DAVID ADAMS speaks with RICE Movement founder Steve Chong about his life-changing trip to the Middle East with persecuted church advocacy and support organisation Open Doors Australia…
When Sydney-based preacher Steve Chong was asked by persecuted church advocacy Open Doors earlier this year to accompany them on a life-changing short trip to meet with Christians who have faced persecution in the Middle East, he and his wife Naomi, who have four children under eight, found himself wrestling with a whole range of unexpected questions.
“Even that process of having to decide whether to in itself was good for our faith…” says the 37-year-old who is also the founding director of the Sydney-based RICE Movement, a initiative which aims to evangelise and renew the faith of predominantly Asian youth in the city.
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ON THE FRONTLINE: Steve Chong says he found a church “on fire” for God in the Middle East; something he wanted to bring back to Australia. PICTURE: Supplied by Open Doors Australia.
“I went over there, thinking ‘I’m going to find an underground, hidden, broken, on-the-edge of their limits, church’. But actually I…found a church that was awake, alive, unwaveringly committed to Jesus yet suffering massively…”– Steve Chong |
“Just all those questions of what do we hold dear and the four little kids we’ve got…so we have a big pray about it – we’d prayed about it separately because we were arguing about what to do – and God laid it on our hearts at different times that we were going to go.”
The Chongs, who only returned from the trip on 21st May, ended up traveling with Open Doors to an unnamed country where they spent four days visiting Christians in camps located as close as 10 kilometres away from the frontlines in the conflict with the so-called Islamic State.
“We heard about three bombs go off in the space of 10 minutes – it was really quite intense,” recalls Mr Chong. But what has stayed with him most about the trip, he says, was the scale of persecution the Christians he met had faced.
“I went over there, thinking ‘I’m going to find an underground, hidden, broken, on-the-edge of their limits, church’,” he says. “But actually I…found a church that was awake, alive, unwaveringly committed to Jesus yet suffering massively…”
Mr Chong tells, for example, of a man who spoke of some 150,000 Christians uprooted from their homes when IS arrived in their home town and forced them to “pack up and walk 80 kilometres to a camp”.
“And that’s just one town…You can’t even get your head around it. It’s just huge…So I think seeing that scale of Christians persecuted for their faith because they refuse to give in and convert was something I’ll never forget.”
Mr Chong says that one of the key messages he brought back from those Christians he encountered in the Middle East was for the Western church to remember them in their time of suffering.
“They don’t want to be forgotten,” he says. “And we do forget them, don’t we? I do. I don’t know why I do, but I’ve always put them to the corner of my mind even though they’re actually my family; they’re actually my brothers and my sisters. And I know that if that happened to the church down the road…within an hour I’d be there, (asking) ‘Who needs help?’ But they’re also our church.”
One of the stories that impacted him most on the trip was that of a man he met who, prior to the conflict, had been a rich man but who, when IS arrived on his doorstep, had been forced to flee with his wife and their four kids. One of the man’s friends had rung him on his mobile phone as the family had fled and informed him gleefully that he had now taken everything that had been his in the name of the Islamic State.
When the man replied that he would return one day, his ‘friend’ had told him that it wouldn’t be so, that he would pursue him to the next town and “take everything again”. But it was his next words which really struck Mr Chong, who wrote in a diary he kept of his experiences.
‘”Before they took away everything I was a Christian only by name but now my faith is alive,” he recalls the man saying. “ISIS (another acronym for IS) is a gift. If ISIS comes to the West it is a gift from the Lord. It will be a wakeup call for a sleepy church. If you want to spend your time working for more money and more houses and just going along to church on Sundays you can lose it, but if you work for God (he points upwards), you can never lose it. So I say to the Western church ‘Wake up. Wake up!’”
Mr Chong writes that he was “cut to the heart” when the man concluded by saying: ‘”Christians in the West don’t want to die because they are more in love with life than Jesus.”
“It’s so biting because it’s so true…” says Mr Chong when speaking to Sight. “I have come back with, surprisingly, thinking…not only do we have to be aware of them so that we can pray for them and support them financially, but that actually they’ve got a message for us.”
“I come back to a place that I feel so comfortable in, so sleepy in, and where my faith feels hardly challenged when it comes to sticking up for Jesus and the ability to take Jesus at His word when He said that following Him looks like picking up your cross and denying yourself. I don’t know if I have ever really understood. I don’t think I live it to be totally honest; not like these guys live it. And I want to. I want to wake-up.”
Asked how he can maintain a “defiant, bold faith”, Mr Chong says that as well as identifying the things which distract us from Jesus – including the “materialistic DNA of our society”, part of the answer lies in continuing to let the persecuted church “speak to us” and a renewed determination to “be bold” in living their faith and understand it’s not “horrible and hard” for Christians here.
“We keep telling ourselves this narrative, ‘Oh, it’s so hard here and people reject us’. I think we need a good dose of more of it.”
For more of Steve Chong’s diary, see http://opendoorsblog.org and his Facebook page, http://www.facebook.com/stevechong.
Correction: The word ‘awake’ has been corrected from ‘unawake’ in the quote in paragraph six. The error occurred in transcription.
