Yes, we can read......who's asking?

The brutality suffered by Christians outside the West is a reality, and it boggles my mind how we, living in free countries, are still so ignorant and so silent about their torment...especially when even a half-hearted search unearths quantities of documented, modern-day persecution. What are we reading? 

 Paul Marshall's book, "Their Blood Cries Out," asks some hard questions of the American church, making the case that we have no excuse for our apathy. At the beginning of the book, Marshall quotes verbatim from Mark Danner's 1993 article on El Salvador (published in The New Yorker). The excerpt (p .87) reads:

"There was one in particular the soldiers talked about that evening (she is mentioned in the Tutela Legal report as well): a girl on La Cruz whom they had raped many times during the course of the afternoon, and through it all, while the other women of El Mozote had screamed and cried as if they had never had a man, this girl had sung hymns, strange evangelical songs, and she had kept right on singing, too, even after they had done what had to be done, and shot her in the chest.

She had lain there on La Cruz with the blood flowing from her chest, and had kept on singing--a bit weaker than before, but still singing. And the soldiers, stupefied, had watched and pointed. Then they had grown tired of the game and shot her again, and she sang still, and their wonder began to turn to fear--until finally they had unsheathed their machetes and hacked through her neck, and at last the singing had stopped."

Why have we withdrawn ourselves from the battle lines? How do we conscience our silence on their suffering? Marshall suggests that one reason we have stopped caring about the persecuted is that we are buying into the values of our society, a society that ridicules faith as a fairytale and refuses to take religion seriously.Yet this society has yet to explain away what he calls, "the brutal facts." The best it can do is unreport them (which it has...prior to 1993 right up to the present). We the church cannot afford to follow suit. We serve the Truth, and we will be held accountable to Him - the singing must never be stopped. 

I know other wiser Christians have said this and are saying it, but the Western Church needs to step up and start shouting - both to encourage the persecuted and wake up its members. I admit it readily: I'm young, I have huge knowledge gaps, I'm idealistic. Passion often gallops ahead of articulate argument, and I struggle on a daily basis to correctly process and interpret everything I learn. But I have to try, because the Jesus I worship, the Messiah of the Scriptures, is the head of His Body, and I can no more ignore the amputation of my own arm than ignore the suffering of His hands and feet in El Salvador, in China, in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Iran....etc. Please join me in praying, and in pursuing the facts, however brutal.