““Indeed, someone from the Anabaptist tradition might argue that minority status and persecution are the natural and predictable outcome of attempting to live a Christian life, and it is the communities that coexist comfortably with state power that have departed from the norm. What matters is not the size or numbers claimed by churches, but rather the quality of witness demonstrated by Christians in their particular circumstances. Of course, Christians were persecuted in seventeenth-century Japan, and in many other places before and since. And just as evidently, Christians have often experienced the status of being persecuted minorities, or, commonly, persecuted majorities, sometimes in societies they had once dominated. Why should any historically informed observer expect matters to be different? As the letter to the Hebrews declares, here, we have no abiding city.””
