In this conversation, Nik Ripken and I wrestle with the difference between the Christianity many of us have experienced in the West and the faith of believers who follow Jesus, where doing so may actually cost them something.

What does it mean to make disciples in a culture built around comfort, safety, and avoiding suffering? Are we preparing people simply to attend church and live good Christian lives—or are we preparing them to follow Jesus when following him gets hard?

Nik shares story after story from believers around the world who have had to answer those questions in ways most of us never have. Their faith has been tested by persecution, loss, betrayal, and suffering. And yet, in many cases, that is precisely where their faith has become strongest.

One of the most challenging ideas in our conversation is that persecution often comes at the point of witness. If we keep Jesus to ourselves, we may never experience much resistance. But when we actually bear witness to him, opposition often follows.

That raises an uncomfortable question for those of us in the West: Have we mistaken the absence of persecution for the presence of faithfulness?

This conversation isn't about romanticizing suffering or making Christians feel guilty for living in relative comfort. It is about asking whether the kind of Christianity we are producing is strong enough to survive when comfort disappears—and what we can learn from brothers and sisters around the world who already know what it costs to follow Jesus.

Takeaways:

• The point of witness significantly influences whether one experiences persecution in their faith journey.
• Retaining a private faith may lead to a life without the trials of persecution.
• Healthy church leaders embody resilience and are shaped through experiences beyond mere comfort.
• The nature of discipleship must prepare individuals for the cost of obedience to Jesus.
• Witnessing boldly can often lead to persecution, which is a testament to the authenticity of one's faith.
• The challenges faced by the persecuted church offer profound insights into the true essence of discipleship.

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Today's episode is brought to you by the Lindenmeyers.

May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all.

It's at the point of witness that determines whether or not you're persecuted or not persecuted.

And if you keep Jesus to yourself, you have a good chance of never suffering for your faith.

Satan has two desires keep you from Jesus.

And secondly, if he can't keep you from believing in Christ, having access to him, he wants to shut you up.

Healthy leaders are not formed by comfort alone.

And healthy churches are not simply built by having the right programs, the right strategy, the right attendance, the right building, and even the right theology on paper.

At some point, what we believe has to be tested.

No question.

It has to move from conviction to witness.

And that's exactly where we're going today.

Welcome back to ministry Deep Dive.

My name is Travis Michael Fleming and this is part two of my conversation with missionary and author Nick Ripken.

And if you haven't listened to part one yet, I would highly encourage you to go back and start there because it lays the foundation for everything else.

At Apollos Watered.

We care deeply about helping develop healthy leaders who lead healthy churches.

And one of the ways we do that is by learning to see the church through more than just our own experience.

What we need are four lenses.

First and foremost, scripture.

That's our primary lens.

The ones through which everything else is evaluated, everything comes from that.

Secondly, church history.

We have to learn from those who have gone before us, those across time.

And then third, the hard fought lessons from those in the mission field, listening to our brothers and sisters who have followed Jesus in places where faith has caused them something.

And fourth, this is the newer one, neuroscience, paying attention to how God has created us and how people are actually formed.

We can map that out.

That's so cool that God has revealed that to us.

And together those lenses make up what we call missio holism.

It's the mission of God for all of life that's concerned not only with the task that's being accomplished, but who we're becoming in the process, becoming more and more like Christ.

And today, once again, we're looking through the third lens, the mission field.

Because there are things our persecuted brothers and sisters understand about discipleship, leadership, prayer, witness, suffering and sacrifice that those of us who are living in relative comfort can easily forget.

And Nick says something in this conversation that I have never forgotten.

I kid you not.

It's at the point of witness that determines whether or not you are or are not persecuted.

Let me say that Again, it's at the point of witness that determines whether or not you are persecuted.

Think about that for a second.

He argues that if Satan cannot keep you from Jesus, his next objective is to keep you quiet about Jesus.

And that raises an uncomfortable question for all of us.

Have we mistaken the absence of persecution for faithfulness, when in reality, it may sometimes reveal the absence of witness?

See, that's one of the issues we wrestle with in this episode.

And that forces us to ask some very difficult questions about the way we lead our churches and the way we form our families.

Are we forming resilient disciples?

Are we preparing people to follow Jesus when obedience becomes costly?

Or have we unintentionally created churches that can flourish only when everything is comfortable?

I mean, is Jesus worth my life?

And then an even harder one, Is Jesus worth the lives of my wife and my children?

These are not abstract theological questions for those that are in majority world cultures.

They're formation questions.

They're leadership questions.

They are the questions about the kind of disciples our churches are actually producing.

And this is why conversations like this matter.

Because healthy church leaders need more than ministry techniques.

Healthy church leaders need more than successful programs.

We need leaders and churches with a faith deep enough to endure suffering, courageous enough to bear witness, and surrendered enough to say that Jesus is worth whatever obedience requires.

So as you listen today, don't simply listen to Nick's stories.

Listen for what they reveal about you.

Listen for what they reveal about your leadership.

Listen for what they reveal about the health of the church, and ask yourself, what kind of disciple am I becoming?

And what kind of disciples are we forming?

And if following Jesus really began to cost us something, would our faith be strong enough to hold?

That's what this part two of my conversation with Nick Ripken is all about.

So grab your gear, buckle up.

It's time to think different, go deeper, and serve greater.

And it's time for another ministry.

Deep dive.

That's a challenging word to hear.

Actually, this entire conversation is, I think, challenging to many of our listeners, even though, as you said and as you were referencing, talking about Dmitri, you talked also about some of the other Russian believers you encountered.

And in interviewing them, God revealed some other things to you about suffering.

Actually, the whole thing, you go through the journey of meeting Russians and talking to people in Islamic countries and China, and you mentioned each one providing some different characteristic.

As you were having this idea of suffering and persecution revealed within the plan of God, what did you learn when you first went and saw and interacted with these Russian believers that had been so persecuted under communism.

I was incredulous.

I remember sitting with some pastors in Russia and I got upset at them and I said to them inappropriately and too loudly, why haven't you written this stuff down?

Why haven't you made books and movies out of this rival Hollywood?

And this very gentle white haired old pastor, been in prison 10 years, quietly at a break, took me to a window in the house and said, nick, I hear you have three sons.

And I said, yes.

He said, how often did you take them to the eastern side of the house?

And said, look boys, the sun's coming up in the east.

I said, I would never do that.

He said, why?

I said, well, it always comes up in the east.

I'd be stupid, foolish to make that kind of statement.

He said, well, that's why we don't talk about persecution, why we don't make movies and write books.

It happened to our great grandparents and our grandparents and our parents.

We're preparing our kids to suffer.

Persecution is like the sun coming up in the east.

And as I went to the Ukraine and sat with the evangelists, same story again.

You can't have resurrection without crucifixion.

And really I don't want one be seen.

You don't want to do as I saw some groups do.

I've seen groups define faith by persecution to such an extent that when their persecutors went away like they did for a period in Russia and the Soviet Union, they can't prove who the real Christians are because nobody's suffering.

And to get them to say, well, this is a season of life that God has given you, where you have a freedom to really broadly sow the gospel and go deeper until the things come crashing in again.

We'll take advantage of those days.

That's what persecuted Christians see about America, that by their stripes, by their blood, they are holding Satan hostage in his own backyard to buy you and I a period of freedom in America, in the west, to share Jesus mostly free of persecution and suffering.

And they say to us, don't you dare give up in freedom while we never give up in persecution.

And that is our witness to the life and death of resurrection of Jesus Christ.

You see, we think, well, we don't have persecution because we have a right form of government.

And yet almost all significant church growth in the world is in persecution.

It's not in the West.

Matter of fact, almost every denomination in the west is declining by 3 to 7% a year.

And so again, you don't pray for persecution you pray for faithfulness to witness the persecution is going to come.

But that is Satan's response to the love that Jesus brings and to a hatred that he doesn't want to give up his own territory.

And Satan will you watch him in Somalia killing these babies and raping these women.

And you watch all the starvation going on in Afghanistan.

Satan will sacrifice any part of his body to protect his investment, if you will, his territory, whereas Jesus will give all of his body and be crucified so that you and I have a chance of eternal life.

Wow, that's good news.

That's really good news.

It is good news.

And you draw this out with Russians and then in the Chinese especially, you saw a difference between their sufferings, you mentioned their attitude and their disposition.

Can you describe briefly what that was and the approach that the Chinese had that was different than the Russians?

Well, there were a number of things, but one of the things that the Russians did, the continents there were very smart and they swallowed the church piece by piece by piece over 70 years.

Then when communism failed, the church had been swallowed up to his chin and didn't even know it.

And they just did this piecemeal.

There's just ways they did this over decades at a time.

And all these pastors and religious leaders had to report to communist handler once a week.

And they just slowly got you used to telling them what's going on in the church.

And yet in China, by the time 48, 49 was over, every believer there knew that communism, the communists were not going to be happy until every church was destroyed and every believer dead.

Same go in Russia, but because they were so devious and they let you keep your churches and they let you keep your seminaries and they let you keep your houses and properties for your pastor.

And then what they did, they held you hostage to them.

You see, you don't allow evil to hold you hostage to God's blessings.

And if you need to walk away from a building, walk away from it.

You need to walk away from a seminary established, walk away from it.

And yet the Chinese and the communists in China ripped them out of the very fabric of society within a less than 24 month period that the Chinese believers knew well, they're going to kill us, they're going to kill every one of us, so we might as well go out loving, go out living and go out witnessing.

And so they knew there was no compromise.

And yet in the Soviet Union, some of the places in the satellite countries when the records were communism fell so quickly, brother, that the Church got all those records of what pastors and denominational workers told the bad guys.

And some of those places, 90% of the clergy, denominational leaders lost their position in their church, in their denomination because of what they had told on their church members to the bad guys.

Can you imagine?

They take you, Travis, you've got kids, you've got a wife, and you're sitting in that chair across from your communist handler and they say, no, Travis, I like you.

I really don't want anything bad to happen to you.

But you know, Travis, you know your wife walks through these back streets coming from the market, you might, Travis, you might want to tell her she needs to stay where the light is because we're trying to stop it, but we can't.

But assets being thrown in the face of some of the pastors wives.

Oh, I'd hate Travis to see something happen to your wife.

So you might want to keep her at home.

And they do that with your and what they'll do.

They take your kids, they put them in the middle of a gym and the whole school's there and they ridicule your children 9, 10, 11 years of age.

They put your children in the gymnasium and in front of all of their friends.

They ridicule the children of the pastors and the leaders.

They make your kids stay after school, stand at attention before the principal's desk.

Administrators, teachers are there and they make fun of your kids because their parents are Christians.

And your nine, seven, eight year old kids come home and say, why can't we be like other kids?

Why can't you get a real job?

Do you know what they're doing to be there as that plays out?

If their parents love their enemies and their parents do good to those who hate them and despitefully use them and spit upon them, about 12, 13, 14 years of age, their kids will look at the lives of their parents and the lives of the persecutors and they choose Jesus.

See what the communists know, what the persecutors know.

If they can separate yours and my kids, our kids, from our faith, in one generation, Christianity's dead.

And what has not happened in persecution is happening in America.

That our kids are walking away from church at 17, 18 years of age and certainly by their first year in college, without a shot being fired, without anybody being tortured or anybody going to prison, we're losing that whole generation.

How are we going to start over?

You mention this, that suffering really is the key to helping not just purify but authenticate the faith.

I don't Know if you've read Christian Smith's book Souls in Transition.

He is a Notre Dame researcher.

And they did the largest study on religion of American youth, although it was under the guise of something else.

Because if they said religion, they the answers would be skewed.

And they wanted to know why these kids that did stay in the faith, why?

And he really isolated it, if I remember correctly, down to three factors.

He said, number one, the parents modeled what they taught.

Number two, there was another adult outside of the home that verified or supported what the parents said.

And he goes, number three, they suffered for their faith.

Wow.

And that seems to fly in the face of what has been largely taught in America.

I was speaking to a man who runs a college ministry at the University of Illinois in Urbana Champaign, and he was talking about the younger people that are coming in today.

And I said, what did you mean?

He said, the kids coming in now lack grit.

They lack a stick to it.

Iveness.

They don't know how to communicate very well with people.

Part of that's an online world in which they've been raised.

He said, but he goes, they lack a steadfastness.

And I said, well, what do you mean?

He responded and said, have you heard of helicopter parents?

And I said, yes, the parent that's always over the shoulder looking at the child.

And he goes, have you heard of a snowplow parent?

I thought, no, what's that?

And he said, it's the parent that clears away any opposition that the child has received so that they never have to suffer.

But it seems that suffering is one of the mechanisms that God uses to not only authenticate the faith within ourselves, but to show the reality of who Christ is in his kingdom to those who are outside of his kingdom.

After all that you have learned, and I know we are only scratching the surface, reading through the book, you visited how many different countries?

72.

Yes, 72 countries you met with believers.

How many interviews did you conduct, roughly?

I've documented 600, but probably 700, 700.

Believers that are in massive persecution.

And how long were these interviews?

These weren't just 20 minute interviews.

No, we don't just say, how'd you come to Jesus?

An adequate one is four hours.

You want to hear from their first memories.

Say, for instance, with a Muslim.

When did you.

As they're telling your life story, you want to know who mom and dad are.

You want to know about their education.

You want to know conservative, secular.

You just want to listen, just Want to listen?

People love to tell their life story.

Just not ask questions.

Just listen like you do so well and let me just rant and rave.

And then what you're listening for is when you first heard of the Bible, what were you told?

First heard the name Jesus, what did you feel?

What were you told?

And you're looking for all those things that led up to their conversion and who baptized them.

For instance, I have a column where Westerners are involved.

And the more that Westerners are involved inside of persecution without language and culture especially, the deeper the persecution is because of the outsider, not because of who Jesus is.

And so we're looking for those correlations.

What led up to your suffering?

Did you learn from it?

Did the church learn from it?

What'd your family say?

Was there growth?

Did things go back when Judas shows up?

See, there's a whole thing every time.

When a church, the body of Christ usually in homes, when there's a critical mass of believers for the first time emerging in a place, Judas always shows up from the inside.

Judas is one of the clearest examples that God is up to something.

And how you deal with Judas will determine.

If you focus on Judas and the crucifixion, you'll fall back in 10 to 20 years.

It'll take you 10 to 20 years to get back where you are today.

If you focus in all that horrible betrayal on Jesus and the Resurrection, you're just Acts two is around the corner.

Pentecost is ahead of you.

So what you do with Judas is a tipping point.

But almost no one in the Western church knows about Judas because Judas shows up when we are a threat to Satan, when we're an absolute threat to Satan, those Bible stories come into play.

And so all of these things that you're saying is very, very helpful to me.

Now, no sane person prays for persecution.

What you're praying for is to be faithful in season and out of season, knowing that persecution is going to be a byproduct of that.

And yet what my culture is doing is holding up things like an abortion and homosexuality, which I believe we must have a very strong biblical stance on that.

But are we willing?

Here's why I think we're coming short.

In the church, we do a good job of giving women options rather than killing their babies.

Homosexuality, I don't know what it does to us, but we stand at a distance and throw rocks.

But we're asking governments to pass laws to protect church from our social issues that we feel strongly about.

When believers in persecution, why they are persecuted is not because they don't have social stance, they do.

But the reason they're persecuted is that they've come to Christ and they're abode in their witness to their family, their neighbors, their friends at work.

They know how to share Christ with others.

And yet Islam has the same social stance on abortion and homosexuality as Christianity does.

Now, am I going to have a strong stance on those two social issues?

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

But the difference between me and an Islamic stance is I am going to be willing to give my life for those who practice what I feel is non Christlike social practices.

And I think that's what makes us different.

And so if I want to identify with my brothers and sisters in chains, this is the hardest thing I ever say, Travis.

Right now, if I want to identify with my brothers and sisters in chains, of course I pray for them as they pray for us, but I am they're in chains because they're coming to Jesus and they're sharing Christ appropriately throughout the strata of society.

So the way that I identify with my brothers and sisters in chains is by giving my life to Jesus and sharing Christ with others.

But when I the opposite is true.

When I keep Jesus to myself and I deny my family member, my friend, that mean person at work, access to eternal life, not only am I failing to identify with my brothers and sisters in chains, I'm identifying with the ones that chained them.

By keeping or giving my witness, I choose to identify with.

The persecuted are the persecutors.

Oh my goodness.

Oh my goodness.

When I realized what believers in persecution were trying to teach me, I couldn't breathe.

I couldn't breathe because they had already modeled for me.

I already knew evil.

Satan's two biggest objectives is to keep people from having access to Jesus.

And he's doing a mighty good job of that globally.

And secondly, you know what, brother?

You can come to Christ in Saudi Arabia and North Korea, theoretically.

And if you keep Jesus to yourself, you have a good chance of dying at old age in your bed.

It's at the point, not the point of government, it's at the point of witness that determines whether or not you're persecuted, are not persecuted, set the point of witness.

And if you keep Jesus to yourself, you have a good chance of never suffering for your faith.

Satan has two desires.

Keep you from Jesus.

And secondly, if he can't keep you from believing in Christ, having access to him, he wants to shut you up and make you keep Jesus to yourself.

And what believers in persecution have refused is to shut up and they're not ugly about it.

They go and give medicine to their torturer.

They go and pray over that person that beat them when they're at the end of their life.

I've interviewed.

I can't tell you it's not going to be in the hundreds, but be in the scores of former security policemen who came to Christ by torturing our brothers and sisters and being loved in return.

And you know what?

They learned that from Jesus.

They learned that from Stephen.

That's why you don't want to put the Bible in past tense, but the Bible in present active tense is a dangerous, dangerous thing because it'll send your kids to the end of the world.

It'll call out your mom and dad, and they won't get to see their grandkids grow up because they're somewhere out just serving the Lord.

And it's something, maybe for another time together.

But pagans bless their children more often to go to the mission field than Christians do.

Ouch.

That one hurts.

Because pagans, pagans will make up a reason for our going.

I came home when all that stuff in Somalia wasn't working and looking for help, and I came here to Kentucky to see my dad.

I walked into the only restroom.

Restroom, the only restaurant in my little town, and all these old men patting you on the back and saying, way to go, boy.

We knew you had it in you.

And that never happened to me.

My older brother was that kind of person.

And they put me back where the Rotary Club only meets and gave me a real plate and real silverware, and everybody is.

And I said, dad, what's going on?

And dad said, I told him what you did.

I said, dad, what'd you tell them?

He said, I told them how you brought those 32,000 troops into Somalia to save those people.

And I said, dad, I didn't do any such thing.

He said, were you there first?

I said, yep.

He said, did you write about it, give interviews?

I said, yes, sir.

He said, so you shamed America, shamed other countries, and they had to do something about it.

And I thought, lordy.

And then after went down, I'm a mile away.

And we came home after that for a short visit.

I said, dad, where are you going to tell your friends now?

He said, I've already told them.

I said, oh, no.

I said, what did you tell them?

He said, I told them they didn't listen to you and they had to leave.

You see what non believers will do.

My dad came to Christ after our son died, but they will make up A reason of why their kids are out there.

Church people know we only go for one person, one reason, Jesus.

And if Jesus is not worth their lives and the lives of their kids and their grandkids, they're not going to bless them to go, wow, Nick, you.

Bring up such a challenge to the Western Christian mind.

That seems to be the everyday through the New Testament.

Yes.

Through our experience of our brothers in the majority world cultures.

Right.

In our culture today.

It's my contention, and I say the west, the American church, that we don't suffer from a hard persecution as much as what I would call a soft persecution.

And what I mean by that is it's not.

I mean, we don't have to in many ways suffer.

We don't suffer like those do in other cultures.

We suffer a thought of litigation, reputation, that kind of thing.

But the reality I think is, is we're so addicted to our creaturely comforts and we're so distracted by our busyness by Netflix, by scrolling through YouTube on our phones, that we're too distracted to even think on these issues.

They seem so far removed from our everyday experience.

How does the church in the west recover this sense of urgency?

And there is a soft persecution, what I like to call a pleasureful forgetting.

And in the majority world, there's a hard persecution, which is a painful remembering.

How can we combat that soft persecution here in the West?

Let's talk about us guys on the mission field.

Whether you're charismatics, Baptists, whether you're with Frontiers, ywam om, whatever groups out there, we have seven single women for every one single man.

It's like men in our churches, brother, are praying God.

Here am I, send my sister.

And if you go to the hard places, like when we got kicked out of Yemen, we had 21 single women and one guy.

And the harder the place, the more women we have, the less men now.

So the question you and I need to talk about is, over time is what is it in Christian church culture that's emasculating men?

One of them obvious to me is our culture just does the pastor, teacher thing.

And young men, that's what they have.

If they are watching men lead, that's the role they see cleaned up, sheep among sheep.

Nothing wrong with that.

But Jesus is quoted, some are given the role of apostle, church planner, evangelist, pastor, teacher.

We've added those first two or three out.

We don't have that model.

And so that's why a lot of new people, workers like ourselves, I avoid a lot of times the word Missionary, but they go over and they evangelize until they can see enough people to have baptized, and then they gather them so they can pastor them.

But a pastor is always a local person, not a foreigner.

The foreigner, we're bait for Jesus.

We let local people fish with us and often doesn't turn out well for the bait.

But we're like Paul, we're going from place to place to place.

We do it in the language, we do in the culture.

But this thing about where we're having so many women show up and the men are not showing up, the pastor teacher is just one piece of that, a bigger piece that we could talk about a long time, and I think you could help me is why men are not coming is because my home culture lies to us.

Now think of Christian men around the world.

Picture fathers just not in persecution.

They're in rural Ethiopia, they're in southern Sudan, they're in the Congo, they're in South America, they're up the Amazon bases.

They're making, if they have a job, they're making one to two dollars a day.

So they're a barter economy.

They don't have disposable income.

And yet my culture tells me, ripken, if you're going to be a man of God, it is your responsibility to see that your wife and children married appropriately.

If that's true, have the best medical care, cleanest water, the best education, the best shelter, and above all else, you are responsible for their security.

What we've just said, and that's by me saying that we've just said to 90% of the Christian fathers of the world, you have no chance whatsoever of being a good father, a good husband, because you cannot protect your boys three and under from Herod's killers.

If Herod soldiers want your wives and daughters, they're going to take them.

You're lucky to send one child to school and that will never be your daughter.

In rural parts of Islam, girls are married at 14.

Education is the number one factor determining what age they married.

And the guy's usually 30 years of age.

And I can go on and on and on, but when I talk to guys, when their wives are willing to go to the Somalias and Afghanistan, the mountains and the deserts of this world, and their husbands want to go, and I can name some places and those places need Jesus, but they're just the more dressed up, Western oriented places.

It's just because of this lobby believe.

But see, for me, I was raised Travis and I hear my grandfather and father say often I'd rather be a poor man and go to heaven than a rich man and go to hell.

I thought that was in the Bible.

And so when I got to Africa, that was my biggest adjustment.

I'm from a very poor family in Kentucky, and so I get there, we have access to medical care.

Have to drive there.

We have access.

I dug a water well, so we had clean water.

None of the villages had that unless they come to our place.

We have access to regular food that varied.

We had fair security, we had nice housing.

But having access to more than survivability put me in the top 5% of the richest people in Africa.

Top 5%.

So now I'm the rich guy going to hell in my mind.

And I've had guys tell me, and I am not.

I am not picking a Second Amendment fight.

I'm not going to do that.

But I've had men after man, father after father, husband after father, pump me in the chest with their finger and said, I will not go to these places because they will not allow me to take my guns and I cannot protect my family.

And I asked them, so what's your job?

Food, water, shelter, education, medicine, security.

So I asked them, what is it that you let God do?

And they're dumbfounded.

And the wives will go over and get in their laps and put their arms around their husbands and weep and say, honey, that's what I've been trying to say to you for years.

I have a God, I need a husband.

They're not the same person.

And so while our culture tells us Christian men what it means to be a godly parent, that's been one of the most hurtful things that I've had a hard time responding to is, by implication, over.

You're going to take your wife with you?

No, I'm going to leave her for 35 years.

You're taking your kids with you?

No, I'm going to let my family raise them and just tell them they don't matter to me when they are the best missionaries that we've ever had out there.

And the whole implication is you're not a good husband, you're not a good father, because you're taking them out of these places, America, where they have all this good stuff.

And yet 9 out of 10 of our kids that grow up on the mission field finish in the top 90 percentile of however you measure success, emotionally, spiritually, whatever.

Educationally, they finish up in the top strata.

Now 10%, my goodness, they fall hard, and they almost never can adjust back here.

There are those prices to pay.

But the question is, we got to answer is, what does it mean to be a man of God?

What's my role and what's God's role?

And we fight over this verse about, women, submit to your husbands and to the Lord.

And we almost use that to fight over church positions.

But you know what the next part of that verse says?

Women, submit to your husbands as unto the Lord.

Husbands, love your wife as Christ loved.

The church and gave himself up for her.

So that's the part we don't remember.

And when Muslim women see, Watch me.

Watch Ruth defer to her, ask her to tell Bible stories in a gathering and attract it to her after 45 years of marriage.

And they will say, as we tell these Bible stories, I can't believe there's a man on earth willing to give their life, oh, yes, for his honor, but for the love of his wife.

That's incomprehensible.

That's what we get to do.

That's what my wife and I and our kids get to do.

And what a joy that is to let them look in on our marriage and our parenting.

And if there's anything that we've sacrificed, man, a hundredfold's been given back to us.

Let's go back for a moment.

You were talking about.

I mean, we've been talking about sacrificing not only ourselves, but bringing our family along.

Because Christ calls us, yes, he calls us as individuals, but yet if we're part of the family, the children are going to inevitably experience some type of sacrifice and blessings.

Yes, yes.

Through that, you tell a story in the book.

I can't remember if it was Russia or China.

It's the man that you had to interview.

And he made it that he laid out the conditions of the interview.

And he's hiding behind a bush, right corner of a room.

Was that in China or Russia?

It's Islamic setting.

Oh, it's Islamic.

Okay.

Central Asia setting.

Central Asia.

Central Asia here, where all the nonsense is taking place right now.

And can you just tell that story very quickly?

Because I found myself drawn in.

This is a very difficult man, a man that I don't think many of us could ever really identify with until it gets to the challenge that you laid out.

But tell that story briefly.

When the last country invaded his country, he was a freedom fighter.

And he said with his own hands, he'd killed over 100 people.

Some of them, he led a group of.

Of Islamic freedom fighters.

And he talked in a dead voice of skinning people Alive and let me back up a little bit.

I had a number of Westerners, said, this is guy you need to talk to.

But nobody knew where he was, nobody knew his name.

And finally somehow word filtered to him and he sent me word.

And he said, fly to this city.

When you get to this city, call this number.

I did that and I called that number, said, fly to this town, this city.

So I flew to a smaller city.

I got there, called a number, fly to this city.

I flew to this city, got there, called a number, said, get a taxi, go to this part of the city, got out of the taxi.

They said, look to your right, go to this building, walk up to the seventh floor, walk in, open the door, stand under the light bulb, don't move.

That's where I stood for six hours, talking to this guy with a bright light bulb at my forehead.

He's behind a potted plant.

I can hear his voice clearly, I can see his saddle.

That's all I can see.

And this guy tells me about the people he killed and how he began to dream of the blood on his hands that other people he'd killed and throats he had cut and, and skinned alive, and how in successive nights over the weeks that blood grew and dripping off his elbows.

And he said, I knew I was going hopelessly insane when I started seeing the blood in the day.

And no matter washing or scrubbing, I couldn't get the blood off.

And he said, I was just about to take my life and I dreamed.

And there was a man clothed in white in my language.

He said, I'm Jesus.

Messiah, he said, had scars in his head, his hands and his feet and his side.

Not an unusual dream for Muslims to have, but said, if you find me, I'll take the blood off.

This guy walked to three countries looking for you, looking for me, because we're not looking for him.

And he put pieces of the story together and there's one day he found the Jesus film in his language and gave his life to Christ.

And Christ took the blood on himself as he does.

This man immediately became an evangelist of his people.

And see, that's the thing.

See, if you're where Christ is not known, you're automatically an evangelist, church planner.

There's nothing to pastor, there's nothing to pastor.

And so we don't even know how to start in environments like that.

But let's just leave that for a moment.

And so he's telling me this story for six hours behind this light bulb and, and it was life changing.

I call him the toughest man I've ever met.

He was.

And they.

After he became a Christian, they called him a few times.

They beat him, they broke his bones.

There was a time when his old squad, or whatever you want to call him, caught up with him, and they began to beat him with rifle butts and they broke his elbows and some of his bones in his feet.

And there was a believer among those 15, I think about 15 men that only God knew about and said to the others, hey, we're being foolish.

If we kill our old commander quickly, we can't find out who he's contacting on both sides of the border.

Let me take him to the next town.

I'll get him patched up.

When you come back through from your patrol, then you can torture him more wisely.

Slowly, we can get the names out of him.

So that believer put that believer on the animal.

I think a donkey or something took him next city, patched him up and smuggled him out of the border.

And so years later, I meet him under his conditions.

And so he's talked and he's done.

And my life is.

I'm just.

All these wheels are turning, and I'm thinking, I'm listening to the Apostle Paul walking in the Old Testament.

But that's what Apostle Paul did in the New Testament.

He was walking in the Old Testament.

It's on his stripes and on the cross that Jesus carried at the New Testament, emerged from the Old Testament in their lifetimes.

And I just don't really put all those pieces together until I'm experiencing it.

But I did say to him, after six hours, you know, my life's changed.

I don't know.

I feel so lost.

Do I even know Jesus?

When I look into the mirror of your faith, I felt that so many times.

And I said, but, you know, you told me that you got a wife and kids, and yet after the next six hours, you never mentioned them again.

How do they figure into your ministry?

How do they help you?

How do you do this together?

Because I know when the men do this by themselves, the harvest is going to be 90% men and 10% women and families.

And it's not going to go anywhere.

It's not.

And so it's families that reach families.

The smallest unit that can survive and thrive in persecution is when a family comes to Christ.

One by one by one, they come to Christ.

Satan picks them off one by one by one.

Okay, I've got all these little satellites going around us, and sorry for that, but I said, but you haven't mentioned them in six hours.

How do they figure in your ministry?

And he leaped from behind that potted plant to where I'm standing and grabbed me by the shoulders and began to shake me.

And I about.

Can I say this?

I about wet my pants again.

And they don't teach you that in seminary, that when fear comes upon you, you pray and you.

Yes.

And I was.

And he's shaking me and I'm thinking, oh, he killed 100 people now.

I brought that back out in him.

And he began to shake me and yell.

And my face spitting on me.

How can God ask it?

How can God ask it?

I said, well, if you stop shaking me, I'll trying to help you find the answer that.

I said, how can God ask what?

And he said, I've given him everything.

And he had.

And my body's been broken.

I've been almost frozen to death.

I've gone without water for days at a time.

And what I go to bed living in fear of is that God will ask of my wife and children what he's asked of me.

How can he ask it?

I have scars on my heart that were very raw because our son had not been dead very long.

And I chose for one of the first times to tell him that story and tell it in a way that I'm not going to tell on the radio.

And I told him that.

And I told him what it was like to watch four of my brothers be killed in one day and not be able to bury their bodies.

And just to say, I've not been through what you've been through.

But I just asked him, is Jesus worth your life?

I said, this is what I have to ask of my family.

Is Jesus worth your life?

The life of your wife and the life of your children.

Is Jesus worth it?

And we just made a music video with Erskine on a song that he and Matt Papa and others helped us write some years ago.

It's a marvelous somebody night on.

Go on YouTube and look at Erskine E R S K I N and is he worth it?

It's a powerful, powerful.

It's from the clips from the film.

The toughest man I ever met is featured in that music video.

And yet he came out and.

And I asked him that question.

And he's holding me and he's weeping, and he's weeping, just broken.

And he wiped those tears away almost in anger.

You could see, you know, he's not used to crying.

And he said, I'm going home.

And I've gone home.

I'm going to get my wife, I'm going to get my kids, and we're going to do this stuff together.

Because I have no right, he said, I have no right to cheat my wife and kids out of the joy for suffering for Jesus.

And I walked out of there broken, crying, saying, lord, what have I done?

What have I done to this family?

And the Holy Spirit said, you've done what I told you to do.

You talked about the nature of the kingdom of God.

And you put in perspective that a man had 100 sheep, cattle, camels, goats, and he goes out and he finds that one's missing.

And see, we tell ourselves the story.

We don't tell us the story.

Biblically, it says, does he not leave them in the open country?

See, in our brains, he leaves them in a barn or corral or a craw or something.

He doesn't.

He leaves them in an open country.

And does he not go, take that one beast and carry them home and have a feast?

And we say to churches, do you understand?

Jesus is saying that we, the 99, have eternal life.

We have it.

And there is no true tragedy to get to go home to Jesus early with that for the sake of one Al Qaeda, one Taliban family, one ISIS unit of a family coming to Jesus.

God says 99 church members are disposable income, because I've already washed you with the blood of the lamb, and you have eternal life.

And nothing they can do that can keep you from having eternity together.

Our stuff in the west has become our eternity.

It has.

And so I'll never forget his response.

I can't get in touch with him.

He's such a. I won't really say a moving target.

He is a target and he is moving.

But see, a lot of these folks, it took miracles for me to find them, to walk alongside of them, and there was no cell phones.

And really trying to keep up with them the way technology is today would put their lives in further risk.

But I hear pieces of things coming out of there at times.

At times I hear that like with Dimitri, his son now is chaplain of the prison.

Other times, these people disappear, and I only assume that they've allowed me go home to Jesus.

And this is.

You see, you and I are not doing a talk show.

We're talking about the nature of eternity, the nature of being created in the image of God.

And if Jesus is who he says he is, then he's worth it.

And if he's not, then we should stay home and keep Jesus to ourselves.

What a conversation.

And once again, we're not done.

This is only part two of my conversation with Nick Ripken, and there's still more to come in part three.

One of the things that stands out to me in this conversation, I don't know about you, but for me it's it was that healthy churches are not simply churches that are growing, organized, or culturally relevant.

Healthy churches form disciples who can remain faithful when following Jesus cost them something.

And healthy church leaders are not simply people who know how to cast vision, build teams, or manage complexity.

Healthy leaders are people whose lives bear witness to Jesus, People with enough depth, resilience, courage, and surrender to keep following him when obedience gets difficult.

That is one of the gifts our persecuted brothers and sisters give us.

They help expose the difference between a faith that is merely comfortable and a faith that is actually durable.

They remind us that witness matters.

They remind us that sacrifice matters.

They remind us that Jesus is worth more than our comfort, our security, our reputation, and even the plans we have for our lives.

And that leads to a question worth sitting with what kind of disciples are we actually forming?

Are we preparing people merely to attend church?

Are we preparing them to actually follow Jesus?

Are we giving people enough depth to ensure that they can endure hardship?

And are we forming leaders who can remain faithful when the pressure rises?

See, those are the kinds of questions we want to keep asking here at Apollo's Water.

So if you care about becoming a healthier church leader and helping build a healthier church, I want to invite you to stay connected with us.

Go to ApolloSWater.org and simply join our email list.

That's it.

Give us your email address.

We'll make sure you know that when Part three of this conversation with Nick Ripken is released, along with other resources designed to help you think different, go deeper, and serve greater.

And in Part three, we're going to keep pressing into these same issues even further.

What faithful looks like, what the global church can teach us, and what it means for those of us leading and serving in the church today.

So you don't want to miss that.

And if this episode has challenged you, share it with another leader.

Send it to your pastor, your elders, your staff, your small group leader, or someone you serve alongside.

Use it to start a conversation with what does a healthy, resilient, faithful church really look like today?

Until next time, this is Travis Michael Fleming signing off from Ministry Deep Dive.

Stay watered, everybody.