Here’s a number that should wreck every comfortable Christian in America: 365 million believers worldwide face high levels of persecution for their faith. According to Christianity Today’s latest global persecution report, the church is under fire in ways most of us can’t imagine. House churches raided. Pastors imprisoned. Bibles confiscated. Families torn apart for the crime of following Jesus.
And here’s what should wreck us even more: those churches are growing faster than ours.
Iran. China. North Africa. The places where it costs you everything to say “Jesus is Lord” are the places where the Gospel is spreading like wildfire. Meanwhile, in America — where we have freedom, buildings, budgets, worship teams, and more Bible translations than we know what to do with — church attendance is in freefall and discipleship is an afterthought.
Something is deeply wrong with this picture. And if we’re honest, the problem isn’t persecution. The problem is comfort.
What Persecution Strips Away
There are no fog machines in a house church in Tehran. No Instagram-worthy lobbies in an underground gathering in Beijing. No five-point sermon series with custom graphics in a living room in Eritrea.
Persecution strips away everything that isn’t essential. And when you remove the production, the programs, the building campaigns, and the branding — what’s left?
People. The Word. The Spirit. And a mission so urgent it can’t wait for a committee meeting.
That’s it. That’s the church. That’s what Jesus built. And it turns out, that’s all the church has ever needed to multiply.
Paul understood this. He wrote to Timothy from a prison cell — not a corner office — and said, “The things you have heard me say in the presence of many witnesses, entrust to reliable people who will also be qualified to teach others” (2 Timothy 2:2). Four generations of discipleship in one sentence. No building required. No budget required. Just one person pouring into another, who pours into another, who pours into another.
That’s the Multiply Method in its purest form. And the persecuted church lives it every day because they have no other option.
The American Church’s Comfort Problem
Let’s be honest about where we are. The American church didn’t decline because of hostile governments or anti-Christian legislation. It declined because we got comfortable.
We replaced discipleship with attendance. We replaced multiplication with addition. We replaced “go and make disciples” with “come and watch the show.” And slowly, over decades, we produced a generation of spiritual consumers who know how to sit in a pew but don’t know how to open the Bible with a neighbor.
Rick Warren put it bluntly: “The church is not a building you go to. The church is a family you belong to. Stop attending church and start being the church.”
The persecuted church already figured this out. Not because they read a book about it — because they had no choice. When the government shuts down your building, the church doesn’t die. It goes home. It goes underground. It goes relational. And it grows.
As Scott Vander Ploeg said on The Disciple Standard Podcast, the operating system of the church needs an upgrade. Not more programs. Not better production. A return to the relational, reproducible, Spirit-empowered model that Jesus gave us and the early church demonstrated.
What the Underground Church Does That We Don’t
If you study how the church is growing in persecuted nations, a few patterns emerge:
- Every believer is a disciple-maker. There’s no clergy-laity divide. There can’t be. When you might be the only Christian someone ever meets, you’d better be ready to open the Word and share the Gospel. This is the priesthood of all believers in action — what Paul described in Ephesians 4:11-12, where pastors equip the saints for the work of ministry, not do it all themselves.
- Small is the strategy. House churches of 10-15 people that multiply into two groups when they hit 20. No megachurch ambition. Just multiplication. Know Jesus. Make Jesus known. Live a Jesus life. Repeat.
- The Bible is the curriculum. No workbooks. No video series. No six-week studies with fill-in-the-blanks. Just the Scriptures — read, discussed, memorized, and lived. Scott’s 222Disciple curriculum captures this same conviction: every believer should be equipped not just to read the Word but to teach it to someone else.
- Suffering produces depth. There are no casual Christians in the underground church. The cost of following Jesus filters out everyone who isn’t serious. What’s left is a community of people who have counted the cost — and decided Jesus is worth it.
This Isn’t About Guilt — It’s About Awakening
I’m not saying we should seek persecution. I’m not saying American Christians have it easy (spiritual warfare is real on every continent). And I’m certainly not minimizing the very real suffering of our brothers and sisters around the world.
But I am saying this: if the church can thrive without buildings, budgets, and freedom — then maybe those things aren’t what the church actually needs.
Maybe what the church needs is exactly what John Piper described: “The greatest need of the hour is not more clever strategies. It is the power of the Holy Spirit poured out on broken, praying people.”
Broken. Praying. People. That’s the formula. It always has been.
What You Can Do This Week
You probably won’t face persecution this week for following Jesus. But you can choose to live like someone who takes the mission seriously:
- Pray for the persecuted church by name. Go to the Open Doors World Watch List and pick three countries. Pray for believers there daily this week. It will change your perspective on your own faith.
- Start one discipleship conversation. Not a program. Not a class. One conversation with one person where you open the Bible together. That’s how it starts. That’s how it always starts.
- Ask yourself the hard question: If everything was stripped away — the building, the worship band, the coffee bar, the comfortable routine — would your faith survive? Would it grow? If the answer scares you, that’s actually good news. It means the Spirit is showing you where to build.
The persecuted church isn’t just surviving. It’s thriving. And it’s inviting us to remember what the church was always supposed to be: not an institution, but a movement. Not a show, but a family. Not a building, but a body — broken, poured out, and multiplied for the glory of God.
Let’s raise the standard.
For more on discipleship multiplication and the heart of the church, listen to The Disciple Standard Podcast with Aaron Mamuyac and Scott Vander Ploeg — on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.