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The Discerner

Scrolling Past the Martyrs

Scrolling Past the Martyrs

My thumb has habits my heart never approved. Somewhere in an ordinary evening scroll, between a slow cooker recipe and an argument about a movie I will never watch, my feed has shown me a church being raided on the other side of the world. Three items, three identical rectangles. Same size, same brightness, one flick apart. I would like to tell you I always stop. I do not.

The raid was real. On June 14, in Jiangyou City in China's Sichuan Province, sixty to seventy police and government personnel pushed into a hotel ballroom where Early Rain Covenant Church was holding Sunday worship, according to Fortify Rights and the church's own statement released through ChinaAid. They detained 33 members of the congregation. Two elders, Yan Hong and Wu Wuqing, received 15 and 14 days of administrative detention. Members who were not taken for questioning, including children and the elderly, were held in the ballroom into the evening, where some were pressed to sign an affidavit whose contents the authorities refused to show them. Most would not sign.

Early Rain has been raided before. Its founding pastor, Wang Yi, has been in prison since 2018, serving a nine-year sentence. The church, by every account, keeps meeting.

And I keep scrolling. That is the part of the story that belongs to me.

Forty years ago, Neil Postman argued that the trouble began with the telegraph, the first machine to deliver urgent news from everywhere to people positioned to do nothing about any of it. Information cut loose from action, he warned, drifts toward entertainment no matter how grave it is. He was writing about television. The phone finished his sentence. My feed is a machine for making everything weigh the same, and it is very good at its job. It has no setting for lament.

Consider what arrives weightless. Open Doors released its 2026 World Watch List in January: researchers counted 4,849 Christians killed for their faith in a single reporting year, about thirteen a day, and more than 388 million believers living under high levels of persecution or discrimination. One in seven Christians on earth. I believe those numbers. I have checked them. And I know exactly how they arrive: in the same smooth rectangle as the recipe, rendered at the same brightness, gone with the same flick.

The ancient church had the opposite problem, and its solution is sitting in plain sight. "Remember those who are in prison, as though in prison with them, and those who are mistreated, since you also are in the body," says Hebrews 13:3. Notice what the verse does not say. It does not say stay informed about those in prison. The first readers of that letter had almost no information: a name, a rumor, a letter months old. What the verse commands is not a news habit. It is a discipline of the imagination, done in the body. As though in prison with them. As though the cell were yours, the ballroom yours, your own children the ones held until dark.

They had no information and deep attention. We have infinite information and almost none. The verse was written for both conditions, but only one of them is ours, and the feed is engineered to harvest the exact thing the verse commands.

So here is a small discipline, small enough to survive an actual Tuesday. When the persecuted church surfaces between the recipe and the argument, stop the thumb. Read the item twice, which the feed will experience as an eternity. Say the names once, out loud if you can: Yan Hong. Wu Wuqing. Wang Yi. Then pray the verse instead of scrolling past it. Put yourself in the ballroom for one minute, among the children waiting for the doors to open, and stay there until the minute is over. This is not a guilt exercise. It is membership. You also are in the body, and a body that cannot feel its own members is not healthy. It is numb.

This week my feed will do it again. Somewhere in the stack, below a recipe and above an argument, there will be a rectangle with a church in it. The rectangle is weightless. What it carries is not. Thirteen believers a day are proof the word martyr has not retired, and a congregation that walked out of a hotel ballroom in Sichuan and will gather again anyway is proof the church has not either. My phone will never learn the difference between a recipe and a raid. It was never going to.

That job was always mine.

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