Tertullian, a North African lawyer turned Christian, wrote it around the year 197. The Roman authorities of his day had been killing Christians for nearly two centuries, and they could not understand why the religion was not dying. They burned. They beheaded. They fed believers to the lions in the Colosseum. They did everything an empire knows how to do to extinguish a faith. And the faith kept multiplying.
Tertullian wrote, in a public defense to the Roman authorities, a sentence that has echoed for two millennia: plures efficimur, quotiens metimur a vobis: semen est sanguis Christianorum. The more you cut us down, the more we multiply. The blood of the Christians is seed.
He was not making it up. He was watching it happen.
The pattern in Acts
Open the book of Acts and the same pattern is there from the start. The early church in Jerusalem is comfortable. They have favor with the people. The apostles are teaching daily in the temple courts. Then comes the stoning of Stephen — the first martyr — and persecution scatters the believers across the surrounding regions. They run for their lives.
Now those who were scattered went about preaching the word. Acts 8:4
One sentence. The men and women who scattered did not stop being witnesses; they took the witness with them. Phillip ended up in Samaria, where revival broke out. The gospel reached an Ethiopian official on a desert road, who took it home with him to Africa. Saul of Tarsus was supposed to crush the movement and ended up converting and writing thirteen books of the New Testament. The very persecution Satan used to silence the church became the wind that scattered her seeds across the empire.
It is one of the great ironies of redemptive history. The enemy keeps reaching for an axe and discovering, far too late, that he has been digging holes for new trees.
Where the church is bleeding now
If Tertullian was right, the parts of the global church we should expect to see grow most explosively in the next twenty years are the parts that are bleeding most heavily right now. Let me list them, because the pattern is unmistakable.
Iran
The Islamic Republic has been the second-most hostile environment for Christians on earth for decades. House-church believers are routinely arrested, tortured, and given long sentences for the "crime" of meeting in living rooms to read the Bible. And yet — by every credible mission agency's estimate — Iran has experienced one of the largest, fastest, most explosive growths of Christianity anywhere in the world over the past thirty years. Believers number in the hundreds of thousands, possibly more than a million, and many of them are former Muslims, often from the families of the very religious authorities who would punish them. The seed has been falling on Iranian soil, and the harvest is staggering.
China
The Chinese Communist Party has been crucifying the church, in slow motion, for the better part of seventy years. Mao thought he had buried it during the Cultural Revolution. He had not. The house-church movement, persecuted under every administration since, is now estimated at somewhere between sixty and one hundred million believers. Some demographers believe China will be the most Christian nation on earth, by raw numbers, within a generation. The seed is sown in jail cells, scaffolded churches, and the prayers of grandmothers.
Sub-Saharan Africa
Sub-Saharan Africa is, simultaneously, the most violently persecuted region for Christians on the planet — and the region where Christianity is growing fastest. One in eight Christians on earth lives in the fourteen countries on the World Watch List in that region. The center of gravity of global Christianity has shifted to Africa, even as the continent's Christians pay the highest possible price. The blood of Nigerian believers is becoming the seed of a future African Reformation.
Syria
Syrian Christianity nearly evaporated under fifteen years of war and the rise of Islamist rule following the Assad regime's fall. Many congregations are now meeting in homes, with security guards at the door. And — the Open Doors partners on the ground keep reporting the same strange thing — more Syrians are asking about Jesus than at any point in living memory. Disruption has driven a generation to ask questions their parents and grandparents never asked. The seed is in the ground.
What this asks of the comfortable church
I have to say something hard. There is a strange spiritual physics at work in the world. The church grows where it bleeds, and it shrinks where it is comfortable. The most rapidly de-Christianizing parts of the world today are not the persecuted parts. They are Western Europe and increasing portions of North America — places where the church has had every freedom and has, by and large, used those freedoms to become indistinguishable from the surrounding culture.
I am not saying we should pray for persecution. That would be foolish, and it would dishonor the suffering of believers who are paying the price right now. But I am saying this: the comfortable church should be very, very careful about assuming that her comfort is a sign of God's favor. It may simply be a sign that her witness has become so quiet that the world no longer feels threatened enough to push back.
What the persecuted church has and the comfortable church often lacks is not a different gospel. It is a different seriousness about the same gospel. They believe Jesus actually rose from the dead. They believe heaven is actually real. They believe hell is actually waiting for those who reject Christ. They believe the gospel is actually worth dying for, because it is the only thing actually worth living for. And the world, watching them, can feel the difference.
The seed in your own life
You may not be called to the lions. The Lord may keep you, like Joseph, in a comfortable seat for a strategic season. But the same gospel that is multiplying in Tehran and Hubei and Damascus is the gospel He has placed in your hand. The same Spirit that emboldens a Nigerian widow to forgive the men who killed her family is the Spirit that lives inside you. The same Christ who walked out of the tomb on Easter morning is the Christ who is your refuge today.
Use the freedom you have. Pray for the family who has none. And remember — every time you read the headline of another believer falling in another country — that the soil is being watered. The seed is going down. The harvest is coming. Christ said it would. He has never been wrong.