Unknown Nations Podcast

  This is the Unknown Nations Podcast, where we'll be sharing about reaching the nation where Jesus is unknown. 

Well, hello and welcome to the Unknown Nations podcast, where we are highlighting what God is doing in the most spiritually dark places on the earth. Today, we're going to be highlighting an anti-conversion law and asking the question: How does the Church endure in the face of such opposition? This story from India is really shocking, but it's something that we've been seeing patterns of, unfortunately, over the last number of years. And that is these anti-conversion laws. Just to give you one quick example, there was a teacher who got permission.

He got the blessing from the students' families, which is really key anytime you're a Christian and you're serving in a majority Hindu country, and he was delivering these boxes. So think of, like, gift boxes basically that had been put together—people caring for the needs of these children. He handed them out to the children, and a mob had heard about it.

A Hindu majority mob had heard about it, and they came to the school. They found the teacher. They ripped all these gifts away from the terrified students, and this teacher got reported and imprisoned. I mean, that is just a reality of what's going on. And that precious person who is caring—all he's doing is loving the children.

And yet, he's finding himself on trial, and that is because of this vigilante mob that is at work in India. So it's things like that that are going on around the world today. Now, we have the honor at Unknown Nations to serve God by helping these kinds of places—the most zero-access, barrier-ridden, spiritually antagonistic, spoken-word-reliant people groups on the planet—with the goal of giving birth to the Church in impossible places.

These places are impossible, friend. And we have to acknowledge, as the body of Christ, what our calling is, which is to make disciples of all nations. And when you think about those precious words from Jesus and the assignment that everyone—hey, when we signed up to say yes to Jesus and become a follower of Jesus, we became stewards of those words to make disciples of all nations.

And we have to ask ourselves the question—I love, I love to, what I call, it's a progress report: How are we doing? And when I bring that up, it's with this idea of, hey, there's still two and a half billion-plus people who don't have access to the gospel. And so, out of 8 billion people, if two and a half billion don't even have an opportunity, cradle to grave, we have to acknowledge there must be barriers that are preventing these people from following Jesus or even hearing the good news.

And these barriers are things like political barriers. These are religious barriers—Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim environments. They're geographic barriers. Hey, I could take you to the middle of the Himalaya Mountains; from one village to another, it would take you several days to get there. That's a barrier, isn't it—getting there? There's family barriers. There are unique local issues in the nuclear family that are barriers to the gospel. And, of course, there's persecution issues. And so, there's a number of these being wrapped up in the story today that we're talking about.

But the reality is, the anti-conversion laws—they are truly tightening around the world today. There's research that says about 50 countries worldwide have laws that are restricting religious conversions, and that truly is impacting millions and millions of lives.

So these are people who, if you are accused—and that's a lot of times what happens when we're talking about anti-conversion laws—a lot of that is targeted at Christianity in these Hindu areas, Buddhist areas, and Muslim areas. And so the laws themselves, what they do is they're on the books. If someone is accused of, let's just say, proselytizing or sharing the gospel of Jesus Christ, they can accuse them of violating these anti-conversion laws, and these people can be imprisoned. These people can be put on trial. These people—even, there's many cases of people being killed for that. And the unfortunate issue with these anti-conversion laws is it's not always just a policeman who's walking around hearing someone doing street evangelism.

A lot of times, the implementation of the anti-conversion laws is happening through vigilante justice, like the story that we shared, that we're featuring today. So you have these groups of people that are taking it upon themselves, and they're going into these areas and terrorizing. They know where the Christians are at.

A lot of times, the Christian communities are kind of in specific areas, and they know that they're Christians. In Pakistan, recently, just last year, there was an entire community of Christians. Now, one of the leaders was accused that he violated the anti-conversion law and that he had proselytized to a Muslim.

This person converted. Now, the details of it were a bit fuzzy. And again, when the vigilante justice is taking place, they're making stuff up. They're making accusations that aren't even true to the fullness of the story, but it riles up the groups of people. They went in and set on fire all kinds of houses.

The church was burnt to the ground, and that's, that's the way it looks. And so when these people are accused like that, it's real. It has tragic results. And in Pakistan, over 700 people, just in the last year, have been accused of these anti-conversion laws. So, as you can imagine, it creates tremendous barriers to the gospel.

So, what do we, what do we do as the body of Christ? Well, we, we have to come alongside these individuals. If it is a barrier to the gospel, we have to come alongside of them and calm and encourage these leaders because they're the ones who are going to be facing the mobs of people that are against them. And so the way we do it at Unknown Nations is we bring these people to our training centers, we pour into them, we encourage them.

Um, we raise them up. We, we fill them with the word of God so that they can be better equipped as disciple-makers. I mean, when you are facing this kind of adversity and these kinds of barriers, uh, it takes a lot of courage, doesn't it? I mean, imagine if you were going to your next-door neighbor who didn't know Christ and you wanted to share the gospel with them, and they reported you.

And the next thing you know, your front door is knocked on, and the police are putting you in handcuffs and taking you away. What was your crime? You shared the gospel of Jesus Christ. Isn't it just an outrageous thought?

The opportunity for people to come to know Jesus is incredibly barrier-filled, and it is the work of the enemy. He is, he is using individuals, he is using political leaders, he is using people of influence to put these kinds of laws on the books, knowing full well that it's not going to be legitimate law enforcement people who are carrying it out.

It's going to be a large deployment of these mobs that we call vigilante justice. Um, I think about India again, and there are 11 states that are enforcing the anti-conversion laws. They're, they're just, it's totally being weaponized against the minority groups, and it's not just Christians. 

Although a majority of Christians become the target of these anti-conversion laws. But in, um, in India, Islam is really growing. Most people don't realize that although India is the most populated Hindu country in the world, within the next 20 years, it will simultaneously be the most populated Muslim country in the world.

And so, they go to great lengths to prevent the marrying of a Muslim man and a Hindu woman as an example, just using that to give you an idea. And that person could be beaten; that family, God forbid, he would ask that Hindu woman to marry him. What do they do? They use the anti-conversion laws, uh, and they target that person.

And that person again gets beaten. They get imprisoned, they get tried. Uh, but what we see in many instances is it's the Christians who are the ones, because the Christians become truly the ultimate minority.

And so we need to be praying and lifting up our brothers and sisters who are dealing with these just outrageous laws. We had heard of another situation in the country of Myanmar not too long ago. Now, uh, this country, most people don't associate Buddhism with extreme persecution, but we have heard of some of the fiercest forms of backlash and targeting and intimidation and worse in the country of Myanmar and other Buddhist countries like that.

In one instance, there was a precious young woman, and she was in a village that some missionaries, some local missionaries, indigenous leaders had gone into that area. And Myanmar is on the list that has anti-conversion laws. So now, again, Buddhism is the majority religion targeting, in this case, a Christian family.

And this precious young woman said yes to Jesus. We love, we love to hear those stories. I hope that it encourages you too, when you have a community that has never had access to the gospel, which is the way you would describe this particular village that she's from. She hears about Jesus for the first time, and she says yes to Jesus.

Well, word quickly traveled back to the Buddhist monk in that case. But what's very interesting in these areas is that the most gruesome and aggressive form of persecution is not the Buddhist monk, it's not the Hindu priest, and it's not the Muslim imam. It's the nuclear family. And that was the situation with this precious young girl—her family, her parents, her grandfather—they were furious with her and they said, "How could you embarrass our family by converting to Christianity?"

"You know that it's not legal to convert to another religion. How could you possibly do that?" And they began to ostracize her. They began to punish her and make her reconsider her thoughts. And she said, "Mom, Dad, uh, grandfather, Jesus has changed my heart." They saw this transformation inside of her and they were drawn to it.

I love the verse in Scripture that Jesus talks about the coming of the Holy Spirit. And he says, "It's in your best interest that I leave you." Why? Because when he comes, He will convict the world of guilt in regard to sin and righteousness and judgment. Jesus knew that he had to leave so that the Holy Spirit could come and fill His followers and convict the world of their sin. And that was what her testimony was, and the Holy Spirit convicted her family, who also became followers of Jesus. Well, as I said, word traveled back to, in this case, the Buddhist monk, and you don't think of a Buddhist monk as the one administering harsh persecution, but that's exactly what happened.

So, this individual mobilized a mob who knew about anti-conversion laws, and he brought her before a trial, like the entire community. They had heard—people don't understand Christianity. They just know it's a threat because it's against their worldview. And so, they dragged this woman in front of the entire community because they had heard she had converted. And they said, "What are you? Are you a Buddhist? Are you a Hindu? Are you a Muslim? Are you a Christian?”

 And this precious young girl had the wisdom to say, "I follow the living God." And they said, "No, you're, you're Buddhist, you're Hindu, you're Muslim, or you're Christian. What are you?" And she said, "I serve and follow the living God."

Well, that was unacceptable. And so he went to every single person in the community. And so all these people lined up and they gathered rocks. Then one night, they just started raining down rocks on this family.

Why? Because she converted to Christianity, and it was all against the laws. God's hand was on this whole situation, protecting this family from the mob, and they come out and they declare their faith in Jesus Christ.

Friends, that's going on around the world every day in Buddhist, Hindu, and Muslim environments. And we need to be a part of that—praying for these precious people. How do we pray for them? For the persecuted church, for these laws, these unjust laws, to be repealed.

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