It Isn't Persecution - It's Discipline

Understanding the church’s decline

The heat is turning up on Christianity in the West. In the second half of the 1900s we moved out of the era in which the culture felt positively about Christianity into a time in which the world was neutral toward us. Now, we’ve gone from neutral to negative (h/t Aaron Renn).

In other words, saying “I’m a Christian” was once seen as a good thing. Then it was a personal preference, neither good nor bad. Now we’ve reached the point where it’s seen so negatively that even some regular churchgoers can be found saying “Well, I wouldn’t call myself a Christian—the term has too much baggage.”

To be a true Christian is to be seen as being a hateful, holier-than-thou bigot in many corners. Hating Christians and Christian values is commonplace. In parts of Europe and Canada we’ve seen arrests for “hate speech” for little more than Scripture quotation. A rash of arsons against church buildings has broken out in recent years, with essentially no response from the government. Even here in America, we saw arrests, lawsuits, and fines for church gatherings in 2020.

Along with the negative view of Christianity is the open celebration of sin. I don’t even need to give examples. Everybody sees it. Everybody knows what I mean.

Bizarrely, many Christians look at all of this as a good thing.

Christianity losing cultural influence is a sign we’re moving in the right direction, some would argue. You’ll always have that guy who chimes in with, “The church thrives under persecution!” To see it their way is to believe that persecution is the church’s natural state, and if we’ve escaped from it to have any kind of foothold in the culture we’ve done something wrong.

That’s the problem. None of this is persecution; it’s discipline.

You could argue that, in a sense, persecution is a form of discipline. However, that’s not what people mean when they see our current state as coming under persecution and so it’s important to draw a distinction. This is no semantic quibble.

Why it matters

First, the cause is different

Persecution is caused by the world’s hatred of Christ and His people (John 15). It happens because we are being faithful as the world fights back against our light which invades their comfortable darkness.

Persecution is an inescapable part of the church’s life and growth. As the church went into Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and the remotest parts of the earth, everywhere they went they met resistance. But as they remained faithful unto death, they planted the seeds for the church’s growth in those areas, seeds which manifested in the church’s evolution from startup into an immovable pillar.

Preaching, persecution, endurance, victory is always the game plan under Christ’s watchful eye. What Christians are enduring in places like China and Iran right now is absolutely persecution, for example.

Discipline, on the other hand, happens because God’s people aren’t being faithful. Places where the Gospel has found victory but later backslides don’t re-experience persecution. Rather, they experience discipline. As the spiritual Israel, this is our history lesson from Judges and the rest of Israel’s time in the Promised Land—failing to complete the mission because we’re resting on our laurels inevitably ends in compromise with the world around us, which inevitably ends in God’s discipline.

Look at the church today. Which of these two things do you think is happening?

Do you think it’s our blinding light that is so despised by the world? That it’s because we’re so unmistakably faithful right now that they hate us for exposing their wicked ways?

Really?

We’re so far from that we’ve gone all-in on telling the world we’re not any different whatsoever. “We’re nothing but broken sinners! We’re totally unthreatening in every way, we promise!”

Second, the solution is different

If we’re being persecuted, the answer is to endure and entrust ourselves to Christ to get us through to the other side (Revelation 2:8-11). Keep on keeping on.

If we’re being disciplined, the answer is to repent. Israel always required an oppressor, ultimately to the point of Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian captivity, before they would wake up and repent.

Learning from history would mean doing an about face right now. The dumbest thing Israel could have done was cheer as the Philistines invaded and say, “Israel does best under persecution! This is great, it’s just like when we were in Egypt!” How out of touch can you be?

We can turn this tide, but it’s going to take some critical decisions.

Obviously, we’re going to have to ignore the people saying this cultural downturn is a good thing. If you don’t even know you are being disciplined, you certainly won’t mourn and repent the sins that got us here. It’s also going to take us tuning out the people who, like Ahab told Elijah and Micaiah, say “you’re too negative” when the church is called to repent. The first step is admitting there’s a problem, as the saying goes.

And, once we admit the problem, it’s going to take every congregation repenting and strengthening what remains but is about to die (Rev. 3:2). In life, you can exercise self-discipline, or you can reap the painful discipline of your inability to do so. The same is true for the church. Why wait until times get dire? Why not start practicing self-discipline within our own ranks again right now?

We all lament how cheap the term “Christian” has become in America. Some of the pro-persecution crowd welcome the world’s hate because they think a climate that is adversarial to Christians will weed out the week. To be honest, I used to think that way. But whose job is it to discipline and even weed out unfaithful Christians— the world’s, or the church’s?

We have attracted and allowed consumer Christians in our congregations for decades. We don’t practice the discipline necessary to call people to a higher standard. We let them get away with it, to their detriment, our detriment, the world’s detriment, and to God’s dishonor.

And since we aren’t disciplining ourselves, God is doing it through external means. We can either wait until the persecution gets bad enough to get us back on track, or we can start fencing in the church again today through the teaching and enforcement of the Word.

So long as we let people claim to be Christians and attend sporadically, believe what they want, live how they want, and look exactly like the world, we should not be surprised that we are under discipline.

And as pride parades march down Main Street, your children face pressure to swap their gender, “conversion therapy” is criminalized, the removal of church tax exemption gains steam, plain Bible teachings get classified as hate speech, and you are surrounded by people who hate your Christian way of life, please don’t celebrate it. Please don’t pretend it’s happening because the church is doing her job.

Please wake up and see it’s time to shake out of our lukewarmness and respond to the discipline we’re receiving.