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EDITOR'S NOTE: This year's Week of Prayer for International Missions
in the Southern Baptist Convention is Dec. 2-9 with the theme of "BE His
heart, His hands, His voice" from Matthew 16:24-25. Each year's Lottie
Moon Christmas Offering for International Missions supplements
Cooperative Program giving to support Southern Baptists' 5,000
international missionaries' initiatives in sharing the Gospel. This
year's offering goal is $175 million. To find resources about the
offering, go to www.imb.org/offering.
NORTHERN
AFRICA AND THE MIDDLE EAST (BP) -- Nik and Ruth Ripken* have served in
some of the toughest areas of Africa. They've known believers who have
been martyred for Christ. They've spoken with hundreds of Christians
experiencing persecution in more than 70 countries.
After all that, they've learned something about persecution.
"The
most persecuted person is a lost person who has no access to Jesus,"
Nik says. "Satan wants to keep people from hearing about Jesus. If he
can't do that, he wants to shut you up, to silence your witness." Most
American Christians fall into the second category. They experience no
persecution because they tell no one about Jesus.
Yet persecution
of Jesus' true followers has been normal from New Testament times to
the present day. The No. 1 cause -- when people come to know Jesus. The
key is how to make persecution count for God's glory, as the early
Christians did.
The Ripkens learned that truth the hard way. They
served in South Africa and Kenya after sensing a call from God in the
early 1980s. They experienced the drama -- and trauma -- of ministry
amid racial apartheid, religious and tribal tensions and other
challenges. But nothing prepared them for their next place of service:
Somalia. The overwhelmingly Muslim East African nation was wracked by
civil war, chaos and danger in the 1990s, as it is today.
Loss and sacrifice
"We
fed the hungry. We clothed the naked. We were shot at. We buried a
16-year-old son," Nik recounts, referencing the death of their son from
an asthma attack in Kenya on an Easter Sunday. And they watched
helplessly as nearly 150 Muslim-background followers of Christ in
Somalia were martyred. Four of their closest friends died on a single,
terrible day in 1994.
The horror continued, and the Ripkens and other workers were forced out in 1998. They have not been able to return.
The
Ripkens realized that many of these martyrs died not just for following
Christ, but for being openly identified with outside Christian
agencies. Thus began their long-term effort to understand the nature of
persecution and how God works through it. Trying to stop it in every
case or "rescue" every believer experiencing it is a misunderstanding of
religious freedom, they contend.
"We need to pray intelligently,
not that persecution will increase, but that the peoples of the earth
have access to Jesus -- all of them," Nik explains. "When that happens,
persecution is going to be a reality. Sometimes God needs to have Joseph
in Pharaoh's prison for a purpose. Historically and biblically,
persecution is normal. In many places today it authenticates the faith.
So persecution is not something you run toward or run away from.
Persecution just is. It's what you make of it that counts."
Now
based in Northern Africa and the Middle East, Nik and Ruth specialize in
training and research to help the global body of Christ, including IMB
workers and Southern Baptist churches, understand effective Gospel
witness and church planting in environments where persecution is the
norm.
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