This morning’s news carried the heart-wrenching news of another attack of Islamic militants against Christians of the ancient churches of the Middle East. The church being targeted is the Assyrian Orthodox Church, whose roots go back to the Jewish community of the Persian Empire, who were evangelized late in the First Century by a disciple of the Apostle Thomas, Addai. That church, later called by the western church, “Nestorian,” took root despite centuries of persecution by the Persian Empire that matched or exceeded anything experienced by the churches of the rival Roman Empire. When Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, the churches in Persia suffered even more. Persecution drove them north, east and south into missionary work, so that there were churches and monasteries in Siberia, Central Asia, India and China, a few of which remain, but most of which were lost to waves of Islamic and Mongol invasions. The Crusades, and later colonial invasions by allegedly “Christian” nations like Russia, France and Britain, did more harm than good for the churches of the Middle East, because Islamist reaction against outside meddling often fell hardest on Jewish and Christian minorities at hand. That story seems to be playing out again in the conflict between the West and the so-called “Islamic State.”
That many, if not most, Muslims are as heart-broken over the treatment of these Christians as are Christians comes through another witness to Christ’s way of conquering evil, posted on social media by an Egyptian Christian woman. In the words of our Moravian Christian brothers and sisters: Vicit agnus noster, eum sequamur; “Our Lamb has conquered; let us follow him.”
Let us pray for the captured Syrian Christians, their families and their church, and see how we might be of support to them, at least to those who are serving them while they are in the crossfire of Syria’s civil war.
Pastor Mathew Swora