Welcome to Leadership Now with Dr. Aaron Rock, hosted on Beachhead Media and other podcasting platforms.

Aaron has served as a pastor, chaplain, denomination a leader, professor, and writer, and he is a desire to help others think Christianly about all of life.

On this show, we discussed the nuts and bolts of theology, church life, ethics, apologetics,

culture, politics, and other issues to help you lead better now.

There is no doubt that Christians are being targeted in many different Western countries.

How exactly should we respond to this?

Obviously, we've seen a lot of different responses to this sort of targeted persecution

that we've seen in the West. Some people would say,

oh, I'm just going to grin and bear it. I'm just going to just tough through it and everything

will end up fine. Or other people might say, oh, we just have to turn the other cheek. Some people

might say, oh, we're just going to sit back and sort of quote unquote pray it away. So there's all

types of different responses. And we wanted to take this episode to discuss what exactly

a biblical response to these threats should be and how as a church and as believers, we should

respond to these things. So just to introduce us to the topic, Aaron, can you go through what

exactly we are seeing in terms of Christian persecution? I think one of the most notable examples

that we've witnessed in the last several years in Canada is church burnings as a result of the

conflict between government and the indigenous folks and the clash of cultures

and perspectives and historical hurts and pains and discussions about the residential schools

and whatnot have led to the burning of, I think, over 100 churches in Canada.

During the pandemic, there were the forced closure of churches, which is predicated upon the

assumption that the state has that they have authority over the Christian church.

In my youth, I would say it would be very rare, even for people that were not Christian,

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