The title of our current series of timely Wilderness Voice articles is: The Ichthus Church. The ICHTHUS was a symbol used by early Christians to identify one another. During times of extreme persecution, a Christian would draw one of the two intersecting arcs of the ICHTHUS in the sand, if another person drew the other intersecting arc, then, they would know that they were fellow believers. The ICHTHUS or the sign of the fish was used because the Greek word for fish, “ΙΧΘΥΣ,” could be used as an acrostic for “Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior.”

Ι = first letter of Iēsous, Greek for “Jesus”

Χ = first letter of Christos, Greek for “Christ”

Θ = first letter of Theou, Greek for “God’s”

Υ = first letter of (h)uios, Greek for “Son”

Σ = first letter of sōtēr (Σωτήρ), Greek for “Savior”

Our current series of Wilderness Voice articles are intended to convince the church in America that the time has come for it to draw a line in the sand; that is, in the sands of the end-time. Due to evolving, escalating, and eventually excoriating persecution, Christianity will soon be driven from America's public domain. Christians will be forced to practice their faith incognito and their churches will be forced to meet underground. No longer will churches be allowed to meet publicly and in plain sight, unless sanctioned by the government and subjugated to it. Instead, churches insisting upon remaining under the Lordship of Christ rather than that of Big Brother will be forced to meet privately and in secret. 

Obviously, Christians in today’s America are in need of something like the ICHTHUS, something which will enable us, in the approaching days of impending persecution, to secretly identify ourselves to one another. The day is certainly coming, as Christ Himself predicted, that our public identification with Him will not just imperil our livelihoods and liberty, but our lives as well (Luke 21:12-16). In addition to our need of public incognizance, our churches, if they are to survive in an antichrist society devoted to their destruction, must transition from large public gatherings in multimillion-dollar church houses to small private gatherings in the homes of individual Christians. In short, America’s future church will be comprised of underground house churches, which we’ve chosen to call in this series of Wilderness Voice articles, as is testified to by the title of the series, The Ichthus Church.