As the youngest high school football coach in South Carolina Division 4-A history, 24-year-old Carter Bolin* relished the challenge of motivating his team before games against bigger, better opponents.
Good news – Carter Bolin*, left, discusses Islam and the Christian gospel with Muslims near a mosque in Calcutta, India, West Bengal’s capital. As a missionary strategy coordinator, Bolin aims to train Bengali church planters to reach all 27 million Muslims with the good news of Christ.“I’d point across the field and tell my players, ‘Look at those guys. Every one of them has 20 pounds on every one of you. It’s gonna be fun to smack ’em,'” says Bolin. “Eventually my guys would start yelling, ‘Yeah! Yeah! Lemme at ’em!’ They might bounce off the bigger guys a few times, but they’d eventually wear ’em down.”
Bolin took his undersized, overachieving team to the state semifinals for the first time since 1950 – thrilling the whole town.
“I could’ve run for mayor after that,” he claims with a grin.
Instead, he joined the ministry staff of his church, East Cooper Baptist, next door to the Charleston-area high school where he coached. He spent the next 18 years helping mobilize the growing congregation – especially its young people – to follow Christ into the world. Local outreach spurred international involvement. About 30 East Cooper members have become missionaries after participating in short-term church mission trips.
On the flight home from a two-week mission trip to India, it was Bolin’s turn to be mobilized – by his wife, Vienna*.
“It was miserable, it was hot, it was all the things India can be,” he recalls. “But the people just broke our hearts. There was a spiritual void, and they were filling it with idols.
“When we got on the plane, Vienna looked at me and said, ‘I could never serve in India.’ By the time we touched down in the States, she was in tears. She said, ‘I realized that I trust God with my kids in a safe place like our home, but I don’t trust him enough to take them to India. We’re just paying lip service.’
“So we ended up mobilizing ourselves and our kids to India. We just felt, ‘If not us, who? If not now, when?’ It was time for me to put up or shut up, because this is what I’d been preaching.”
Attempt great things –
That was five years ago. Today, as a Southern Baptist missionary strategy coordinator, Bolin faces a bigger challenge than he ever encountered as a coach.Much, much bigger.
The challenge lies in the Indian state of West Bengal, where William Carey launched the modern missionary movement more than two centuries ago. Today it is home to at least 80 million people. The majority are Hindus – the primary focus of Christian missions among Bengalis since Carey’s day. But one in four Bengalis proclaims Islam. Muslims comprise a quarter of the 16 million people of Calcutta (Kolkata), West Bengal’s sprawling capital.
As in much of the rest of India, however, the real numbers can be found in the villages. In West Bengal and neighboring areas of India, Bengali-speaking Muslims predominate in about 30,000 villages.
Bolin’s vision and goal as a strategy coordinator is to see Jesus Christ glorified through a church-planting movement among the 27 million Muslims of West Bengal and nearby areas. How? By planting a jaamat – or house church – in every one of those villages.
It’s a vision that fits William Carey’s famous motto: “Expect great things from God; attempt great things for God.”
And it’s doable. It’s already beginning to happen. More than 100 jaamats – with about 1,000 former Muslims who have become followers of Isa Masih (Jesus Christ) – have sprouted across West Bengal during the past two years.
That represents only a typical month’s spiritual harvest across the border in Bangladesh (once part of Bengal), where several powerful church-planting movements among Muslims now count more than half a million believers. But momentum is gathering.
“We feel like we’re on the end of the runway getting ready for takeoff,” Bolin reports. “Things are starting to happen.”
What’s it going to take to reach the other 29,900 Muslim communities? Bolin’s team intends to see at least 50 reproducing churches begun in each of West Bengal’s 15 majority Muslim districts, along with three to five churches in each of Calcutta’s Muslim areas. These churches, in turn, will multiply to finish the task.
More than math
Bolin personally knows about 30 of the 100 current jaamat leaders. The rest are “second-generation” disciples – led to faith, nurtured and trained by other jaamat leaders or the Bengali church planters Bolin and his missionary team have trained.
Newlyweds – Kim and Julian Scarbrough*, a couple from South Carolina, delayed their honeymoon to save for a trip to India. They didn’t see the Taj Mahal or other tourist spots; they took the train to help missionary Carter Bolin share the love of Christ in West Bengal.“We want to build this into the DNA, into the very fabric and backbone of every jaamat: Now that you’ve heard the good news and received it, you must share it with neighboring villages,” he explains. “It’s the principle of reproduction, of multiplication, rather than addition.”
The positive response they’re getting transcends mathematics. Bengali Muslims – many of whom follow a form of “folk Islam” that incorporates Hindu and animistic beliefs – hunger for the truth most have never heard about God.
When Bolin or other missionaries and volunteers on his team accompany a Bengali church planter into a new area, they ask about village life, make friends and inquire about religious traditions. They intentionally seek out the local imam (mosque leader) or village head to discuss the Quran, Islam’s holy book, and what it says about Jesus. That serves as a bridge to the “before books” – the Old and New Testaments – which the Quran commands good Muslims to read.
“It’s a bridge,” Bolin stresses. “You don’t camp on it; you cross over it. It gives Muslims ‘permission’ to look into the New Testament.”
As each visit progresses, they pray that a “man of peace” will emerge – whether it’s the village leader or someone in the crowd that eagerly gathers around – who will become the key to reaching the community with the gospel.
“If you go as a learner and spend an hour just getting to know them, love them, play with their kids, talk to them about their goats and their harvest, have tea with them, that goes a long way,” he says.
Usually they get invited to stay for a meal or to spend the night. The dialogue goes on; often the whole village listens.
Not every encounter ends on a positive note. They’re asked to leave some villages. Once, an imam grew hostile during a group discussion.
“The crowd actually rallied around me, siding with me and countering his points,” Bolin recalls. “He was very angry, so as we left, I said, ‘Peace, brother,’ embraced him and thanked him publicly for allowing us to talk.
“A couple of guys followed us back to the vehicle. They asked for the Book (Bible), and they wanted to know how Jesus could make our lives so loving and caring. So in the midst of what I thought was a bust, since we didn’t get anywhere with the imam, these guys saw our message of love.”
Another time, a man, soaked to the skin, appeared at a village discussion. “Come in, brother,” said the Bengali church planter. “Where are you from?”
“I’m from across the river,” the man replied. “We heard there were some people here talking about Isa (Jesus), so I swam over to hear it.”
He listened intently, then accompanied the team to the next village to hear more. By the end of the day he had become a believer. Today, he leads a jaamat in his village.
Model, assist, watch and leave
As strategy coordinator for 27 million Bengali Muslims, Bolin mobilizes every partner he can find for the task: prayer support, new missionaries for his team, evangelical churches in India, Muslim-background gospel workers “on loan” from Bangladesh, volunteers from South Carolina. A recently completed “Muslim-friendly” edition of the Bengali Bible, he believes, is a landmark on the road to sowing the word of God throughout the land.
But the key to the villages is the Bengali church planters. With them, Bolin’s old coaching skills come in handy as he applies a tried-and-true training method: Model, assist, watch and leave.
“We’re cheerleaders, we’re encouragers,” he says. “We’re going to model it for you, assist you to do it, watch you do it – and then we’ll go do it somewhere else.”
On a recent trek through several Muslim villages, Timothy*, a church planter, stopped to mop his brow in the shade. “There are 1,600 villages in my district,” he said, with a determined gleam in his eye. “My vision is a church in every village. You pray!”
* Names changed for security reasons.