Preached at St Matthew’s, Rowde (Devizes Deanery Choral Evensong)
Readings – 1 Kings 6. 1–11, 23–38; Acts 12. 1–17
“[Rhoda] ran in, and told how Peter stood before the gate. And they said unto her, ‘Thou art mad.’”
Our New Testament reading this evening is one of the most familiar stories from the earliest years of the Church. Peter has been imprisoned during a bout of persecution in Jerusalem, and faces being executed just as like James, the brother of John, had been shortly before. In the dead of night, he finds his chains suddenly falling off and an angel leading him into freedom. At first, Peter doesn’t believe the incident himself. He assumes it must be a dream.
Baltasar Beschey. The Liberation of St Peter from his Chains, (1769). Hangs in the Church of Sint Petrus Banden (St Peter in Chains), in Diemen, just outside Amsterdam.
Peter’s fellow Christians in Jerusalem, who have been fervently praying for him, also refuse to believe this miracle at first. They told Rhoda, the domestic servant who came to the gate when Peter first knocked, that she must be mad. Interestingly, as with the Resurrection, the first witness of this emergence into new life is a woman of low social status. God continually upends our expectations—not only of who is important and trustworthy, but of what is possible at all.
This miraculous experience does not make the persecution of the Jerusalem Church vanish. Indeed, persecution remained a dominant them of the Church’s life in its first centuries.
It is all a long way from the scene at Solomon’s Temple in our Old Testament reading. Sometimes the Church has been able to follow in the footsteps of Solomon, building great places of worship to the glory of God; at other times, it has had to meet in secret and in hiding. Both extremes can be found in the world today.
Leading up to the year 2000, the Vatican established a commission to examine those who had died for their faith in recent generations; it concluded that there had been twice as many Christian martyrs in the 20th Century as in the previous nineteen combined. Our own Westminster Abbey had ten statues of martyrs carved above its west door in the 1990s, representing Christians of every continent and many denominations who died for their faith in the 20th Century, from Martin Luther King to Grand Duchess Elizabeth of Russia.
The 21st Century continues to produce more than its fair share of persecuted Christians. Take the situation in Iran. There have been reports that in less than a week in mid-July more than fifty Christians, all converts from Islam, were arrested across five cities in a new crackdown. Also this month, the pastor of a house church, also a convert from Islam, who had been released from prison after completing a five year sentence, was unexpectedly rearrested at a routine visit to a government office, flogged, and sent into internal exile. Another pastor was transferred unexpectedly from the prison in his home city on the Caspian Sea more than a thousand miles to the Gulf coast, making it impossible for his family to visit him regularly.
Renewed persecution also affects the small Anglican community in Iran. Its three churches were shuttered during the Covid pandemic and have not been allowed to reopen. Special permission is needed even to hold funerals, and in recent years it has become impossible for bishops to obtain visitors’ visas from the authorities in Tehran.
We would expect the Church in a country like Iran to be in terminal decline in the face of such persecution. Yet, time and again, God upends our expectations of what is possible. It is true that tens of thousands of Christians have fled into exile abroad, whether as refugees or after securing work in other countries; from the country’s ancient Armenian and Assyrian churches, and the Roman Catholic and Protestant mission churches of the last few centuries, and among the many converts from Muslim backgrounds who have joined underground house churches since the 1990s. Yet, the Church in Iran is numerically stronger than it has been for many centuries.
If you told the average person in the UK that thousands of people in Iran were becoming Christians, they’d tell you “thou art mad”. But God continually upends our expectations of what is possible.
Nobody is quite sure how many people have come to faith in Christ in Iran from Muslim backgrounds over the last thirty years or so. Some sceptics claim no more than a few tens of thousands, while some enthusiastic evangelicals claim numbers in the millions. Article 18, a UK-based charity which advocates for Iranian Christians, says a “conservative” estimate is that there are between half a million and 800,000 converts to Christianity in Iran. Research carried out anonymously on the Internet in 2020 by sociologists in the Netherlands from a non-religious perspective estimated that 1.5% of Iranians considered themselves Christians, implying around a million converts from Muslim backgrounds.
We know that Iranians have been popping up in churches in this country, and across Western Europe and North America, in significant numbers since around the mid-2000s. Some seek baptism here, and while this undoubtedly helps any claim for asylum, some go on to become very serious Christians. Others turn up in the UK as mature Christians already who attempted to remain in Iran but whose lives were at some point made unliveable.
Indeed, if we think about the possible motivation for the authorities in Iran to unleash persecution, then such behaviour seems like the natural response of an authoritarian régime to a new social trend it fears.
It is hardwired into our culture that the Church is declining, and that this is an inevitable by-product of modernity and education. Across the world, however, the Church has been growing at an extraordinary rate, not just in the poorest countries, but also in contexts with better educated populations than our own, like the Chinese diaspora in South East Asia.
So please give some time in your own prayer lives to give thanks for the growth of the Church in Iran, and for persecuted Christians there and across the world. Pray also for a renewal of the Church in our own country. You may think that unlikely, but time and again God upends our expectations of what is possible.
And now to God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost, be ascribed all might, majesty, dominion, and power, as is most justly His due, now and forevermore. Amen.
If you’re interested in following the persecution and the growth of the Church in Iran, follow Article 18 on Facebook or Twitter or visit their website; or visit the website, Facebook, or Twitter of the Jerusalem and Middle East Church Association for a specifically Anglican perspective.
