This letter first appeared in the Diocese of the Mid-Atlantic newsletter “The Messenger” on March 18. Subscribe to the Diocese newsletter here.

Dear Friends,

In my address to Synod last November, I focused on how vital it is for us to be raising up disciples who will remain faithful to Jesus and who will lovingly share him and the Gospel in the face of the growing pressure on Christians in our culture.
 
I said, “Sadly, it is clear that this increasing pressure is causing many to reject the central biblical understanding of who we are as human beings, as male and female made in God’s image. Rising generations have been bombarded with the counter message of the world, a message poured out on them through the entertainment industry, public education, and the relentless flood of social media, a message that declares affirmation of biblical Christianity to be hate speech. Our efforts at discipleship seem meager by comparison and all too often are found to be inadequate, as we see alarming percentages of young people leaving the church if not abandoning their faith altogether.” (The video of my report is here.)
 
Now, the Equality Act, passed by the U.S. House of Representatives and pending in the Senate, threatens to increase that coercive pressure on biblical Christians in alarming ways. For a fuller discussion of the Equality Act and its implications for religious freedom, see these articles by Albert Mohler and Andrew Walker.
 
But whether the Equality Act is enacted or not, we must deal with the painful reality that all too often we’ve done a woefully inadequate job of forming our people as mature followers of Christ who will be willing to suffer for his Name and who are equipped to speak his truth in kindness and love.
 
During Lent, I’ve been rereading a book which affected me greatly when I first read it years ago. It’s Suffering, Martyrdom, and Rewards in Heaven, by Josef Ton. It is a comprehensive exposition of those subjects in the Old Testament, the intertestamental literature, the New Testament, the early Church fathers and the Reformation. I am again finding it to be riveting, though it is not light reading. Ton was a Romanian pastor, persecuted under the totalitarian Communist regime of Nicolae Ceausescu. He knows suffering for Christ firsthand and he writes powerfully of how God uses suffering by his people for his eternal purposes.
 
Ton points out that the overwhelming majority of Christian books on suffering ask only the question: What does suffering do to the sufferer? They ignore what the Bible has to say about other key questions, questions we need to be asking in our context: “What does our suffering do for others, for the conversion of the lost, for the building up of the body of Christ, for the defeat of Satan, and for the triumph of God’s truth on the earth?”
 
As we look toward Holy Week, we speak repeatedly in our worship of our call to walk in the way of the Cross. We even dare to pray, in the Collect for Palm Sunday, “Mercifully grant that we may walk in the way of his suffering.”  
 
That is a profound petition and I pray that God will make it more than mere pious words for us, that he will press that desire deep into our hearts.
 
Yesterday, I spent time with a member of our Diocese who has paid a high price for faithfulness to Christ and to truth. I am blessed by her courageous and gracious witness under intense attacks, and I pray for more of that courage, that humble boldness for myself.
 
On Monday in Holy Week, we pray, “Mercifully grant that we, walking in the way of the Cross, may find it none other than the way of life and peace.” Lord, would you fulfill that in us, would you give us the grace to follow Jesus in faithfulness for his glory and for the spread of his Kingdom.

Faithfully yours in Christ,
The Rt. Rev. John A. M. Guernsey