Religious Freedom and the Freedom to Share the Gospel
An Arab Christian serving in the Middle East offers a powerful reminder of freedoms Americans can easily take for granted. His experience challenges Christians to value religious liberty and use the freedom to evangelize, study, worship, and live out their faith openly.
- Religious freedom allows Christians to speak openly about their faith without fear of government intrusion.
- An Arab Christian’s ministry experience highlights the risks believers can face where such freedoms are restricted.
- Freedom brings an opportunity—and a challenge—to pursue the church’s work with renewed passion.
By Mark A. Taylor
He is an Arab Christian with a ministry in the Middle East. And to start he says he could not speak freely with me in his home country. There our conversation would not continue, he said, until he had removed the battery from his cell phone.
“Why?” I ask.
“Surveillance.”
“They would bug your cell phone to listen to your conversations?” I said to him in disbelief.
“It happens,” he said calmly. “If I were to openly speak with a Muslim about becoming a Christian, life would become very difficult for me and for him,” he said. And then he went on to discuss a litany of government offenses and harassment that has made his work difficult and sometimes dangerous. His precarious position is the reason I will not tell you his name, his ministry, our meeting place, or his nation.
From America Back to the Middle East
His family fled from Palestine to this Arab country when Israel became a nation. Later he came to college in the United States, with plans to enter a high-paying professional career. But in America, his roommate was a Christian. And before he graduated, he had made Christ his Lord too. He returned to the Middle East a changed man, with a changed vision for how he would spend his life. Seminary in America followed, and then a ministry in the Middle East.
“I am very grateful for America,” he told me. “First, of course, because that is where I met my Savior. And then,” he added, “because of your Bill of Rights.”
Freedom to Be the Church
Freedom of speech. Freedom to assemble and worship. Freedom to publish. And thus freedom to tell others about Jesus. Most of us take these freedoms for granted, and some would say they are threatened here today.
It’s sure every citizen should resist any effort to redefine or restrict these basic rights. Meanwhile, all of us can talk to a neighbor about Jesus without fear of government intrusion. We never wonder whether our small groups will be raided or our worship services shut down. No one is prosecuted for converting from one faith to another.
On every Fourth of July celebration since then, I’ve thought of this Arab Christian’s wistful testimony. His experience reminds me to thank God for our freedom to be the church. His faithfulness challenges me anew to approach the church’s work—evangelizing and studying and worshipping—with a passion we sometimes see best among those who must live out their faith behind closed doors.
Author: Mark A. Taylor
Mark A. Taylor, who served as Christian Standard editor from 2003 to 2017, retired in June 2017 after almost 41 years with Standard Publishing (Christian Standard Media).
Thanks for the important reminder, Mark.
Our freedom to speak openly about Jesus is being challenged in America in new ways. I recently went to a Tibetan Buddhist sand mandala ceremony (a black magic, demon-invoking ritual) on the campus of Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. Two friends went with me to pray against the ceremony and for the power of God and the love of Jesus to be manifested.
Here was Melinda’s experience there: “I tried to start a conversation with a monk. Then I asked him if he’d ever heard of Jesus. A nearby student stepped in, pointed a finger at me and said, ‘You can’t ask him that question! That’s proselyting!’ I kindly said that this was America and that we had free speech . . . An older woman who had overheard what I said about Jesus angrily told me that I didn”™t have the right to ‘force my religion’ on anyone. Here was a whole month of events devoted to Buddhism on a secular college campus and I can’t even say the name of Jesus?”
Brothers and sisters, suppression of the truth comes in many forms. To understand the hidden agenda behind these ceremonies, e-mail me at lenawood.author@gmail.com. I’d be glad to send you the whole article. To learn about a similar spiritual threat in our nation’s capital, see http://www.wotnodyfiles.com. Click on the glossary at the top of the page and go to K is for Kalachakra. Please join us in prayer about these events!