When you were a child, the most exciting Sunday was when missionaries on furlough would visit your congregation and talk about the ungodly people they ministered to and the converts who were doing so well. They would show you souvenirs from their outpost, and slides of almost naked people. And when you went to bed that night, the dreams curled around your brain and left you numb. By morning, you were more pious and determined to give your life to Jesus and the mission field.

Of course, over the years other things have captured your attention, such as getting an education and a good job. You forgot the mission field when you bought that house and those cars. Every time you fly off for a great vacation on a peaceful isle, the dream of being a missionary fades into a deeper pit of corrupted dreams.

Well, now we're hearing that it is OK that you forgot about being a missionary because most of the people who get converted and begin to live a Christian life are probably going to be captured, tortured and killed.

In the United States we can attend the church of our choice and no one blinks an eye. But in some countries, every person who worships Jesus Christ is followed, usually persecuted and often martyred for the faith.

Churches are closed and sometimes destroyed. Christian schools and especially seminaries are special targets and have been shut down in many countries. People who are prisoners for the faith are often denied food and die from malnutrition. Many devout Christians are tortured until they convert to the religion sanctioned by the government.

In North Korea, it is reported by international agencies that the government has put thousands of Christians to death and closed many of the nation's churches. In Pakistan, blasphemy laws are used to suppress Christian teaching and preaching, according to Faithworks magazine, a bimonthly publication of the Associated Baptist Press.

If you are a world traveler, it is possible to avoid these places. Even if you visit some of the nations where believers are persecuted, you may never know about the government's war against faith. Even if you live in a nation where Christians are persecuted you may not know about the suffering, because it is a secretive system. It is not until those tortured souls escape to a free world that their stories are broadcast for the world to see.

When I hear about these people who suffer day after day for the faith, when I see their faces in church publications and read their stories, I am absolutely astonished that the Christian faith is so different depending upon where you live.

Here in the United States, in Canada, nobody suffers for the faith. Sure, there are preachers who are out looking for jobs because they crossed the wrong deacon. But for the most part, years go by and not one believer suffers for the faith.

Nobody gets chased through the streets because they knelt in prayer. No one gets beaten by police because they carried a Bible. No one in the United States has been killed because they worshiped in the wrong sanctuary. Do you know how unusual that is?

The Christianity we embrace in this country is completely sanitized and so clean that it is barely recognizable from that faith found in the Bible. How has that happened - that we have allowed the earthy and bloody story of God's salvation to become a story for afternoon tea? We are all guilty because the real truth is so hard to believe and so impossible to live.

We sit in our sparkling clean sanctuaries and never think of the people huddled in windowless rooms chanting softly the same liturgies and praying the same prayers and reading the same scripture. We never think of how dangerous, how utterly foolish it is for a preacher to whisper his or her sermon to a tiny room full of people. How could we ever understand how filled with danger that activity might be or how stupid it would be to declare faith in a public place?

We simply cannot imagine what believers suffer around the world. And, it would be my guess, in most congregations there would be a terrible rumble, if some brave preacher tried to tell you about the suffering and the martyrs who die for your right to worship.

Clark D. Morphew