This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.
Rethinking the Way We Talk About Persecution
In this podcast, missionary and author Matt Rhodes discusses what persecution looks like today in different areas of the world and how this has affected missionaries and the global church. Matt points out some common misconceptions we may have about suffering for Christ and how we can avoid these pitfalls.
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Sharing more than a decade of experience serving unreached people groups, Matt Rhodes helps Christians endure suffering with joy by offering a scriptural view of its role in the Christian life and in the missionary task.
Topics Addressed in This Interview:
Matt Tully
Matt Rhodes has lived in North Africa since 2011, where he and his wife serve as part of a church planting team to a previously unengaged people group. He’s the author of a number of books and articles, including his latest from Crossway, Persecution in Missions: A Practical Theology. Matt, thanks for joining me again on The Crossway Podcast.
Matt Rhodes
Glad to be here.
Matt Tully
Matt, your book includes a foreword by a man we’ll call Joshua. That’s not his real name. That’s a pseudonym that he’s using. I wonder if you could just start out by telling us a little bit about Joshua and his story.
Matt Rhodes
Joshua was a Chinese pastor, and he’s faced some significant hurdles himself as a pastor, trying to pastor his church in ways that would maybe not be approved of by the Chinese government. There obviously are government sanctioned churches, but in order to maintain his church’s freedom and independence from the government he’s faced significant hurdles, like a lot of Chinese pastors do.
Matt Tully
Reading his preface to your book, it really was a powerful way to start the book because it was a bit of, I know for me, a wake up call and reminder that persecution is still a very real and live issue for so many of our brothers and sisters in Christ around the world. And I think sometimes for us as Western Christians and especially American Christians, we can sort of think that maybe persecution is something from a previous era. It’s something that Christians faced maybe decades, if not hundreds, of years ago. But I know that’s not the case, and your book helps to draw that out a little bit. So I wonder if you could just start off by sharing a little bit more about your own experience with persecution on the mission field.
Matt Rhodes
Thanks. That’s a great question. My wife and I, as you mentioned, work in North Africa, and the people group we work with is basically 100 percent Muslim. And so I think it isn’t something that we face in the same way that they will face. Now, the country that we’re in, they generally have freedom from the government to make whatever religious choices they want. They can become believers. But the consequences that they will face from family members and from their community are really intense. I met a couple of guys just a few months ago who had become believers, and their wives and kids were taken away from them. This woman and these kids—they’re not yours anymore. We see a lot of that. We see people beaten. It’s a really terrible and heartbreaking reality that they face.
Matt Tully
So often I think we can boil down persecution in our mind to state-sponsored persecution or oppression. And that’s often the case in places like China and other places around the world. But I think it’s a good reminder that there’s often maybe a softer kind of pressure or ostracism or persecution that Christians can face that might not even involve the “authorities.” As you think about your role in the area where you live and minister, help us get a sense for what your work looks like and even how you’re perceived by this predominantly Muslim area. Who are you to them? How do they view you?
Matt Rhodes
We’re very open about who we are. It’s interesting. We have the respect of a lot of people in our town. We were preceded by some missionaries who did really wonderful things and were recognized as wonderful people, and in some ways, we’re standing on their shoulders. We are largely welcomed. Now, the missionary side of our work is something that people see as sort of sinister, but everyone has their own weirdness, and so this is the weird thing you guys do—as long as it’s not touching their own families.
Matt Tully
So it’s when it becomes personal for somebody that they would get a little bit more resistant to it.
Matt Rhodes
The culture where we are, there’s an awful lot of cultural pressure. It’s really strong, and so if one of your children were to begin following Jesus, the shame that you face in the eyes of the community and the pressure that they put on you in order to pull your children back to Islam, it’s really overwhelming. And so I think most of the violence that we have seen people face has come from their families.
Matt Tully
Let’s take a step back. I know you’re connected to a lot of missionaries working around the world—and a lot of indigenous Christians around the world—who are in these hostile places. How common and how prevalent is persecution today? Again, it’s something that we often think of as something from a bygone era. But if you were to try to summarize what global Christianity is facing, how would you do that?
Matt Rhodes
I think that’s really important for people to understand. When we look at taking the gospel into least-reached areas, persecution is almost a given. There will be a few places where you won’t find it, but they’ll sort of be the exception that proves the rule. And very often, if any significant number of people become believers, persecution will then start to sprout up. And this was something that was really interesting to me as I started studying this—and also just horrifying—that it’s there in the Muslim world, it’s there in the Hindu world, it’s there in countries where there’s state-sponsored atheism. It’s sort of the thing that ties all of these differently reached areas together.
Matt Tully
If you were to give us a bit of a taxonomy of persecution, what would be some of the things that you would include in that list? How would you define this term that you’re using and that you use in this book?
Matt Rhodes
It definitely would include things like martyrdom, but I think biblically we also see in the book of Hebrews people are being put in prison. They’re having their property confiscated. And both in Hebrews and in 1 Peter, the shame that people are forced to endure is a really heavy thing, especially in societies where there’s a lot of poverty and you can’t necessarily just do things on your own. You’re very linked to the community and very interdependent with them. And so I think all of those things are really potent forms of persecution. We maybe tend in the West to sort of feel that if people are just going to be cruel to me, that’s not real persecution. But in a lot of these societies, it very much is. It cuts off your ties with your family. You can’t marry. Like these men who I just mentioned, their wives are taken from them. The shame aspect and the becoming a social outcast is a terrible thing—sometimes maybe worse than violence.
Matt Tully
I am just struck by how it’s hard for us as Americans to really understand some of that. We understand the importance of community. We understand broken familial relationships. But I think we kind of always have in our mind that if my community were to cut me off and when they were to stop speaking with me and ostracize me, we have economic means, we have the transportation means. I could find a new job, I could move to a new city, and I could start over, in a certain sense, and I would be okay. My family and I would be okay. And that’s just not always the case for so many of these brothers and sisters in different parts of the world.
Matt Rhodes
That’s right. So, I think you want to compare it more to the type of blow to your family where you wouldn’t be okay. You become a Christian and your wife walks out with the kids and you never get to see them again. Could you survive that? Yeah, technically, you could, but you would be sort of half a man after that, or half the person that you are. Not because your life is worth less, but because so much of you has been taken away. And I think as well there’s maybe sort of an idealism that we have because we already are believers, and so we know the value of what we have. Actually, one of the things that helped me to realize what a big problem it is where we are is I remember listening to two of my friends, and one of them started to read the Bible. And his friends said, “You can’t do that. They’ll take your wife and kids away.” So, this is before he even knows there’s anything that this book has to offer. That’s an incredible amount of pressure, because then most people are never even going to learn what the Scriptures say.
Matt Tully
That’s such a huge barrier to even considering Christianity. Again, we’re so used to this idea that we live in an open, tolerant, pluralistic society—or at least the veneer. I think sometimes it’s maybe not as truly robust as we wish it was, but there’s at least the veneer of open-mindedness and, You do you. If you really want to pursue that, you can go do that. And to have that not exist is kind of a whole different ball game.
Matt Rhodes
It absolutely is. And I think we do need to remember that our own society has changed in the last twenty years in ways that if you had told me twenty years ago I was going to see some of the things I’m seeing today in the United States or in the West, I wouldn’t have believed it. And so we don’t know what changes the next twenty years will bring. It’s an important reminder for us that persecution is a fundamental part of sinful human nature. Yes, it’s something we haven’t experienced to a great extent in the United States or in much of the West, but that absolutely doesn’t have to remain the case.
Matt Tully
One of the big emphasis of this new book that you’ve written, and it’s actually right there in the subtitle, is the importance of developing as Christians, and particularly as missionaries and people who are going out into the field in cross-cultural contexts, to have a theology of suffering, to have distinct and robust theological categories for thinking about and understanding the various forms of suffering and persecution that we might face. And I just wonder if you could speak to that a little bit. Why is that such an important emphasis for you? And what are you responding to when you look at the missions landscape and why this is an important emphasis right now?
Matt Rhodes
I think there are two things I’m primarily responding to in the missions landscape. The first is a tendency that I see often to romanticize suffering. Now, there are absolutely times when we have to bear suffering. But I do often hear both missionaries and Christians who support missions speaking of it as if it’s a positive good in and of itself for the church—we need persecution in order to be a strong church. And so I think this is an excess that really endanger churches in areas of persecution. Does God call us to handle persecution at times without buckling? Absolutely. And is it something Christians must walk through? Yeah. But Christians also need to walk at times through war and through cancer. But we don’t romanticize those in the same way.
Matt Tully
Matt, what does that romanticization look like in practice? What does that lead to in your experience?
Matt Rhodes
It can lead either to not taking people’s problems seriously, because persecution, as in the stories that I was just telling you, it can tear families apart. It can tear people apart. It can maim you. It does serious damage to people. People can be bereaved. If we don’t take that seriously and if we pursue it with kind of a cavalier But God is in this, and every time it happens, your church is going to grow, we can end up damaging people. There’s been a couple cases in the US that received a lot of press, where women who were abused were told, Go back to your abusive husbands and share the gospel instead of, Hey, we’re going to get you into a safe place before we minister to this family. In our own context, we understand how pastorally dangerous this can be, but in missions context, often we don’t. And this can put a weight on people that really they shouldn’t be carrying, because Jesus himself says, “If they persecute you in one city, you flee to the next.”
Matt Tully
That was one thing I wanted to ask about, just this broader romanticization of Christian persecution and how that contrasts a little bit at times with what we see in Scripture. My mind immediately went to that famous quote from the early church father Tertullian. I’m sure you’ve heard it so many times. “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.” And as you hear phrases like that, whether from historical figures or just the ways people talk today, how would you respond to that idea that does seem to have a kernel of truth in it? That’s one of the main emphasis of your book, that persecution and suffering can be a pathway to joy in Christ. We share in that suffering. That’s a biblical idea. But there’s also the truth that it can tear somebody apart, as you said. So, how do you hold that in tension?
Matt Rhodes
That’s a great question. I think this is where we need to have our categories so clearly defined. In Tertullian’s quote, he’s actually quoting John 12, where Jesus says, “Unless a seed falls to the ground and dies, it bears no fruit.” And so there’s some real biblical foundation for this. Does God work through suffering? Absolutely. If Christ hadn’t suffered, we would all be condemned still. So there are absolutely times in Christ’s suffering, in the apostle’s suffering, and the suffering of missionaries today where suffering plays a key and needed role. And I think the key here is that as Christians, we’re not seeking suffering; we’re suffering in order to redeem others from suffering. That’s what Christ is doing. He’s suffering in order to redeem us from eternal suffering. But he’s not in any way pursuing the suffering itself. And actually, in Jesus’s his own life, there’s a number of attempts made to kill him before his time has come. Right? And he withdraws each time. And you see Peter do the same thing when Herod tries to kill him. You see Paul do this a number of times. None of them are just wanting to fall into the hands of their persecutors. But there are lines they’re not going to cross, and there’s a time for them to confront this and to say, Okay, in most of my life I’ve withdrawn from persecution because that was wise, but now it’s time for me to face it.
Matt Tully
My assumption, and maybe this is incorrect, would be that those who might be most prone to fall into this romanticization of suffering are those who have maybe experienced it the least. Maybe they’re the sending Christians who are supporting missionaries from the safety of their homes. But those who have actually experienced suffering on the field, whether a missionary or an indigenous Christian, they understand the toll that it can take and the reality that this is something that we don’t want to be looking for. Is that true, or is there more nuance to that?
Matt Rhodes
I think that’s largely true. I think where I would maybe nuance that a little is that I would say often missionaries who are in areas with substantial suffering may not be suffering themselves. And so you have church members who are looking to them for advice. In missiology today there’s a term extraction. This is persecution that drives you out of your home or, basically, your community. And this is almost always seen as a negative. There’s very few missionaries who are going to say persecution itself is a negative, but there’s a big emphasis on avoiding extraction. And so what you said is true. Often those of us who haven’t suffered it as much can understand it less. And so there is a real danger for missionaries to advise people who should be maybe going to stay somewhere else until their family cools down. I’m not saying that they just fly to the West and try to build a prosperous life. That’s usually impossible. But at times when people do need to be taking a step back and letting things cool off, there’s a tendency for missionaries to say, Hey, that’s extraction. We can’t have that because that’s stopped the growth of the church.
Matt Tully
You note in the book that a lot of missions literature today does seem to assume that Christians should never flee persecution, that that’s never the right decision. There’s the posture of endurance, of suffering for the name of Christ, and that’s what everyone is always called to do in every situation. But then, as you mentioned already, there are examples from Christ’s own life and ministry, examples of Paul. I thought of Acts 9:23–25, where Paul learns about this plot to kill him, and he escapes the city by night under cover of darkness, essentially. How would you counsel—whether they be missionaries who are then counseling believers, or Christians themselves who are under persecution—how would you help them to think through what I would imagine could be a difficult prudential decision sometimes about when to flee? When do I pull back? When do I maybe not go out and share that thing with that person quite yet versus when should they be bold for the gospel?
Matt Rhodes
In the New Testament we see people who are ready and willing to die for their faith. We don’t see anyone walking into the middle of their persecutors and saying, Hey, persecutors! Here I am. In fact, when Jesus refuses to answer questions about being the Messiah, it’s not just to keep people waiting. It’s because he knows the people who are asking him are going to use his answer against him to undermine his ministry. And so there is a sense where we don’t want to just call attention to ourselves in ways that help ill-intentioned people hurt us. In terms of actually fleeing, I’ve seen this go both ways. I’ve known people who got refugee status in the West, and I didn’t really feel they were in a lot of danger. In the New Testament, I see people fleeing persecution, when you look at Jesus or Paul or Peter, when there’s credible risk to life or limb. And sometimes in cases of civil unrest, where there’s a big riot, I think you could always be in danger to life or limb. But I think also they’re concerned about their followers. I think Jesus quotes, “Strike the shepherd and the sheep will be scattered.” And so if Paul will leave Thessalonika, the violence dies down, he can send people back in, and they can minister in peace. And so that’s where I would mostly be looking to get someone out of their situation is if there’s credible risk to life a limb. And then hopefully we can take them somewhere as nearby as possible until the situation becomes a little less hot.
Matt Tully
As you think about this big topic about suffering on the mission field, the suffering of other Christians in contexts where there’s hostility toward the gospel, are there any other major misconceptions or confusions that you tend to encounter when speaking with Christians?
Matt Rhodes
This isn’t something that’s just unique to the mission field, but I think that people often will assume that because they’re suffering there must be a lesson in their life that they need to learn. Just as telling people to stay in a situation if they need to get out can place an unnecessary burden of guilt on them, in the same way, assuming that your suffering is necessarily to address one of your character weaknesses or your maturities gets a little bit into the territory of Job’s friends—There’s something wrong with you, and that’s why God has brought this on you. If you didn’t idolize your spouse, she wouldn’t have been killed in that car accident.
Matt Tully
That’s such a dangerous and insidious tendency that we seem to all have. Sometimes it’s self-directed, and other times it’s directed toward others. What’s behind that tendency for all Christians to, whenever we encounter something hard, we often will go to the questions of Why am I being punished? What’s wrong with me here?
Matt Rhodes
I think it’s actually an attempt to frame it more positively—How is God using this in my life? I think maybe the difficulty is that we’re starting to prioritize our suffering. As we’re looking for what God could be doing in this, we’re seeing it mostly in terms of my own life, and we’re forgetting how much Scripture talks about suffering for the sake of the church. Paul says, “I suffer all these things for the sake of the elect.” And there’s a lot of talk in Scripture about sharing the sufferings of Jesus for the sake of the church. Does God use suffering in our own lives often to teach us? And we should hold on to whatever lessons we can learn. But often our sufferings are something different. It’s God working through our sufferings in the lives of others to show them his ability to sustain us.
Matt Tully
If all of our comfort in suffering and all of our hope in suffering is focused on understanding the lesson that he wants to teach us, that just seems like that’s a dangerous place to root our hope, rather than in something deeper than just our own growth and our own development as believers.
Matt Rhodes
And I think it would end up painting God in a little bit of a dark light. My character on this sight of eternity will never be complete, but as it grows, Lord willing, there would be worse and worse things that I would have to endure to keep it growing. I think part of this, too, is maybe we don’t understand how suffering is used against us. There’s another side to this equation, which is that the devil brings suffering and the devil brings persecution. And we see it really clearly in Job’s case. “If you let me touch his body, he’ll curse you to your face.” And so the devil is wanting suffering to undermine our faith and to have us doubt God’s goodness. And Job does struggle with that. Anyway, it’s really important for us to remember that when we suffer faithfully, that helps other people through those doubts. It’s a positive thing that we contribute to others in the church, even if it’s not intended primarily for our benefit.
Matt Tully
Matt, maybe just a few more specific questions that came to my mind as I was thinking about this topic and looking through your book. One of the topics that you address in the book is just the general, broader issue of money and resources of those on the mission field and how they should think about their money in relation to the people that they’re ministering to. And so maybe just to cut right to the quick of it, should missionaries be poor? Should missionaries think of their themselves as needing to really forgo a lot of the things that we as Christians in the West tend to just assume are the normal trappings of life in the modern world?
Matt Rhodes
I think that depends a lot on where they are. If you are a missionary working among deeply impoverished people, then it’s not going to help you in your work to be ostentatiously wealthy. I hear missionaries talk a lot about avoiding dependency and not creating dependency. But my concern, and I think a lot of the reason that Jesus avoids ever becoming a financial patron and he avoids letting his disciples do it, is to avoid double mindedness. Peter and John, when they walk into the temple, they say, “We don’t have gold and silver for you. This is what we have.” The danger is that if you go into a society and you’re living at a much higher economic level, we don’t always know how much that affects people’s motives. We think that they’re interested in Christ, and they might very well be, but it might be a different Christ than Scripture is preaching. It’s a financial Christ.
Matt Tully
And especially if they’re in a context where even just having enough food on the table could be a huge financial burden for a family in a way that, again, as Americans, we just don’t understand how overriding that concern might be just to survive.
Matt Rhodes
And maybe we should. Because as Americans, when we have trouble paying rent for a month, the amount of stress that we endure from that, we should maybe be extrapolating that to what if I didn’t even know when I was going to eat? Mm-hmm. I think we get a great example in John 6. This is a hand-to-mouth agrarian society, and Jesus has just fed 5,000 people, and they decide, We need this guy to be our king. For me, I think my natural reaction would’ve been like something along the lines of, Hey, these guys have the wrong idea, but there’s 5,000 of them and they’re so open to me, I can work with them. Jesus won’t even speak to them. He just gets out of there.
Matt Tully
That’s so interesting. Another quick question for you related to short-term missions. What are your thoughts on the wisdom, the benefits, the challenges with short-term missions, especially when they are to maybe somewhat hostile or closed areas, where persecution could be a dynamic? I guess that even ties into the broader importance of training and equipping and preparing missionaries for this work in, again, particularly hostile areas. How do you think about that?
Matt Rhodes
Persecuted areas are sensitive situations. And in the same way, if you don’t have a lot of training in marital counseling, you’re going to hopefully be slow to step into a volatile marriage. I think short-term missions just need to operate with a lot of caution. Generally, because of linguistic barriers that exist and just the difficulty and the long-term nature of discipleship, I usually don’t see short-term missions as being a tool at the front end of missionary work. I usually don’t see them as being primarily about evangelism or discipleship. I would probably see them more as sometimes there are things that the missionaries themselves need done. We need this (whatever it is) constructed. We need help in this area. I think those can be really useful. In my own experience, I was assigned for six months in a remote area in North Africa when I didn’t know if I was going to be able to make it on the field. And so that really meant a lot to me. So, I don’t think we should underestimate the power of the short-term trip to change the life of the short-termer.
Matt Tully
That’s helpful just to hear you articulate that the purpose of a short-term trip, in a hostile context or not, it maybe is better viewed as something to help the missionary to assess a calling or understand how fitted they are to a region, and maybe also as a way to support existing missionaries. So, maybe having more modest goals for those kinds of trips is wise.
Matt Rhodes
Yeah, I think so. As Protestants and especially as evangelicals, we don’t really have much of a tradition of pilgrimage. I think if we were to view short-term trips more in that light, I think a lot of them could become really helpful for people.
Matt Tully
Matt, as a final question, I’m sure there are people listening right now, probably especially some young people listening, who are actively considering vocational missions work—long-term missions work. Maybe they’ve been on some short-term trips or maybe they haven’t, but this is something that they sincerely feel God calling them toward or increasing some interest in. What word of advice or encouragement would you want to offer to somebody in that position who’s considering this and wants to go in with their eyes open, wants to go in with a realistic understanding and appreciation for what it entails to be on the mission field in general, but then especially in a place that where they might face some kind of persecution or the people they’re ministering to might face that? What would you want to say to that person as a final word?
Matt Rhodes
I think more broadly, I want people to be ready for the suffering that missions holds for them, and to remember that what carries us through that is reward—we are looking forward to eternal life. That makes things worthwhile. If someone is specifically considering the mission field, I think what I want to most know is has God given them the strength for that hope of eternal reward to carry them through the specific difficulties they’ll face on the field, as I would if they were in another ministry calling. Because we’re all going to have difficulties that we face, and I think that is a part of how we learn whether we’re suited to face these difficulties. Yeah, they’re hard, and in the moment they may be unbearable, but do I have the strength to look through that to the reward on the other side of this? When the Macedonians give and Paul says it’s beyond what they’re able and they give out of much poverty and affliction, but they give joyfully because they know that if they sow richly, they’re going to reap richly. That’s always what I want to see is that ability to look past these specific difficulties.
Matt Tully
That’s such a helpful word for us on this, particularly related to persecution. And I also just wanted to mention the other book that you have with Crossway that is on these same topics as well. It’s called No Shortcut to Success: A Manifesto for Modern Missions. And that’s a slightly broader book looking at missions work more generally, considering what the preparation and the careful thinking and assessment that really needs to be at play there for anyone who’s looking to go to the mission field and seek to serve Christ in that particular context. That book came out a few years ago, but it’s had a pretty big impact on many people in the missions world as they think about this and want to do this faithfully. Matt, thank you so much for taking the time today to speak with us and for creating this book that is going to serve so many people around the world.
Matt Rhodes
I really appreciate you having me on.
