Activism, letters, and the persecuted church

If you haven't checked out the official site of Voice of the Martyrs, you definitely need to take some time to look through it. But if you have and are looking for more information or ideas on what you can do to encourage Christians suffering for the gospel around the globe, here are a few more resources:

BASIC- Brothers and Sisters in Chains, it's a ministry of VOM specifically geared to helping communities find new ways to do serve their brothers and sisters suffering in other parts of the world. If you go there, read Damare's story. It confirms for me the vital importance of a suffering church. Damare is a 15-year-old boy in the Sudan who, from the little bit I can gather from the story, seems to have more perspective and maturity than many middle-aged Christians in the USA.

Bibles Unbound- A ministry of VOM that delivers Bibles to the persecuted church. Many first-generation converts in China and other countries become Christians without ever having even seen a Bible and once they receive one they value it far more than many of us in the west, where almost all of us have multiple Bibles (I have 3 or 4 in my dorm room alone, plus a few more back home).

Prisoner Alert- This is the best way to get information about individual Christians. PrisonerAlert sends out e-mails updating you on the condition of various prisoners and also provides resources to write letters of encouragement to the prisoners and letters demanding their release to the governing officials of their country.

This is the coolest part of these sites, several years ago myself and several friends got together to write letters of encouragement to the Christians and letters of protest to the governments. To my shame, I didn't follow up after they were sent but earlier today when I was looking at the PrisonerAlert site I found a list of released prisoners and two of the men released were men that my friends and I had written to. I specifically remember writing out, by hand, a letter to the Prime Minister of Pakistan on behalf of Parvez Masih, who has since been released.

Lately I've found myself often struggling with feelings that what I'm doing right now doesn't really matter, that I'm just in a holding pattern until I can start whatever it is I'll spend the bulk of my life doing. So it was a wonderful encouragement to me to see that two of the men I'd advocated on behalf of and had tried to encourage were now free.

That said, there are several others, Li Ying and Gong Shengliang, who my friends and I wrote to two or three years ago, that are still imprisoned.