are singled out, that some attackers use jihadist language, and that the pattern looks like displacement rather than random conflict.

Both contain truth. A conflict can be about land and ethnicity and religion at once — and when one group is consistently the victim, the question of why is legitimate.

In the North, there is also violence over alleged blasphemy. In May 2022 Deborah Samuel, a Christian student in Sokoto, was killed by a mob over a WhatsApp message. Many Muslim leaders condemned it; prosecutions were limited.

Other key regions

North Korea has topped the Open Doors list almost every year for over two decades. The state ideology treats loyalty to the Kim family as absolute; owning a Bible can mean a labour camp for the whole family. Open Doors estimates that tens of thousands of Christians are held in camps. Believers worship, if at all, in total secrecy.

China has the world's most sophisticated system of religious control. Since revised religious regulations in 2018, unregistered house churches have faced closures, surveillance and arrests, and registered churches face "Sinicisation" — pressure to align teaching with the Party. Between 2014 and 2016, crosses were removed from many church buildings in Zhejiang province. In 2019 Pastor Wang Yi of Early Rain Covenant Church in Chengdu was sentenced to nine years in prison.

India has seen a sharp rise in pressure linked to Hindu nationalism (Hindutva). A number of states have passed anti-conversion laws, which are used to accuse pastors of conversion by "force" or "inducement". Mob attacks on prayer meetings are frequent. The 2023 violence in Manipur — primarily an ethnic conflict between Meitei and Kuki-Zo communities — saw hundreds of churches destroyed.

Iran treats conversion from Islam as apostasy. Converts meeting in house churches are regularly arrested and sentenced, usually on charges of "acting against national security" rather than religion.

Afghanistan had a tiny, entirely hidden church before 2021. After the Taliban returned, most known believers fled or went completely underground. It briefly replaced North Korea at the top of the World Watch List in 2022.

Eritrea has been called the North Korea of Africa. Since 2002 only four religious bodies have been allowed to register; evangelical and Pentecostal Christians have been held without trial, some in metal shipping containers in the desert. Even the Orthodox Patriarch, Abune Antonios, was deposed and held under house arrest until his death in 2022.

How the church grows under pressure

Persecution does not automatically grow the church. It came close to erasing it in North Africa, and it has emptied the ancient churches of Iraq and Syria. That needs saying, because the slogan "persecution always grows the church" is not true.

But there are places where the church has grown under heavy pressure, and the two most striking are Iran and China.

In Iran, the number of believers from a Muslim background has grown since the 1979 revolution from a few hundred to — on the estimates of ministries working there — hundreds of thousands, possibly more. A 2020 online survey by the research group GAMAAN found around 1.5% of respondents identifying as Christian; the sample has limits, but it points the same way. Much of this growth has come through satellite broadcasting, Scripture distributed secretly, and ordinary believers sharing faith at great personal risk.

In China, as The twentieth century in this library describes, Protestants numbered perhaps a million when the missionaries left; credible estimates today run from around 60 million to over 100 million.

The blood of Christians is seed.— Tertullian, Apology 50 (the usual shortened form of his words)

Tertullian was writing to Roman governors in North Africa around AD 197. He was not stating a law of history. He was telling the persecutors that killing Christians was not working — and on that occasion, he was right.

What the Bible says about suffering for Christ

The New Testament does not treat persecution as strange.

It is expected. "Indeed, all who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted" (2 Timothy 3:12). Paul wrote that from prison, near the end of his life. Jesus said the same: "If they persecuted me, they will also persecute you" (John 15:20).

It is not a sign of God's absence. "Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery trial when it comes upon you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you. But rejoice insofar as you share Christ's sufferings" (1 Peter 4:12-13). Peter adds a sober qualification: suffer as a Christian, not as a murderer or a meddler (1 Peter 4:15-16). Not every hardship a Christian experiences is persecution, and wisdom does not invite trouble for its own sake.

It is blessed. "Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven" (Matthew 5:10).

It belongs to the whole body. "Remember those who are in prison, as though in prison with them, and those who are mistreated, since you also are in the body" (Hebrews 13:3). "If one member suffers, all suffer together" (1 Corinthians 12:26). A Christian in Lagos or London is not a spectator to what happens in Plateau or Pyongyang. It happens to their own body.

It does not license hatred. "Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them" (Romans 12:14). The persecutor Saul became the apostle Paul. Some of the people burning churches today will be preaching in them tomorrow.

How to pray and help responsibly

Pray specifically. Pray by country, by region, by name where names are public. Use current prayer guides from established ministries (Open Doors, Barnabas Aid, Voice of the Martyrs, Christian Solidarity Worldwide and others) rather than viral messages.

Pray what they ask for. Persecuted believers interviewed by researchers like Nik Ripken have repeatedly asked not mainly for the persecution to stop, but for courage, faithfulness, and the salvation of their persecutors. Pray that too.

Check before you share. Images from one attack are often recycled as evidence of another, and some circulating stories are false. Every fabrication becomes a reason for officials to dismiss the true ones.

Protect identities. Publishing the name or photograph of a secret believer in Iran or North Korea can endanger them. Follow the lead of organisations that know the situation.

Give through accountable channels. Support established ministries, or churches with direct, accountable links to affected communities — particularly for displaced families, widows and orphans.

Advocate. In democracies, writing to representatives about religious freedom makes a difference. In Nigeria, pressing for the arrest and trial of killers — of anyone's community — is part of loving your neighbour.

Welcome those who flee. Many persecuted believers become refugees or internally displaced people. The church in camps and in host cities is part of the persecuted church too.

The church has never been safe. It has, by the grace of God, been kept.

"Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword?... No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us" (Romans 8:35-37).