The Christian church in its homelands in the Middle East is undergoing a “rapid attrition”, the Anglican Bishop of Chichester has warned.
Bishop John Hind, in a House of Lords debate on religious persecution, pointed to the “extreme deprivation” suffered by Christians in Iraq.
“In places where different faiths have coexisted for centuries we see the rapid attrition of the Christian church in its ancestral homelands,” he said.
“In Iraq, Christians have suffered extreme deprivation, sometimes due to sheer religious hatred, sometimes just caught in the cross-fire, sometimes because, amazingly and quite wrongly, they are regarded as representatives of a western faith.
As the church in the West has given in to sentimentality about the parity of all religions, that Jesus is merely the Savior of Christians, it has found it more difficult to empathize with small enclaves of Christians in predominantly non Christian countries. Thus there’s little sympathy for Christians in India, the Middle East and parts of Africa who experience active persecution and individual martyrdom.
Interfaith conversations are important, but not so if they result in a rejection of our own evangelical and catholic doctrine of the Church and its mission.
We should pressure those who are leaders to embrace the suffering of the Church in peril.