South Carolina Baptists are impacting lostness in India. Six members from Kittiwake Baptist Church in West Columbia went on a 10-day trip to Delhi in early 2012 as part of the South Carolina Baptist Convention partnership, and the church already has plans to return next year.
On a trip earlier this year, a team from Kittiwake Baptist Church laid the groundwork for a partnership with IMB and local pastors in India.Pastor Tim Smith* said the trip was the next step toward Kittiwake’s goal of developing an Acts 1:8 strategy for missions. “We have focused on developing local missions first and then expanded out to Kentucky for the last few years,” he said. “Our next step was to take a global level, and we began praying about where God may lead us to form a partnership.”
Kittiwake Church member Otis Kennedy* went on a vision trip to India last year with Jim Austin, SCBC executive director-treasurer, and experienced firsthand the needs there. As a result, the church corresponded with the International Mission Board to see how it could be involved in a partnership, and Kennedy organized the January 2012 trip for his church.
“After my first trip, I sensed the call to go home and ‘sell’ my church on Delhi. It’s hard enough to explain the chaos of the city, and it was harder to explain the need I felt to return. I worked closely with the IMB to create a trip that would allow us to do as much as possible, and it ended up allowing the group to see what I had seen and experience what I’d experienced,” Kennedy said.
An estimated 23 million people live in Delhi, a city described as spiritually dark with a predominance of Hindu people and a growing number of Muslim converts. The Kittiwake team’s primary work was to prayerwalk Muslim and Hindu temples and neighborhoods where, they were told, no Westerners – and no Christians – had ever been. They also visited house churches and helped them identify unengaged people groups living in the city. The second half of the trip was spent on the outskirts of town at the Sewa Ashram, a Christian-based medical facility that cares for the destitute and dying.
” ‘Sewa’ means ‘practice of selfless service,’ and ‘Ashram’ means ‘spiritual community,’ and it is a place for the untouchables, the sick and dying, who don’t get help anywhere else,” Kennedy said. “Without organizations like the Ashram, these people will die. There they get food, medical treatments, and some return to work in society and support their families. Many come but never leave.”
As a result of the team’s experiences there, Kittiwake Church is committing to pay the annual salary of one of the Ashram workers. “We feel that our job is to help train and encourage local believers there and to help the churches gain momentum,” Smith said.
Kennedy described his missions-minded church as a “small church with a big heart.” That passion for missions can be seen in their Lottie Moon Christmas Offering goal, which, Smith said, was $1,600 nine years ago and last year was set at $12,000. The church ended up giving $17,000 to the 2011 Lottie Moon Offering. “As we have expanded on our Acts 1:8 vision, there are more and more people catching a vision for missions. In these financial times, it was an amazing thing,” he said.
The church also emphasizes that missions is not just about giving, but about going. Every member who is physically able is encouraged to experience at least one mission trip. “We don’t want to be missions tourists traveling the world, we want to establish a partnership with one place. Then as the relationship grows, the partnership becomes more effective,” Smith said.
There is a role for everyone in the India partnership, too: prayer commitment, encouraging a missionary in the field, missions giving, supporting missions teams sent from local churches, financially supporting a pastor or missionary in India or, like the Kittiwake Church team, going on a mission trip.
According to Kennedy, the Great Commission is the greatest reason other churches should become involved in international missions. “If you look on a map of unreached people groups, India has the highest concentration in the world,” he said. “Few Christians have been able to share the gospel with the 1.6 billion people living in India. If we believe as we say we do, what’s stopping us from sharing the gospel with them?
“We desire to see the gospel penetrate lostness, and there is no greater area of lostness in the world than India. What an opportunity for South Carolina Baptists to be on the forefront of what God is doing in the world and to be pioneers of the gospel in some of the darkest corners of the world.” – SCBC
*Names have been changed.