The Bloodiest Century
Story★★★★On September 28, 1997, M. Craig Barnes, pastor of the National Presbyterian Church, Washington, D.C., preached a powerful sermon on the Persecuted Church. He began with this vivid picture: One evening the soldiers talked about a girl they had raped many times in the course of the afternoon. Through it all, the girl sang hymns, strange evangelical songs, and she kept on singing, even after they shot her in the chest.
She lay on the ground with the blood flowing frotn her chest, but she kept on singing-a bit weaker than before, but still singing. Then the soldiers grew tired of this and shot her again, but still she sang.
And then the soldiers became afraid. Terrified of the girl, they fell upon her with machetes, and at last the singing stopped. For the last two thousand years, someone has always been trying to stop the singing of Christ’s followers. The report I just read sounds a lot like the accounts of early church persecution I studied in history books.
But this report does not come from a history book. It comes frotn the New Yorker magazine (December 6, 1993), and it describes contemporary events. More followers of Jesus Christ have died during [the twentieth] century than in any other time in history. About 150,000 each year are tnartyred.
About two million are actively persecuted. And millions more are living with their religious freedoms severely restri!ted.
The point
M. Craig Barnes' powerful sermon on persecuted Christians in the twentieth century, documenting a martyr's faith through brutal persecution and noting unprecedented Christian martyrdom in that era.