I want you to meet some brave Christian leaders pledging their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor.

When thinking of the golden age of the Church, many of us hearken back to the book of Acts, when Peter and John stood up to the religious authorities, who told them to be silent about Jesus the risen Messiah. “Whether it is right in the sight of God to listen to you rather than to God,” they answered, “you must judge, for we cannot but speak of what we have seen and heard.” Then they prayed for boldness, and the Church exploded across much of the ancient world.

But there’s a golden age for the church going on right now—with the same kind of courage, persecution, and Spirit-empowered growth. Where is it? In communist China.

World missions historians tell us that when all the foreign missionaries were kicked out of Mao’s China a few years after the Second World War, there were probably no more than 3 million believers in Jesus Christ in the whole, vast nation. But today, seven decades later, the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life counts 67 million Christians of all kinds—35 million independent Protestants, 23 million Protestants in government-sanctioned churches, and 9 million Catholics. Other estimates go even higher.

Whatever the true number is, it’s almost as many as there are members of the Communist Party! Maybe that’s why the government is cracking down on Christians. According to Christianity Today and other news outlets, Under President Xi Jinping, China’s government has been tightening its grip on religious affairs.

In February, regulations aimed at religious groups have brought increased pressure on churches to be “Chinese” culturally and to submit to the authority of the Communist Party. Churches are being told to burn their crosses and replace them with Chinese flags and to display slogans praising the Communist Party. Some are being forced to join the government-sanctioned churches and permit video surveillance of their services.

Meanwhile, in Jiangxi province, authorities have forced at least 40 churches to display banners forbidding foreigners from preaching and anyone under 18 from attending. In August, they even published new rules stating, “Party members who have religious belief should have strengthened thought education.”

In the spirit of Peter and John, a group of at least 250 Chinese pastors has publicly signed a joint statement opposing the new regulations. In the statement they declare that Jesus is Lord of all, offering eternal life to anyone who will repent and believe in Him.

But they also say, in a challenge to the Chinese communists, “God hates all attempts to suppress human souls and all acts of persecution against the Christian church, and he will condemn and judge them with righteous judgment.”

Then, like Peter and John, they pledge obedience not to the earthly authorities but to King Jesus, no matter what. “We declare that in matters of external conduct, churches are willing to accept lawful oversight by civil administration or other government departments as other social organizations do. But under no circumstances will we lead our churches to join a religious organization controlled by the government, to register with the religious administration department, or to accept any kind of affiliation.”

They close their incredible joint statement with the bracing yet sobering words, “For the sake of the gospel, we are prepared to bear all losses—even the loss of our freedom and our lives.”

Friends, is it any wonder that the church in China has grown, and continues to grow? What we’re seeing before our eyes is the golden age of the church in China. How can we not pray for these wonderful brothers and sisters? And more than that, how can we not emulate their costly faithfulness in our own little corner of God’s world?

Copyright © 2018 BreakPoint-All rights reserved

It’s one of the most dangerous places in the world to be a Christian. What’s going on right now in Nigeria is “pure genocide.”

Recently on BreakPoint, I said that it took a lot of courage to be a Christian in Iraq. Just two years ago, the Obama administration called what ISIS was doing to Iraqi Christians “genocide.”

Unfortunately, there are other places in the world where being a Christian requires a lot of courage as well, and, where the treatment of Christians merits the word “genocide.”

One such place: Nigeria. By most estimates, the population of Nigeria is almost evenly divided between Muslims and Christians. That religious split largely follows geographic lines: The northern part of the country is predominantly Muslim, the eastern and southern parts of the country heavily Christian. The middle, sometimes called the “Middle Belt,” is ethnically and religiously diverse.

Not surprisingly, what makes Nigeria so dangerous for Christians originates in the Islamic north. There, Christians have been on the receiving end of a campaign Open Doors calls “religious cleansing,” that is, an attempt “to eradicate Christianity” from the region.

One of the most notorious Islamist terrorist groups in the world, Boko Haram, is responsible for killing thousands of Christians and displacing countless more in northern Nigeria. But Boko Haram isn’t the only group targeting Christians there.

In a statement released in late June, Christian leaders claimed that “over 6,000 persons—mostly children, women and the aged—have been maimed and killed in night raids by armed Fulani herdsmen.”

The Fulani are an ethnic group who are overwhelmingly Muslim, and their raids are not always at night. In April, Fulani herdsman attacked a group of Christians during Sunday mass, killing two priests and seventeen parishioners.  The same attackers then razed fifty homes belonging to Christians. In fact, earlier in the year, on New Year’s Day, 72 people died at the hands of a Fulani attack.

In their statement, Nigerian Christian leaders also complained about the “continuous abduction of under aged Christian girls by Muslim youths…” These girls “are forcefully converted to Islam and taken in for marriage without the consent of their parents.”

The language used by Christian leaders in Nigeria in their statement to describe what is happening, “pure genocide,” is hard to disagree with. As was the call, directed toward the national government to “stop this senseless … blood shedding… and avoid a state of complete anarchy where the people are forced to defend themselves.”

Unfortunately, Nigerian officials are downplaying, if not outright denying, the religious dimension of what’s happening. Instead, they’re calling this a conflict over resources, in this case, over land.

Don’t believe it. For starters, the security forces are, in the words of the statement, “skewed to one religion and one region of the country,” that is, Islam and the Islamic north.

What’s more, this idea conveniently glosses over the one-sided nature of the violence in the region: The Fulani are the hammer and the Christians are the nails.

Finally, any student of the history of genocide or ethnic cleansing knows that conflicts over resources are often just the trigger that unleashes the sort of mass violence we’re currently seeing in the nation of Nigeria.

So, what can we do about this? First, we must pray, continually, for our brothers and sisters there. Second, we have to encourage the White House to continue pressing Nigeria about what’s happening in its Middle Belt, as it did during an April meeting with the Nigerian president.

President Trump called what’s happening then a “serious problem.” That’s an understatement. It’s past time to make sure that the response to the problem is equally as serious and not understated at all.

Copyright © 2018 John Stonestreet &  Roberto Rivera BreakPoint-All rights reserved

Beyond the crazy guilt-by-association stories, the debate over homeschooling boils down to this: Who is responsible for our kids’ education?

Hi, I’m John, and my wife and I homeschool our children.

I hope in the future that’s not how we’ll have to introduce ourselves as a sort of public warning to others. But make no mistake, the phenomenally successful home school movement does have its enemies: enemies constantly working to turn public opinion against parents who have chosen this way to pursue their children’s education.

A recent and -obscene example comes from the New Republic, where writer Sarah Jones is using the horrible story of the torture inflicted by David and Louise Turpin on their 13 children as a means to attack the idea of homeschooling itself.

Under the inflammatory headline, “The Turpins Won’t Be the Last: How Lax Homeschooling Laws Enable Child Abusers,” Jones argues that this horrifying case is representative of a larger trend of child abuse enabled by the freedom to homeschool.

Now folks, to use a phrase I introduced a few weeks ago on BreakPoint, this is nutpicking nonsense. There’s nothing inherent to homeschooling that creates abuse. Abuse happens in all educational, parenting, ecclesial, and for that matter, cultural contexts.

My BreakPoint colleague Shane Morris, a product of homeschooling himself, tackled Jones’ cheap-shot article in a sharp-elbowed but necessary response to Jones at The Federalist.  Shane writes, “In [Jones’s] mind, the fact that some homeschooling parents abuse their children is proof that something is wrong with liberal homeschooling laws. But we might also apply her line of reasoning to public schools.

“In New Jersey,” he continues, “93 teachers pleaded guilty to sexual relationships with students from 2003 to 2013.” And “Reuters reports that in 2014, ‘almost 800 school employees were prosecuted for sexual assault.'”

It would be absurd to conclude from these statistics that public and private schools “assist abusers.” No one thinks that way.

But that’s exactly what Jones does to homeschooling, when she and other proponents for increased regulation worry that what they call the “state of deregulation” “actually assists abusive parents.”

Not surprisingly, Jones also questions the motives of groups like the Homeschooling Legal Defense Association and downplays the impressive academic achievement displayed by homeschooled children, as well as the research “that shows homeschooling produces, on average, better-educated and more college-ready students.”

There are, as Shane writes, good schools and bad schools–schools that produce college-ready students by the boatload, and there are schools that graduate kids who can barely read. In the same way, there are parents succeeding at homeschooling and there are those that aren’t.

If you’re not calling for the state to abandon public education for the bad apples, you’ve got no business calling for a crackdown on homeschooling because of the evil deeds of these two California parents.

In the end, I think Shane is right: “On a more fundamental level, those who want to place additional barriers in the way of homeschooling families have a different worldview. They see the state, not the family, as ultimately responsible for rearing and educating children.”

That’s a worldview that Christians don’t share, no matter how we choose to handle our own children’s education.

Kids belong to God, who entrusts them to parents. Whether parents choose homeschooling, private education, charter schools, public education, or like many of us do some amalgamation and combination of those options, the bottom line is, kids don’t belong to the government.

And that means at least two things for us. First, Christian parents ought to take that responsibility just as seriously and intentionally as it sounds.

And second, we should call out the lie that abuse–which sadly happens everywhere–discredits an educational choice that’s blessed over a million-and-a-half kids.

Instead we should ask what’s broken in our society that’s making abuse so common.

Copyright 2018, John Stonestreet,Breakpoint.org – All rights reserved

Trump, the NFL, and Us: America’s Descent into Triviality

Could it be that our fascination with the story is more important than the story itself? President Trump, the NFL, and us.

Last week was a week full of headlines. On Wednesday, the president, speaking before the United Nations, said that if the U.S. “is forced to defend itself or its allies, we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea.”

Later that day, Hurricane Maria crossed Puerto Rico from southeast to northwest, dropping upwards of forty inches of rain, including fourteen inches in a two-hour period, which may be a world record nobody wants to own. More than three million American citizens were left without power or water, and face a humanitarian crisis.

Oh, and somewhere in there was another failed attempt to repeal and replace Obamacare.

But by the weekend, the story that most Americans seemed to care about was a feud between the president and professional athletes.

By now, you undoubtedly know more than you need to know about that feud—I mean that literally—and I don’t want to contribute to a problem I’m about to decry. So for details, I’ll direct your attention to a fine piece by David French in the National Review.

But we’re still left with the question about why this discussion is consuming so much of our national attention when there are issues far more deserving that we are increasingly disinclined to care about.

I suggest the reason was the subject of a 1985 book called “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” by the late Neil Postman. Postman, the founder of New York University’s Media Ecology program, wrote about our culture’s “vast descent into triviality.”

Comparing George Orwell’s “1984” and Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World,” Postman concluded that Huxley had proved to be more prophetic. Whereas “Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information, Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism.”

Whereas “Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us, Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture.”

The consequences of becoming the sort of culture Huxley predicted was on full display this weekend. Namely, as Postman warned, by caring about things that aren’t important, while being distracted from things that truly are important.

We live in an age where the phrase “Instagram celebrity” can be said with a straight face. Historian Daniel Boorstin’s definition of a celebrity—“someone who is well-known for his well-knownness”—is now truer than ever. In such a culture, as Postman forewarned, being popular is confused with being important.

As Bill Brown, Senior Fellow for Worldview and Culture at the Colson Center has long said, “In other times and places, heroes made history. In our time and place, they make CD’s and touchdowns.” And yet, we are the people who know their lyrics and stats better than our own national history or Constitution. We can name the judges of “The Voice,” but not those on the Supreme Court.

Postman also worried that our desire for entertainment and distraction would rob us of our ability to think critically or to even think for ourselves at all.

Here’s a case in point: David French rightly asked how many people yelling ‘free speech’ for athletes are only too happy to sic the government on the tiny few bakers or florists who don’t want to use their artistic talents to celebrate events they find offensive?”

It is amazing just how prophetic Postman has proven to be, even though he was writing years before Internet or social media, and only a few years after cable television. He knew we were embracing self-destructive habits of the soul, and he tried to warn us.

But listening is not nearly as amusing as a Twitter war, and requires much more sustained attention than watching a football game.

Lord, have mercy on us all!

Copyright 2017, John Stonestreet BreakPoint-All rights reserved

How do we resist evil? One woman’s approach was on the money. And soon, she will be, too.

When you open your wallet in few years, you may be seeing something different on the $20 bill: The U.S. Treasury Department is proposing to take President Andrew Jackson off the front of the bill and replace him with one of my personal heroes: Harriet Tubman.

She is someone we should celebrate for what she did—rescue slaves—and for the lessons she teaches us today about when it’s appropriate to resist evil.

Harriet Tubman was born into slavery on a Maryland plantation in 1822. As she grew up, she was made to work driving oxen, trapping muskrats in the woods, and as a nursemaid.

Harriet’s owners frequently whipped her. And she endured the pain of seeing three of her sisters sold, never to be seen again. But when her owner tried to sell one of her brothers, Harriet’s mother openly rebelled. The would-be buyer gave up after Harriet’s mother told him, “The first man that comes into my house, I will split his head open.”

Her mother’s actions likely implanted in Harriet the idea that resistance to evil was right—and could sometimes be successful.

As a child, Harriet herself revealed a strong rebellious streak. She would run away for days at a time. But there were rays of joy in her life, as well. Harriet’s mother told her stories from the Bible, which developed in her a deep and abiding faith in God.

When Harriet was about 26 years old, she learned that she might be sold away from her family. The time had come to try to escape. She made her way some ninety miles along the Underground Railroad. She traveled at night to avoid slave catchers, following the North Star, until she reached Pennsylvania, and freedom.

Once there, she dared to make a dangerous decision: She risked her own freedom in order to give others theirs.

For eight years, as America headed toward the cauldron of Civil War, she made many dangerous trips back to Maryland, leading scores of slaves north to freedom. During these trips she relied upon God to guide and protect her. She never once lost a runaway slave. As Harriet herself later put it, “I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger.”

She gave all the credit to God, explaining, “’Twant me, ‘twas the Lord. I always told him, ‘I trusts to you. I don’t know where to go or what to do, but I expect you to lead me,’ and he always did.”

No wonder she was known as Moses to her people.

Her faith deeply impressed others. As abolitionist Thomas Garrett put it, “I never met with any person of any color who had more confidence in the voice of God, as spoken direct to her soul.”

During the Civil War, Harriet worked for the Union as a scout, spy, cook, and nurse to wounded and sick soldiers. Amazingly, she even led an armed assault on Southern plantations, during which 750 slaves were rescued. In later years, Harriet donated property to be turned into a home for indigent former slaves.

She was an incredible woman—one we can and should celebrate and emulate. Today there still is, sad to say, plenty of evil that needs resisting. For instance, we’re increasingly facing the demands of bullies that we embrace laws and opinions that contradict the teachings of God. Who knows, like Harriet, we may be called upon to move to another state—one that puts a proper value on religious freedom. Or we may have to go to court to protect our First Amendment rights—or help others to do so.

When we lose heart fighting these battles, we should remember Harriet Tubman’s unflinching courage and unfailing faith in God’s guidance—and redouble our efforts to protect our own generation from efforts to enslave, not our bodies, but our heart and minds and souls.

© Copyright 2016 Breaking Point  

Image courtesy of Ms Magazine

Afterword:

Garland Favorito writing for the NewsWithViews.com says there was another reason why Andrew Jackson was  targeted for removal from the $20 Bill….

To help justify the removal of Andrew Jackson from the face of the $20 bill, elitists played the classic Marxist race and gender cards. To gain support from women and minorities, only women were considered and Harriett Tubman was selected to replace Jackson. Harriett Tubman certainly deserves to be honored for her place in history but not by removing the most fiscally sound President in American history and the most distinguished American General other than George Washington himself. It is especially ironic that Treasury Secretary Jack Lew would attempt to remove Jackson from the $20 bill even though he could never achieve the fiscal accomplishments of Andrew Jackson much less his statesman and military accomplishments….