India (MNN) – Every year Open Doors provides a ranking of the top 50 most difficult countries to be a Christian. This year India moved from number eleven to number twelve. Raina Miller with Mission India says this is not as promising as it seems.
“The reality is, if you look at this year’s list, compared to last year’s list, Syria jumped from a ranking of number 18 up to number six, which just bumped everybody else down one. So from our perspective, India’s just as troublesome for Christians. It’s just Syria got even worse. We’ve got story after story from 2025 of severe persecution that’s really concerning and dangerous for our partners and for other believers in the field, and we just don’t see India becoming any safer for Christians.”
Persecution Reports to Mission India
Open Doors lists persecution in India as “extreme”. This includes pressures from almost every side for the believer. Miller notes that this corroborates the report they’ve received as well.
“Unfortunately, persecution comes from all different directions in India. So there are state level laws that make it difficult to spread the Gospel. There are local leaders, like village leaders, who mistreat people who become Christians and prevent them from getting work in town. [They] even chase them out of their home and make them leave the village, make it impossible for them to get access to water. That’s kind of more on the higher level. But then on the personal level, there are people who their own family kicks them out of the home, or their own relatives stop inviting them to family weddings, or they’re not allowed to come to a family funeral. Things like that.”
(Photo courtesy of Mission India)
One Monday in September Miller heard about eight churches who had been disrupted the day before. That was just on one Sunday and just the churches that their partners reported to them. The month before, an extremist group interrupted a class training teachers – including several teenage women – to teach their own literacy classes.
Miller says, “They took videos, demanded to know what was going on, grilled them with questions. Keep in mind, this is a literacy class, but because it’s Bible-based, it’s attracting attention from extremists. Long story short, the adult literacy teachers ended up being escorted to sleep in a railway station that night, because everything else was so out of hand.”
Supporting the Church in India
However, despite the persecution Miller says that their partners don’t pray for an end to the persecution. They pray for God to continue to allow the Gospel to spread. They know that often the Church grows in times of great trouble and they want to see God move. Please join them in prayers.
Miller says, “Pray for their protection. Pray that the Gospel continues to spread. Pray that God strengthens them and gives them the right response when they get interrogated and that people would continue to receive Jesus, even with the possible consequences.”
If you want more specific information on how to pray, please visit Missionindia.org/pray.
Header photo is a representative stock image courtesy of Eddy Pellegrino from Pixabay.
