Zane Pratt, vice president of Global Training for the International Mission Board, recently spoke on how Christians can bear suffering for the gospel and warned of the danger of compromise in America in his message at the 2025 New Mexico Evangelism Conference.
Pratt prefaced his message by sharing his missionary background. He and his wife served in New England, then moved to Central Asia around the time the Soviet Union was failing. As time passed, Pratt was eventually “demoted” to vice president of global training at the IMB.
To begin Pratt instructed the audience to open their Bibles to 2 Timothy 1:1-12. He read from the passage and opened the message with prayer.
Pratt shared that he and his wife got mixed reactions when they moved overseas to Central Asia. People commonly asked them, “Isn’t it dangerous?” Pratt said, “The answer to that is really simple. Of course, it’s dangerous. What a silly question. But see, here’s the thing: the normal experience of Christians throughout history, and normal today in most places, is that Christians suffer for their faith. It’s normally dangerous just to be a Christian. It normally involves suffering to be any sort of minister of the word and, in fact, just to follow Jesus, period. Importantly, for us, it’s normal in the teaching of the New Testament for believers to suffer. Those who are exposed to persecution are the norm. We are the weird exception.”
EDITOR’S NOTE — This story was written by Johanna Nelson and originally published by the Baptist New Mexican.
