Three hundred and eighty-eight million.
That is the number Open Doors released in their 2026 World Watch List. It is the count of Christian believers around the world currently living under what the report calls "high level" persecution — a category that includes everything from being denied a job because of your faith, to having your church bulldozed, to being kidnapped and killed for refusing to renounce Christ. It is up eight million from last year. It is the highest figure since the report began.
Behind every digit in that number is a face. A grandmother in Nigeria whose son was burned alive when his church was attacked. A girl in Pakistan abducted at fifteen and forced into marriage with the man who killed her father. A pastor in eastern China whose church building has been scaffolded over and the cross removed. A Syrian family who fled Damascus after their evangelical congregation was bombed and the bodies of twenty-two believers were carried out of a Greek Orthodox sanctuary.
Open Doors counted 4,849 Christians killed for their faith in the most recent reporting period. Three thousand four hundred and ninety of those deaths were in one country: Nigeria. Sub-Saharan Africa accounted for 93% of the global total. Syria, which had reported zero martyrs the year before, climbed all the way to the sixth most dangerous country on the list, with twenty-seven verified deaths and a near-maximum persecution score.
The world will not tell you these numbers. The major networks have other priorities. The United Nations has other concerns. The campus protests outside your local university are organized around other suffering. Our family is being killed, and most of the church in the West does not know their names.
Two kinds of persecution
Ryan Brown, the CEO of Open Doors US, made an important distinction in his briefing this year. He spoke of smash persecution and squeeze persecution. Smash is what you see in Nigeria — Boko Haram and Fulani militants riding into villages, burning churches, executing pastors, abducting girls. The headlines, when they appear, are bloody and unmistakable.
Squeeze is quieter. It is what happens in Wenzhou, China, where the Chinese Communist Party has been removing the crosses from rooftops, scaffolding over church buildings, and arresting believers under new regulations that ban Christian livestreams and Bible apps. It is what happens in Eritrea, where pastors are imprisoned indefinitely without trial. It is what happens in Iran, where house-church leaders disappear into a system that has, just this year, lost its supreme leader to a missile but kept its grip on its dissidents. It is what happens in places where the church does not get burned — it gets slowly, methodically, professionally strangled.
Both kinds count. Both kinds break the heart of God. Both kinds are happening, right now, while you read this.
What the suffering church asks of us
I want to be careful here. Some Christian outlets, in their effort to advocate for the persecuted, have leaned hard on guilt. You are sitting in a comfortable pew while your brothers are being shot. That kind of rhetoric is true, in a sense, but it does not produce what the persecuted church actually asks for. They are not asking us to feel bad. They are asking three specific things.
One — Pray for us
Almost every interview with persecuted believers — and I have read hundreds over the years — eventually arrives at the same request. Tell your church to pray for us. Not money first. Not platforms first. Prayer. Because they know something the comfortable church often forgets — that prayer is not a small thing we offer when we cannot do anything else. Prayer is the largest thing any Christian has ever done. It opens prison doors. It softens dictators. It strengthens believers under torture. The persecuted church believes this. They live by it. They are asking us to join them in it.
Two — Tell our story
The second most common request is that we will not let them be forgotten. The world is happy to forget. The networks have moved on. The hashtags have aged out. But every time you mention a Nigerian believer to your small group, every time you put up the name of a Pakistani pastor on your prayer list, every time you teach your children about a Chinese house-church grandmother, you keep them visible. Our family does not want to disappear from the conversation.
Three — Use your freedom for the gospel
This one stings, and it is meant to. The persecuted believers I have read interviews with very rarely envy our cars or our salaries or our church buildings. They envy one thing: your freedom to share Christ openly without being arrested. And they wonder, almost universally, why so many Christians in the free world do not use it. We have a freedom most of the global church would weep to possess. We are accountable for what we do with it.
The promise
Remember those who are in prison, as though in prison with them, and those who are mistreated, since you also are in the body. Hebrews 13:3
The author of Hebrews did not write that as a sentiment. He wrote it as a logic. You are in the body. When the foot is in the trap, the whole body limps. When the hand is on fire, the whole body recoils. The Christian in Atlanta and the Christian in Aleppo are joined by something more than goodwill — they are members of the same body, animated by the same Spirit, washed in the same blood.
Three hundred and eighty-eight million. That is not a number. That is a family. They are us. We are them. And the same Lord who said I was hungry and you fed me, I was in prison and you visited me, I was naked and you clothed me — He sees how His undershepherd in Sokoto State is being treated. He sees how His daughter in Pyongyang is praying in her closet. He sees what Caesar's son in Rome did to His believers two thousand years ago, and He sees what a thousand minor Caesars are doing to His believers today.
And He has not forgotten any of them. Pray for them, beloved. Pray as if they were your own children. Because they are.