Persecution in Early Church Issue 27 | 1990 Purchase this issue

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”Martyrdom is a regular, ongoing feature of church life in the 25 percent of global Christianity that we call the ‘underground church’,” claims David Barrett of the World Evangelization Research Center. “In one part of the globe, over 10,000 Christians have been killed every year since 1950, due to clashes with anti-Christian mobs, infuriated relatives, state-organized death squads, and so on.”

Such staggering statements remind us that Christian martyrdom is not confined to the early centuries of Christianity and the Middle Ages. In fact, Barrett’s statistics show martyrdoms increasing, from 35,000 in 1900 to an estimated 260,000 this year. Asked to explain the dreadful upsurge, Barrett says: “All the long-term underlying factors which produce martyrdoms seem to be gradually increasing in our day.” Such factors include widespread social, economic, and political unrest.

“The church in the USSR has suffered more severe and sustained persecution than that of any nation in recent history,” claims Patrick Johnstone, compiler of Operation World. The USSR’s anti-Christian activities have gone through peaks and valleys since the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, but at one time 88 percent of Russian Orthodox churches were closed and 400 leaders of unregistered Baptist churches were in prison. About 10,000 Christians were sent to Siberian gulags or exiled. In a peculiarly cruel kind of persecution, some 1,000 Christians were prisoners in psychiatric wards. Barrett estimates that of the 60 million killed and 66 million imprisoned between 1917 and 1953, half were Christians.

During China’s Cultural Revolution (1966–76), religious activity was forced underground, most Bibles were destroyed, believers’ homes were looted, ...