Before They Come for the Pastor, They Practice on His Children
There is a kind of courage we almost never talk about in church, and it belongs to children. Not the courage of the missionary or the martyr. The courage of a nine year old who bows his head over lunch at a school where the teacher has already told him what she thinks of people like him.
A new report out of Sri Lanka made me sit with that image for a long time. The National Christian Evangelical Alliance of Sri Lanka spent three years, 2023 through 2025, documenting what happens to children of religious minorities in the island’s schools. The report is called Growing Up Believing, which sounds warm until you read what growing up believing costs there.
Teachers scolding students for going to church. Teachers confiscating the Bibles children read during breaks. Children made to attend school on Sunday so they cannot attend worship. A student threatened with expulsion for declining to take part in another religion’s rituals. In a survey reaching 22 of the country’s 25 districts, 17 percent of teachers said they knew of students pressured or coerced into religious activities not their own: made to attend services, made to wear religious markings, made to carry oil and flowers and incense to festivals of a faith their family does not hold. One teacher in Ampara reported that a Hindu boy who visited a church on a Friday was punished by his own science teacher. The machinery is not choosy about which minority it grinds.
And when the adults of a community decide a church should not exist, the report shows where the pressure lands first. In Hambantota District, religious leaders demanding a pastor’s church be shut down found his 12 year old son home alone and intimidated him. In Nuwara Eliya, a pastor’s 14 year old son was beaten alongside the church’s leaders. In Gampaha, villagers protesting a church physically assaulted eleven believers, two of them girls.
Notice the pattern, because it is the whole point. The mob does not begin with the pastor. The pastor has a congregation, a phone, sometimes a lawyer. The child has a school corridor. Before a community works up the nerve to burn a church, it practices on the people least able to answer: it grades their homework, controls their recess, stands between them and the door. Persecution, like most evils, starts where the cost is lowest.
Here is where I have to turn the lens around. When Jesus’s disciples saw children being brought to him, they did what institutions do: they managed access, they shooed the unimportant away. And the Gospel of Mark records one of the very few moments where Jesus is described as indignant. Let the little children come to me, he said. Do not hinder them. We usually read that verse at baptisms, softly. Read it once from inside a Sri Lankan classroom where a boy’s Bible has just been taken, and it stops being soft. Hindering children on their way to Christ is the precise thing that made God angry.
Sri Lanka’s constitution and the international covenants it signed say a child cannot be coerced in matters of belief. The NCEASL report cites them all, patiently, the way reports do. But a circular from an education ministry has never once stood in a hallway between a child and a teacher who despises what that child’s family believes. Only two things stand there: the child’s own small courage, and the prayers of a church that remembers he exists.
So this piece is free, and it has homework. Somewhere in your church is a kid who is the only believer in his classroom, and somewhere in Sri Lanka is a kid who is the only believer in his school. Pray for the second one. Then go find the first one on Sunday and tell him you know it takes courage. He already knows. He is waiting to find out whether we do.
The report is called Growing Up Believing. That is not a title. In half the world, it is a dare.
Share this piece with a parent, a teacher, or anyone who thinks persecution begins with prisons. It begins with recess. And if you want the stories the wire services skip, the courts, the villages, the classrooms, join The Red Lighthouse as a member. We watch the small doors too.
Comments ()