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Greg Kirscher

If Global Initiatives Week began with the goal of helping people think differently about the world, then the Persecuted Church event fit the mold perfectly.

As the week wound down to its last event, Liz Arnold stood at the church door pleasantly welcoming several dozen visitors. It had been an exhausting schedule, but for the director of Gundersen’s Global Partners Department, she was living out her calling.

“My passion is connecting people in La Crosse with needy people around the world,” she said.

This became evident as Arnold opened the meeting and told the audience that while “we hold all people in prayer,” this event would focus on the persecuted Christian Church – the world’s most victimized religion. More Christians have been martyred in this century alone than in the previous 19.

From the opening video, “Sing a Little Louder,” the event was a call for involvement in the world community. Set in holocaust Germany, the chilling video focused on a train, which under normal circumstances rolled by the front of a small a rural church. But on this particular day, it stops, along with its human cargo of Jews. When the cries of the Jews finally disrupt the pastor’s sermon, he picks up a hymnbook and encourages the congregation to sing louder, drowning out the cacophony of suffering.

One La Crosse pastor, in particular, has heard the cries of the persecuted. The Rev. Patrick Augustine, Rector of Christ Episcopal Church, spent a large portion of his ministry reaching out to the suffering – both Christians and non-Christians. Augustine’s quick smile and dancing eyes belie his intense passion to bring relief and encouragement to the hurting.

“It’s not trendy or fashionable to talk about the persecuted church,” he said, looking around at the empty seats.

A native Pakistani, Augustine comes from a long line of Christian ministers, following in the footsteps of his father and grandfather before him.

Quoting from Rupert Shortt’s book, “Christianophobia,” Augustine said that today, 200 million Christians (10 percent of the global total) are socially disadvantaged, harassed or actively oppressed for their beliefs.

Christianity is facing extinction from its Biblical homeland, he said. More than one-half to two-thirds of Christians in the Middle East have left or been killed in the past century. In 1948, more than 22 million Christians lived in the Middle East.

Today, they total less than 500,000. Hungary has become the first nation to form a special department to deal specifically with the Christian refugee crisis.

Augustine also said that in the Sudan, more than 2 million Christians have been killed, “but in the halls of Congress, western media or college campuses, there has been no hue and cry about the killing and crushing of human rights.”

But Augustine also walks the talk. Three years ago, several suicide bombers detonated explosives at All Saints Church in Peshawar, Pakistan, about 30 miles from the Afghan border. In the blast, 127 people were killed and about 250 of the 600 were injured.

Six months later, with soldiers standing on the roof and razor wire wrapped around the church, Augustine stood inside, preaching to the beleaguered flock. Subsequently, his home congregation at Christ Episcopal, and First Free of Onalaska, partnered together to bring medical and financial relief to the stricken Christians. He’ll be returning again next year.

Within several months of his visit, the Archbishop of Canterbury awarded Augustine with the Cross of St. Augustine, the highest honor of the Anglican Communion and cited him with the moniker, the “Voice for the Voiceless.”

According to Augustine, Christians living in areas of persecution often carry a cross.