A mute woman, whose mother described her as demon-possessed, came to the house church in New Delhi where the latest team from South Carolina was visiting. Team members said she looked like she was in a trance, nearly catatonic. They prayed for her as part of their visit.
The next day, the mute woman prayed to trust Christ and was immediately delivered. She told those gathered that a woman in white had appeared to her earlier and taken her voice, and this Jesus had given it back to her.
“That’s a conversation you don’t forget easily!” said Ted*, one of the volunteers.
Deliverance, healing, and miracles of all varieties — these are significant ways Hindus in North India are coming to faith in Christ in what is, by all accounts, a true church-planting movement.
National pastors are leading as many as 150 house churches — second and third generations from their own initial church plant. Nearly a dozen house churches were initiated in the 11 days that the most recent team from South Carolina was there. A leadership training event for eight church leaders, almost all of them new believers, included two or three people who will lead another church somewhere else in the next three months.
And South Carolina Baptists get to be part of it — part of writing church history, as Ted likes to describe it.
Seven teams are scheduled for this third year of partnership between the state convention and New Delhi. A team of seven spent 10 days in the city this summer, receiving training from International Mission Board personnel and working alongside national pastors in prayer, evangelism, discipleship and church planting.
“The purpose of the trip was to help establish partnerships between our churches and associations and national church planters in Delhi,” said Tim Rice, director of missions mobilization for the South Carolina Baptist Convention.
Three volunteers from Chester did just that. They developed a partnership with two national pastors that will include at least two teams per year to work with them on outreach and church strengthening.
“They could teach us a thing or two about discipleship,” said Terry* from Chester. “They really believe a person doesn’t have to know all the Bible in order to share their faith. And they really live out [the belief] that Jesus expects us to share his story and our story.”
The emphasis on personal sharing is intentional. More than one volunteer noted that national pastors and IMB personnel encourage new believers to immediately share their testimony — not after being trained, not even after understanding it all.
Many new believers don’t seem to need much of a push. Consider Brad’s* story:
“In one part of the city where there was no Christian work, we saw an older man get saved, along with his wife,” he said. “The first day we saw him, his left leg was numb, and he was constantly falling because he could hardly walk. Two of our guys led him to Christ and prayed for his healing, but nothing happened. The next day they gave this man a Bible. When they returned the third day, the man had given the Bible to his grandchildren and led his grandson to Christ. So our folks prayed with this man and his grandson, and when they looked up the older man was rubbing his leg. All the feeling had come back while they prayed.”
The combination of such miracles, deliverance, healings, and immediate and vocal testimony of new believers is leading to rapid multiplication of churches in New Delhi. While it’s occurring mostly in slums among lower and near-lower caste people, two members of this team saw spiritual fruit elsewhere.
“We got on a rickshaw with a guy going to the hospital to see his wife who’d been in the hospital since April suffering with cancer,” said Terry. “So we ask if we can join him on his visit and pray for his wife. Two days later she gets a report she’s 99 percent cancer-free. They both became believers. He was an oil executive, so they were in the harder-to-reach upper class.”
In another village, the team encountered a Hindu woman who said, “I know your Jesus.” She needed an important government document, and in the typical red tape of India, had been unable to get it. Someone told her to pray in the name of Jesus as a last resort, and when she did she received the document the next day.
“In a village of half a million where there was no Christian witness, God had gone before us,” said Terry. “I suspect she had a dream, and that was where someone told her to pray in the name of Jesus, but I don’t know. I do know that her testimony validated what we were sharing in that setting, and in moments the crowd grew from five to 30.”
The ease of drawing a crowd, and especially the openness to the gospel, stood out to several team members.
“I wish I could paint [a picture of] the desire in people’s lives, that they really want to hear some good news,” said Ted. “You can see it in their eyes, a hunger for something, though they don’t even know what it is.”
“The highlight for us was that openness to the gospel,” Terry echoed. “All it took was for my wife to comment on how beautiful a woman’s sari was, or for me to walk up beside someone and tell them I’d come from America to tell them about Jesus. Within five minutes of walking into one village, we were invited inside for tea where we shared Christ with a family, and now they want the national pastor to come back and start a house church in their home.”
“It’s a strategy of multiplication rather than addition,” Brad explained. “And it’s overwhelmingly a Holy Spirit movement,” he said. “In America we often plan for success whether God shows up or not. We don’t go out on a limb. When we pray for healing, we give God an escape clause: ‘I’ll pray for your healing but I’m ready to take you to the hospital after we pray.’ But these personnel, and especially the national pastors, are putting themselves in a situation where if God doesn’t show up it just doesn’t happen.”
The needs are staggering. In North India:
- 477.5 million people (one out of 12 people on earth) live there, in an area geographically the size of Texas and Missouri.
- 10,500 people die every day; fewer than 10 are believers.
- One local crematory (Hindus burn the bodies of their dead), which has been in constant operation for a thousand years, cremates 500 bodies every day.
- 30,500 people are born each day; 20,000 people need to receive Christ each day simply to maintain the current number of Christians in the world.
Brad uses the iconic image of the Taj Mahal to describe the spiritual darkness of North India:
“Here is this beautiful, perfectly symmetrical structure — though it is Muslim, not Hindu — that required massive amounts of labor and materials, took decades to finish, is renowned all over the world, and always elicits the comment, ‘Oh, how beautiful,’ ” he says. “But the bottom line is, it’s a mausoleum. It’s lovely, but it’s a tomb. It’s death. And at a Hindu temple, I saw women who leaned over, rubbed the steps beneath them, trying to capture the essence of some holiness from someone else who had walked over that step. All of it just illustrates the lostness. So who’s going to tell them? Who’s going to go?”
* Only first names are used to protect the identity of team members who anticipate future mission trips to New Delhi.