In the last month, I’ve been told reports about how costly it is to make disciples underground. In a closed Asian country and a closed Middle Eastern country, two friends told me about the same problem in different cultural contexts. It is really hard to make disciples when there are few around, and the governing authorities want you silenced, punished or executed.
Governments That Don’t Like Underground Disciples
In both cases, the friends I spoke with made it clear that their governments did not want their citizens to be underground disciples of Jesus Christ. It was okay for expats– the foreigners who lived in the country for work. It was not okay for locals. Locals had heavy surveillance on them at all times. They live in highly controlled environments. So to use the little freedom you have in order to explore the claims of Christianity, then an inquirer needs great courage.
Discipleship is costly. But it is even more costly for these underground disciples.
Pushing Disciples Underground
Like the disciples of Jesus in the Soviet Union, when public faith is above ground, it can get squeezed out of open society. As Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote in The Gulag Archipelago *:
[T]hey were supposedly being arrested and tried not for their actual faith but for openly declaring their convictions and for bringing up their children in the same spirit.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 37.
Solzhenitsyn then quoted from a female poet who received a 10-year sentence for what she wrote:
You can pray freely
But just so God alone can hear
Tanya Khodkevich quoted in The Gulag Archipelago, 37
Those Who Had Not Worshipped the Beast
We know that the threat of the beast is real (Rev 13:15). Regardless of your view of the millennium, Christians can hope in the future reign of the ones,
“beheaded for the testimony of Jesus and for the word of God, and those who had not worshiped the beast or its image and had not received its mark on their foreheads or their hands.”
(Rev 20:4)
Let us pray for the underground disciples of Jesus Christ as they seek to bear witness to the gospel with their words and their lives.
*affiliate