New Glasgow’s First Baptist Church is honouring modern-day martyrs by hosting one-man play on April 20 depicting how a Romanian Christian dissident survived prison and torture.
Titled Solitary Refinement, the solo play is about Richard Wurmbrand, who first converted to Christianity in 1938, after previously working as a Romanian Communist with Soviet support.
He survived the Second World War relatively unscathed despite his Jewish ancestry, but in 1944 Soviet troops invaded Romania and Wurmbrand began an illegal underground ministry as the victorious Communists cracked down on churches.
“Wurmbrand … was arrested and imprisoned as a result of his recent conversion to Christianity, because he felt that the principles of his new faith did not match those of the state,” said Rev. John Dunnett at First Baptist Church.
After his arrest in 1948, Wurmbrand spent three years in solitary confinement – held in a soundproof underground cell – and was released in 1956, whereupon he returned to his underground church.
He was arrested again in 1959 and sentenced to 25 years, suffering torture including mutilation, burning and being forced into a frozen ice box. During another torture session guards lashed the soles of his feet, ripping flesh off until the bone was exposed.
After being released under a 1964 amnesty, Wurmbrand made it to Norway, Britain and finally the United States. He was allowed to leave Romania after the Norwegian Mission to the Jews and the Hebrew Christian Alliance paid a $10,000 ransom to the Communist authorities.
Three years after his release, Wurmbrand founded the group Jesus to the Communist World, later renamed Voice of the Martyrs, which today helps persecuted Christians worldwide. It is this organization that is running Solitary Refinement.
“There’s a lot going on in the world we’re not fully aware of,” said Dunnett.
While Eastern Europe is now free, Christians still face grave persecution in Africa, the Middle East, North Korea and China.
In Iraq and Syria, hundreds of thousands have been forced to flee civil war and ISIS terrorists, who carried out a full-scale genocide against religious minorities before they were defeated by Western-backed forces.
In China, the government attempts to control Christianity by permitting a network of government-approved churches, but an underground movement also exists. Its members risk arrest and jail.
Dunnett also said that Bolivia has emerged as a possible concern. While it is a democracy, the government has passed laws regulating the public expression of religious faith.
But Canadian Christians are reaching out to help those persecuted.
Dunnett himself helped a young couple from Pakistan to seek a new life in Canada. He said that the wife, from a Muslim family, converted to Christianity to be with her husband.
Pakistani Christians have faced ongoing discrimination and persecution, including trumped-up blasphemy charges that can carry a death sentence.
“That put them in a very difficult situation, one that would not allow them to raise children in Pakistan,” Dunnett told The News.
Solitary Refinement starts at 7 p.m. on Friday, April 20 at First Baptist Church on 896 East River Rd. Admission is free but contributions will be accepted.
For more information, please visit www.VOMCanada.com/touring.
