PIETER FRIEDRICH JUL 3

READ IN APP

This year’s Indian Christian Day is a joyful one, as it is every year, and as we celebrate everything that Christians have done for India and all that they ought to mean to India.

What Christians have done for India — and when I say this, I want to particularly emphasize what Indian Christians have done for India — is immeasurable. We can certainly attempt to at least begin to measure their contributions by looking at things that they have done in building clinics and hospitals, founding schools, pushing social and political reforms, advocating for civil and human rights, and, in every way, bringing Jesus to those who are suffering both literally and metaphorically from leprosy.

Resilience

Aside from all that Indian Christians have accomplished for their country in the name of Jesus, there is another reason to celebrate, to commemorate, and to salute that community, which is for their resilience. Yes, that is little bit more of a bittersweet reason to lift up the community, but it is just as marvelous of a reason.

For the past 2,000 years, since long, long before the establishment of the Republic of India or any other of the current nation-states in South Asia, Christians have been an integral and often thriving part of that subcontinent. Yet, throughout that time, and even from the very beginning, they have been “afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; and struck down, but not destroyed.”

Around this world, there are countless Christian communities who have faced the exact same challenge and remained faithfully resilient but, in many ways, I believe the Indian Christian community shines forth as one of the greatest examples of all for, even as they are being afflicted, perplexed, persecuted, and struck down, what have they been doing for India that whole time? What have they been doing, in fact, for those who are their persecutors?

I can think of very, very few other lands in the world today where, even as they are often treated so often as “unwelcome,” Christians so cheerfully continue to give, and love, and care for those around them.

So, on this year’s Indian Christian Day, even as we focus on celebrating the community’s contributions in medicine and healthcare, let us also applaud the Indian Christian Church for its resilience. Especially considering how the resilience of the Church in India is shining so brightly despite what’s happening to it right now.

Persecution

As we all know, the situation for Christians in India today is growing increasingly difficult. Their condition is becoming precarious. In some places, the literal, physical health of the Indian Christian community is at risk. At stake. And they are in dire need of the very same medicine and healthcare which they themselves have, for so long, contributed to India.

As we celebrate how Christians have contributed to medicine and healthcare in India, I believe it is only deeply appropriate — especially for us who are gathering so far away from India — to also commemorate the immense contributions of Indian Christians by highlighting their current suffering, their ongoing oppression, and their escalating persecution.

So what is happening to Indian Christians and why is it happening?

The why is, quite simply, because India has fallen under the control of an evil ideology.

An ideology whose earliest teachers, starting a hundred years ago, described Christians as “foreign” to India. An ideology which called Indian Christians “internal threats,” “traitors,” “bloodsuckers,” and described them as people who should always be treated as “hostiles” within the land of their birth. An ideology which spoke even of exterminating Christians from the land completely.

Since India gained independence in 1947 (with, I might add, the assistance of Indian Christian freedom fighters), this evil ideology has been the single largest source of organized terror targeting Christians. We have seen, for instance, how followers of this ideology burned down churches in the Dangs district of Gujarat in the past, burned alive Australian Christian missionary Graham Staines and his two young son, and reaped unspeakable horror in Odisha.

Yet these atrocities were then, at least, scattered and sporadic. That changed, ten years ago, when the evil ideology I’m talking about gained national, political power. Ever since, the targeting of Indian Christians has gradually become more and more systematic and systemic.

So, that’s the why of what’s happening to Indian Christians.

Now, what is happening to Indian Christians?

• Across the country, there are open and repeated calls for committing violence, even genocide against Indian Christians, calls which are frequently made in the presence of politicians.

• Villages are passing their own local laws making it illegal for Christians to live there, even doing things like banning Christians from praying in private in their own homes.

• Mobs, armed mobs, are invading church services, beating everyone up, destroying the church, and dragging the victims down to the police station on false charges.

• Mobs are conducting home invasions to beat up or even murder Christians. Just last week, for instance, a family in Chhattisgarh who hade recently converted to Christianity was outside, farming their field, when a mob set upon them, beat everyone up, and stabbed the young mother to death.

• In states like Chhattisgarh and Manipur, large-scale organized violence has broken out. Hundreds of Christians have been murdered, many hundreds of churches and thousands of homes have been torched, and tens of thousands have been made refugees within their own country.

All of this is happening within a framework where nearly half of the states of India now enforce “anti-conversion” laws which basically make it a crime for a person to change their religious beliefs and choose to follow a different God without permission from the government. In practice, these laws basically criminalize the practice of Christianity at all, whether that be praying at home, hosting a Bible study, worshipping in a Church service, or evangelizing.

So, in a nutshell, that’s the what of what is happening to Christians in India.

Now, I know I grow tired of simply running down all of this. I wouldn’t be surprised if you also grow weary of it. We are staring evil in the face, we’re rehashing all the details of how an evil ideology is producing evil actions, and it can be so easy to get lost in simply nodding along, agreeing that “yes, that is very, very, very bad,” crying, and waiting for rinse, wash, repeat until another horrible atrocity happens and we start the cycle all over again.

But today we are here, after all, here to celebrate the contributions of Indian Christians to medicine and healthcare. Now, I am no doctor, but one thing I’ve always always heard about doctors is that the best ones always try to find a cure for the disease rather than just treating the symptoms.

Certainly, in context of what’s happening to Christians in India today, there is no simple solution or resolution to it. Yet there are a few things I believe are crucial responses to consider if we want to at least try to heal the hurts and address the hate that is creating those hurts.

I believe the approach we need is a focus on Liberation, on Love, and on Legacy.

Liberation, Love, and Legacy.

Liberation

Let me talk first about Liberation. Recall how when Jesus launched His ministry, he opened the scroll and read where it was written:

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.”

The very first thing that Jesus offered was liberation.

Now, for the Indian Christian today — and, in fact, universally, for all of us human beings everywhere — we need physical and political liberation.

We need to be unchained so that we can practice our basic human rights like gathering together, practicing our rituals (whether of daily life or religion), wearing what we choose (like a cross, for instance), and so on. We need political liberation to protect our physical liberation.

There may be no chains on ours wrists, but without political liberation, we’re virtually still enslaved, in many ways. We need liberation, politically, from those who would seek to oppress by practicing caste, or preventing us from saying what we believe or worshiping how we choose, or even stripping away our physical liberation by jailing or killing us for the peaceful ways in which we decide we want to engage with the physical world. But we also need mental and spiritual liberation.

Our minds need to be liberated from the mentality of slavery. We need to be able to think of ourselves as free — as liberated.

We need to know, intellectually, within the way we think, that we are no longer oppressed, that we also will not become oppressors, and that the chains are broken. To quote Dr. Viktor Frankl, a famous Jewish psychologist who survived a Nazi concentration camp: “When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”

We can lose physical and political liberation, we can find ourselves in a situation where it’s impossible to change the situation of, for instance, Indian Christians, but we can still have mental liberation.

That, then, connects to, for us Christians, to the greatest need for liberation: we need to have spiritual liberation.

We need our souls to be unchained. We need liberation from the world, the flesh, and the devil. In the words of Saint Paul the Apostle: “You [I] once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience — among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh.”

Love

As Christians, we know that we need a new, a Holy Spirit, and we also know that indwelling by that Holy Spirit produces many fruits — the first fruit of which is love. So, after Liberation, as we consider how we can respond to the current situation facing Christians in India, we know that what we next need is Love.

We know how Love truly manifests. We know the true definition of True Love.

There was a great 19th-century Indian social activist, Mahatma Jyotirao Phule, who devoted his life to eradicating Untouchability and the practice of the caste system, who worked to bring education to Dalit girls, and who worked alongside his wife to champion women’s rights. Phule himself was not, it seems, actually a Christian, and yet his whole life’s work was inspired by the teachings he received from Christian missionaries at a Christian school.

To quote Phule: “The great sacred saying of Jesus Christ will carry conviction to our hearts with finality. It is as follows: Do unto others as you would be done by!” Or, as we more usually hear it, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

Building on this, Jesus also taught: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Yet Christ, our Lord, kept pushing His teachings into ever more and more revolutionary territory, finally teaching: “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”

So, as we consider how to respond to what’s happening to Christians in India, and as we search for solutions which might bring a resolution, we know that we all need liberation. Yet the greatest form of liberation is spiritual liberation, and the first fruit of our spiritual liberation is love, and in a situation today where — like in the days of Ancient Rome — we may have, especially in context of India, no hope of achieving physical or political liberation, one of the only things we may actually be free to choose to do is to LOVE.

Again, quoting Holocaust survivor Dr. Frankl: “The one thing you cannot take away from me is the way I choose to respond to what you do to me. The last of one’s freedoms is to choose one’s attitude in any given circumstance.”

In context of India, we can, and we should, take all kinds of actions like political agitation or organizing or education. We should reach out to our US government and seek them to change policies towards an India which persecutes its Christian population, but at the very, very end of the day, there’s only one single thing over which we have total control and that is that we can choose to respond to the evil ideology which has fallen over India with love — even with love of those enemies who is persecuting us (and when I say us, I do include myself, as I have indeed been persecuted for speaking on this issue).

Indeed, that’s the only successful response. As Saint Paul taught: “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.” Why? Well, for many reasons, but one is that it simply does not work to try and overcome evil with evil. To quote Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr: ​“Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”

Legacy

So lastly, after Liberation and after Love, we need Legacy.

We need Legacy to keep alive the stories of those who got Liberation, to keep alive the stories of those who had Love, and because preserving their Legacy is one of the best chances, in the long-term, of actually achieving fundamental change.

We see the root of this in the story, for instance, of Jesus Christ. Certainly the reality of His life, death, and resurrection forever altered our cosmos, but it was also the preservation of His legacy — the telling of His story — that irrevocably changed this world.

With inspiration springing from Jesus, Saint Thomas the Apostle traveled to the Indian subcontinent. His life there and his martyrdom planted the seeds for the Indian Christian community which grew into the tens of millions who now follow Christ today.

Moving to the 19th century, the world received from India a hymn that implanted itself in the soul of every believer: “I have decided to follow Jesus.” Reportedly, the last words of a northeastern tribal man who was killed for converting, that martyrs words were formed into a blood-stirring anthem — by Sadhu Sundhar Singh — that may serve as one of the first examples of Indian Christians ministering to us here in the Western world.

Then, of course, we had Mother Teresa, who was not born an Indian citizen but who did die one after spending 70 years manifesting the hands and the feet of Jesus to the least of the least. Her Legacy is so lasting that, even when that evil ideology which controls India tried to shut down her enduring ministry, they failed.

We had another honorary Indian, who walked in the footsteps of Mother Teresa by also bringing medicine and healthcare to the least of the least in India before he died a martyr’s death. Graham Staines. His Legacy is so enduring that he still serves as one of the most recognizable examples of how Christians in India are being persecuted and why the Global Church must care about it.

We have, also, the Legacy of the late Metropolitan KP Yohannan. Born in Kerala, when he said, “I have decided to follow Jesus,” he became yet another example of how, instead of “foreign” missionaries coming into India, Indian missionaries could themselves go out to take Jesus to the broader world.

Lastly, we have the Legacy of all those millions of Christians, scattered throughout India, who are today remaining resilient in the faith even as they are beaten, bruised, bloodied, and martyred.

So, as we celebrate the contributions of Indian Christians and consider how we can respond to the desperate situation in which many of them are living right now, let us look to Liberation (especially Spiritual Liberation), let us look to Love (the fruit of the Holy Spirit), and let us look to one thing each and every one of us here today can do: the preservation of their Legacy, especially the Legacy of resilience.

We’ll start with that last one — Legacy — by doing what we are doing right now: CELEBRATING Indian Christian Day!