From Bible Bombardment to Incarnational Evangelism: A Reflection on Christian Witness and Persecution
Robert Seiple Sunday, 1 March 2009
Many of my personal views on the complex intersection between evangelism and persecution were crystallized by an incident in 1998, when I was working for the U.S. State Department. During the summer, 30 Filipino Christians were ushered off to jail for distributing Bibles in the Islamic state of Saudi Arabia. It doesn't require too much imagination to see how the combination of elements in this episode—Bibles, Christians, and Saudi Arabia—could have been a recipe for disaster. Fortunately a disaster was avoided. Working with both the U.S. Embassy and the Philippine Embassy, the State Department was able to get each of these earnest Filipino evangelists released (immediately deported, but released) before the summer was over.
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