What the Church in the Global South Can Teach the Church in America About Suffering

The American church has developed a sophisticated relationship with comfort. Its buildings are climate controlled. Its services are crafted for maximum accessibility and engagement. Its theology has been shaped, over generations, by a cultural environment in which Christianity was the dominant social framework — where being a Christian was the normal thing to be, the socially advantageous thing, the thing that came with cultural benefits rather than cultural costs. This environment has produced a particular kind of Christianity: genuine in many of its expressions, but often inadequately formed for the experience of genuine suffering.

The global church — specifically, the churches in the Global South and East that have grown so dramatically over the past century — has developed in a profoundly different environment. In China, Nigeria, Iran, India, and scores of other nations, becoming a Christian can cost a person their family, their social standing, their livelihood, their freedom, and sometimes their life. The theology that has emerged from these contexts is not a different gospel. It is the same gospel, forged in conditions that have produced a depth of faith and a theology of suffering that the comfortable Western church desperately needs to receive.

Their Theology of Suffering Is Different

The Western church's primary framework for suffering has tended toward two poles: the prosperity gospel, which treats suffering as a sign of insufficient faith that will be removed by adequate belief; and a more mainline therapeutic framework, which treats suffering as a problem to be managed and reduced through the resources of psychology and community support. Both of these frameworks are oriented toward the elimination of suffering. Neither of them is adequate for the believer who faces suffering that cannot be eliminated.

The theology of suffering that has emerged from persecuted churches tells a different story. Not that suffering is good or desired, but that it can be the site of genuine encounter with a God who is present in it — that the cross is not merely a theological mechanism for salvation but a model for the shape of genuine discipleship, that following Jesus has always meant the willingness to carry cost. This is not masochism. It is the realistic faith of people who have had to find God in the darkness because there was no other place to look.

"The global church has developed a theology of suffering forged in conditions the comfortable Western church has not faced — and the Western church needs to receive what that forging has produced."

Their Prayer Life Is Different

The prayer life of the persecuted church tends to be characterized by a desperation and a specificity that is difficult to manufacture in comfortable circumstances. When the prayer for safety is genuinely urgent — when the believer asking for protection is facing actual threat — the prayer has a different texture than the same words spoken from a position of security. The Western Christian who has encountered the prayer life of believers in genuinely dangerous contexts often reports the experience as profoundly humbling and deeply instructive.

The church in China, which spent decades of severe persecution praying for the growth of the church, and then watched the church grow beyond anything the persecutors intended to suppress, has a testimony about the power of prayer in adversity that reshapes the Western church's understanding of what prayer is and what it is for.

Receiving Rather Than Sending

The church in the Global South has gifts to give the Western church — theological, spiritual, missional — that the Western church has rarely been positioned to receive because it has been so accustomed to seeing itself as the giver. The partnership model of organizations like the Pastors Connection Network is built on a different conviction: that the mission works in both directions, that the Western church has as much to receive as to give, and that the genuine humility required to receive well is itself a form of formation that the Western church needs.