Religious Persecution

Context Once Jesus ascends in Acts 1, the disciples are not immediately out on the street continuing his work. Many assumed Jesus’ mission would bring earthly power, but now they find themselves fear...

Facing imminent death, Thomas Cranmer—the Archbishop of Canterbury who crafted the foundational Book of Common Prayer for Anglican worship—succumbed to terror and signed a document renouncing hi...

Context The body of the letter continues in chapter 3. If it were not for chapters 4-6, we could even believe that Paul was about to close this letter after we read what appears to be a benediction i...

Context The body of the letter continues in chapter 3. If it were not for chapters 4-6, we could even believe that Paul was about to close this letter after we read what appears to be a benediction i...

The first thing the group of American church leaders noticed about the Central Asian pastor they were meeting was his smile. It was huge. It was so big that anyone who looked at it had to smile too!...

The sufferings of Paul are not interruptions to his mission but are intrinsic to it; through them the message of Christ crucified is embodied.

The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.

An American pastor once asked an Indonesian missionary who works among Indonesians but with a different people group from his own, “Are you afraid you’ll get caught?” Christian mission work in Indones...

In his book Breaking the Rules , Fil Anderson talks about the scandalous reputation of Jesus: He breaks all social etiquette in relating to people. He acknowledges no barriers or human divisions....

On Christmas Eve in Tehran, house-church pastor Farshid Fatah and his family were awakened to the frightening sounds of the Iranian security police pounding at their door. After the police searched hi...

Thomas Cranmer (1489–1556), the archbishop of Canterbury from 1532 to 1556, played a pivotal role in the English Reformation. A key figure in Henry VIII’s break with the Roman Catholic Church, Cranmer...

But we have this treasure in jars of clay, To show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us. We are afflicted in every way, But not crushed; Perplexed, But not driven to d...

Introduction There are two significant ways in which waiting is central to our passage today. First, there is the waiting to be reunited with the apostle Paul and the fledgling church in Thessalonica...

Leader: Thank you for this country, Lord.  People: Thank you for the freedom to worship without fear. Thank you for the freedom to preach and teach your word.  Leader: We pray for our b...

Most of us are aware of various persecutions that took place during the first few centuries of the church’s existence. One particularly brutal local persecution took place during the reign of Nero, wh...

Eric Liddell, the “Flying Scotsman” was made famous by the 1981 movie Chariots of Fire . He was born to missionary parents in China in 1902 and educated in the United Kingdom. Though he made the Bri...

In the deeply moving novel Silence by Shusaku Endo, the protagonist, a young Jesuit priest named Sebastião Rodrigues describes in horror what it is like to watch two of his disciples, Japanese nationa...