At the Ends of the Earth… Anti-conversion Laws
The “hard” places that IBG ministers in around the world are “home” to the people we seek to minister to. It’s their place in this broken world, and while there are places of beauty, these areas often harbor some of the harshest conditions you will find, including injustice. One aspect of brokenness that may be foreign to you as you go to the ends of the earth is the existence of formal and informal anti-conversion laws.
Forty-six nations around the world have some form of national anti-conversion laws on their books, sometimes under the “anti-blasphemy” heading. While North Korea instantly comes to mind, many countries with constitutional guarantees of freedom of religion also harbor and support formal and informal anti-conversion practices that restrict the rights of individuals to choose who and how they worship. India is one such country. Their federal government actively supports the intent to make India an all-Hindu nation, despite their constitutional guarantees, by oppressing their Christian and Muslim minorities. Twelve of India’s 28 states now have formal laws on the books criminalizing conversion to a different religion under a range of loosely defined circumstances. Penalties range from fines to life imprisonment.
In Pakistan, another country which constitutionally guarantees religious freedom, the federal government allows “honor killings” to occur without investigation or prosecution when a family member murders a relative who has accepted Jesus as Lord and Savior. That is the case in much of the Muslim world. Pakistan also has a major problem with what they call “forced conversion”, where a Muslim man kidnaps a teenage Christian (or Hindu) girl, violates her and then forces her to marry him. Pakistan has resisted criminalizing this practice despite strong pressure form the UN Human Rights commission and other organizations.
The theology supporting conversion law is weak. We worship the Almighty God, who is the Creator of all that is seen and all that is unseen. He is so almighty that He imposes just one thing on mankind – freewill. God requires each of us to simply choose whether we will worship ourselves or something else or freely choose to worship Him and Him alone. The Strength Paradox identifies true strength as “having the ability to force your will but choosing not to”. Compare this to the gods who need laws to force worship, or gods who need people to intervene with acts of violence to impose their godhead.
Still, this is the world we enter when we take the Great Commission seriously and engage with His believers in these hard places. A few months ago we shared that a former Muslim theologian who found Jesus was murdered by relatives. Yet when we cautioned his wife to be careful, she told us she could not keep quiet – that the joy she found in Jesus Christ in comparison to the heavy oppression she had lived in all her life compelled her to share the Good News! Recently, our partners in another country were arrested under anti-conversion laws, roughed up, verbally abused, interrogated, but thankfully released.
While I hope you have a sense of outrage at this treatment, know that God is not surprised and is not confounded by these challenges and obstacles. Keep in mind that we encounter opposition placing Bibles in some jails and prisons right here in our own country. That’s anti-conversion as well!
God is using your simple task of providing Bibles in His huge work of making His name known throughout the whole world. He will use this persecution and oppression to multiply the church in all these places. In Acts, the persecution in Jerusalem that sent the early church fleeing to safety all over the Roman world spread Christianity like wildfire. Pray that God takes the suffering of our brothers and sisters today to multiply His church in ways we cannot imagine. And pray out of Psalm 27:5 that God would hide what needs to be hidden so that the hope of the Gospel will flourish.
Give Hope! Give Life! Give Bibles!
Chuck Hayes