Justin Reeve

“One of the “gifts” that persecution seems to confer on the persecuted is that it enables them to distill the essence of the message and thus access it in a new way. Take the Chinese Jesus movement, for example. When all the external structures and reference points were removed, when most of their leaders and theologians were killed or imprisoned and all access to outside sources was cut off, they were somehow forced through sheer circumstance to unlock something truly potent and compelling in the message they had always carried as the people of God. The result was a Jesus movement unparalleled in history—against all possible odds they grew from around 2 million to around 120 million in seventy years! What was going on here, and what can we in the West learn from this?”
― Alan Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways: Reactivating Apostolic Movements