Surviving Persecution

How to Understand, Prepare, and Respond

Vernon J. Sterk

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781532638589
  9781532638596
• eBook ISBN:
  9781532638602
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

Persecution can kill the church--unless there is an adequate understanding of, preparation for, and response to this potentially fatal threat. Surviving Persecution is a study based on more than forty years of living and working with the Mayans of Chiapas, who inhabit the highlands of the southernmost state of Mexico. This book can serve as a guide for Christians living in a hostile environment to know how to avoid unnecessary persecution and to survive violent persecution when it strikes. This analysis of persecution can also be a valuable resource for students and congregations who desire to better understand the challenges and complexities of persecution. The last chapter gives guidelines for how national and international church organizations can play a vital role in helping the suffering church survive and thrive. From his personal experience of being the target of persecution and then working with the persecuted indigenous church, the author employs an anthropological approach with a biblical perspective to formulate a response to persecution that can promote the growth of the church.

Chapter 1

The Historical Context of Persecution in Chiapas

The growth of the Protestant churches in Chiapas, whose members are known as evangélicos,1 is well known. Less well known is the story of severe, cruel, systematic, physical persecution that was the environment in which the Protestant churches in Chiapas not only survived, but also grew dramatically. For us to understand the dynamics of Christian responses to persecution, it is first necessary to grasp what persecution is all about. What does it look like? In this chapter, I have included numerous specific, authenticated stories of persecution that form the historical context of persecution in Chiapas. The stories shared in this chapter are only a few of hundreds. This chapter serves to set the scene of persecution in Chiapas, and offers a preliminary description of the type of persecution that has been most common there, specifically among the indigenous tribes. The stories from Chiapas have their counterparts in the history of persecution in early Christianity, in medieval Europe, and later in the colonial histories of peoples in Asia and Africa. In this volume, we are focusing our attention on Chiapas as a case study of persecution.

Persecution is not new to the highlands of Chiapas, Mexico. It certainly did not have its beginnings when the first evangélicos crossed the border of Chiapas from Guatemala in 1901 and 1902. Prior to the arrival of the Spaniards, there had been major armed conflict between Mayan groups, but not systematic religious persecution. That began with the coming of the Spaniards in the early sixteenth century. Hugo Esponda records the first persecution in Chiapas carried out by the Spanish conquerors against the Mayan culture and religion only a few years after the successful invasion in 1518 and 1519 led by Juan de Grijalva and Hernán Cortéz.2

Centuries before Columbus’s arrival in the New World, the Mayan civilization had developed one of the world’s most remarkable cultures.3 Mayan religious systems were also highly developed, evidenced by elaborate pyramids, palaces, and artifacts that still stand. Into that pre-Columbian Mayan world, the Spanish soldiers and Roman Catholic priests introduced violent oppression and persecution. They smashed most of the Mayan gods and temples in their path of destruction, and the Catholic faith was imposed on the indigenous people at sword point. The conquest and the persecution were cruel and devastating. In 1542 Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas begins his Brief Account of the Devastation of the Indies with this description of the treatment of the indigenous:

And Spaniards have behaved like ravening beasts, killing, terrorizing, afflicting, torturing, and destroying the native peoples. We can estimate very surely and truthfully that in the forty years that have passed, with the infernal actions of the Christians, there have been unjustly slain more than twelve million men, women and children. In truth, I believe without trying to deceive myself that the number of the slain is more like fifteen million.4

Although Las Casas was most likely describing the killing of indigenous peoples all over Mexico and Central America prior to 1542, he offers an excruciating view of the devastation of the indigenous tribes in places like Chiapas.5

The conquest of Mexico may be better described as a military invasion than as religious persecution. However, it was carried out in the name of God and the king of Spain. The violent form of persecution used in attempting to obliterate the Mayan religion and culture sought to force the indigenous of the Americas to change their traditional religious worldview. Las Casas described the method for bringing them to Roman Catholicism:

Nothing was done to incline the indigenous to embrace the one true Faith, they were rounded up and in large numbers forced to do so. Inasmuch as the conversion of the indigenous to Christianity was stated to be the principal aim of the Spanish conquerors, they have dissimulated the fact that only with blood and fire have indigenous been brought to embrace the Faith and to swear obedience to the kings of Castile or by threats of being slain or taken into captivity.6

Enrique Dussel explains how the Spanish conquest also became persecution by the Roman Catholic Church. Spanish Christendom had

entered the eighth century locked in a desperate struggle against Islam, a conflict that continued for eight centuries and which produced in the Spanish people a spirit of the “crusades” . . . But it was not until 1492, the same year that Columbus discovered some of the islands of the Caribbean, that the Moors were finally expelled from Granada . . . In Spain there existed, therefore, something akin to a “temporal messianism” in which the destiny of the nation and the destiny of the Church were believed to be united. Hispanic Christianity, it was believed, was unique in that the nation had been elected by God to be the instrument for the salvation of the world.7

The idea that the Spanish had been elected by God was given full backing by the Roman pontiffs during the period. As Dussel says: “This was the first time in history that the Papacy gave to a nation the twofold authority to colonize and evangelize, that is, temporal and eternal, political and ecclesiastical, economic and evangelistic authority.”8

Instead of evangelizing the indigenous cultures of Mexico, the Roman Catholic Church set out to destroy what they saw as pagan. Instead of seeking to transform the Indian practices, the Spaniards were scandalized by such things as the offerings of human sacrifices. Because they were unable to understand or appreci...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Dedication
• List of Illustrations and Photos
• Foreword by Charles E. Van Engen
• Acknowledgments
• Definition of Terms
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Historical Context of Persecution in Chiapas
• Chapter 2: Worldview as It Relates to Persecution
• Chapter 3: A Biblical Perspective on Persecution
• Chapter 4: The Origins of Persecution
• Chapter 5: The Stages of Persecution
• Chapter 6: The Missionary’s Role in Dealing with Persecution
• Chapter 7: The Results of Persecution
• Chapter 8: The Persecuted Christian’s Response to Persecution
• Chapter 9: National and International Church Response to Persecution
• Epilogue
• Bibliography