Here’s a little illustration from Robert Seiple’s tremendous article “From Bible Bombardment To Incarnational Evangelism: A Reflection on Christian Witness and Persecution” in the recent issue of The Review of Faith & International Affairs.  It illustrates precisely the difference between genuine persecution and doing something dumb in the name of missions.

Many of my personal views on the complex intersection between evangelism and persecution were crystallized by an incident in 1998, when I was working for the U.S. State Department.  During the summer, 30 Filipino Christians were ushered off to jail for distributing Bibles in the Islamic state of Saudi Arabia.  It doesn’t require too much imagination to see how the combination of elements in this episode – Bibles, Christians, and Saudi Arabia – could have been a recipe for disaster.  Fortunately a disaster was avoided.  Working with both the U.S. Embassy and the Philippine Embassy, the State Department was able to get each of these earnest Filipino evangelists released (immediately deported, but released) before the summer was over.

Four months later I was in Saudi Arabia, and I stopped by the Philippine Embassy to thank the Ambassador for his help in the successful resolution of this incident.  “You know,” he said to me, “under Saudi Arabian law you can bring one Bible into the country in your briefcase.  These people tried to smuggle 20,000 of them into the country.  Then they claimed Saudi Arabia for Christ by the year 2000!”  I was not unfamiliar with these kinds of bold, if unrealistic, missionary campaigns, but to the Philippine Ambassador this was nothing less than bizarre.

“They were running out of time,” he went on, “and here they still had all these Bibles.  So they started to walk down the streets of Riyadh, throwing Bibles over walls, literally hitting unsuspecting Muslims on the head.  Saudi Arabia’s Muttawa (religious police) stepped in immediately, of course, and 30 of my countrymen ended up in jail.”

Now I ask you:  are these brothers and sisters to be commended for their courage or reprimanded for their foolishness?