“The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.”
I heard this statement often as a young Christian. It describes the miraculous way God sometimes causes his church to thrive and grow under the most adverse conditions. Looking back now, I realize I was excited by the statement more than I understood it.
When I moved to China as a 23-year-old, I wanted to see how the gospel could take root and thrive in a place where the government, education system, and culture were arrayed against it. Naively, I assumed a rather simple equation: gospel preaching + persecution = church growth.
The reality, of course, isn’t that simple. Research estimates the church in China grew six-fold from 1949–1979 under intense persecution.[1] Over the next thirty years of relaxing pressure, it grew even more.
It doesn’t seem like the work of the Spirit can be tied so closely to the amount of persecution. Furthermore, intense persecution often paralyzes cooperation between churches. In an environment of extreme risk, churches often opt for safety, which means trusting only the people in one’s own local church, since they are most clearly “in
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