More Encouraging Updates from India!
Taking New Ground has been working in India for two years. We’ve also been training a team there to reproduce our ministry model all over the region. I was recently in a video call with our India team and heard a couple of very encouraging stories that I wanted to share with you.
Raja’s Story: College Students Turned Church Planters
Raja works among the Telugu in Andhra Pradesh. His state comprises the second most unreached part of India. Raja shared a story about how the Covid lockdown actually led to a growth in the Church. Listen as Raja explains in his own words how his concern about college students from his church turned out to be a victory for the Kingdom during the Covid lockdown:
When the lockdown started in India I pastor a small group of church people as a church and then I also lead several groups, small groups. So what happened is that most of them are engineering college students. So they went back to their villages. And what I was expecting is that they won’t have much fellowship, because most of them are from Hindu background and many of them don’t have churches in their villages, but what I saw was God working through them! They started house churches in their own houses. They started gathering people nearby from all the villages.
Pastor Raja
Instead of becoming isolated and alone, these college students became missionary church planters! Raja continues to meet with them and equip them as they lead.
Diwas’ Story: Decentralization for Multiplication
Diwas is from a very unique corner of India in the North East. I travelled to this part of the country about 8 years ago to teach Bible stories to groups of illiterate Christians living in remote villages of the Himalayan hills. This part of India is surrounded by Nepal, Tibet, Bhutan and Bangladesh. Diwas works to reach people in all these surrounding nations.
Diwas recently shared how several of the churches he’s been training in this region were static and failing to multiply, but restrictions placed on them due to Covid actually forced them to apply what he had been teaching them, and they are now decentralized and meeting in small groups that are evangelistically reaching others! His English is a little hard to follow:
What we had is, during this time, it’s a tough time, but during this time we had so many pastors with me, friends with me, pastoring churches, but what I could see from them is that they were having some difficulties with the church.
The church was quite big, but we were teaching some of the things [multiplying leaders and creating missional culture] and recently I have seen that those churches were not able to multiply, and they were stuck in their own problems, and they were stuck maintaining the church for a long time. But, recently the church has gone into the state where they cannot meet in the church [Covid lockdown], and now they have formed like 25 group cell churches around the area and which has led to more people into Christ and the pastor was really happy and he was sharing me that this is a big win and the pastors name is pastor ____ which is a part of our group. Another pastor also his name is ____ now has 7 groups with people added into it.
So, it’s a bad situation but actually we are into the winning place!
Pastor Diwas
Your Support Makes This Possible
Your support of this ministry makes it all possible. We need your help. The mission continues!
