First Full Week of Teaching

Matthew 28:18-20, “And Jesus came and spoke to them, saying, “All authority has been given to Me in heaven and on earth. Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” Amen.”

I have now completed my first full week of teaching and I can say that I love to teach and engage the students. It is great to hear their testimonies of where they are from and how a majority of them want to go back to their villages or where they were evangelizing and plant a church.

Out of the ten students, eight of them plan on going back to the mission fields to plant churches. Two of them said they may want to go on to their Doctorate program in order to help teach the future church planters. I think this is a great distribution between church planters and academics. This will truly help to bring BBCM-ACPL to a fully indigenous ministry. They now have teachers in training and at the same time have the majority going into the villages to plant churches.

My days right now are filled with study, preparation and teaching. I am now on a committee with another Indian Ministry called IIM and they offer Ph.D. degrees. They are revamping their entire program and asked me to join, helping them with its redesign. They have asked me to teach a Ph.D. class on Worldview as it pertains to the Hindu faith and the impact on Christianity. The goal will be to be able to look through the eyes of a Hindu and then attempt to put into place a ministry system that will effectively witness to them.

According to all the leaders that I have been talking to here, they have all stated that just about all ministries reaching out to Indians still try to utilize methods that were brought to fruition in the West. The West then brings them here and tries to use the same methods and they do not work, as the average Indian Hindu thinks completely different from the average Western person. We tend to assume that a person has at least heard of Christ (whether correct or incorrect), or been to a church once in their lives, or at least have heard about Christianity through some medium. In the West we are taught more from the possibility that there is not a God in schools, and in the East, in particular India (as that is where I am), they are taught with the belief that God created the universe. Many have never seen a Christian church, nor heard of Christ, the Bible or anything to do with Christianity. We are worlds apart in many ways as it pertains to spirituality and our thinking regarding spirituality.

Fortunately there are many organizations and leaders here that are realizing and starting to team up to rethink, retrain and reorganize to become more indigenous in their outreach to the lost in India. I am just excited that we all can be part of helping them move toward this new outreach mission. Though I am here in person, it is all of us together, as it took all of you to allow us to be here to help in any way we can.

Continue to pray for our transition and that as I plan the Ph.D. class that it will be done according to God’s will. Through it the students will gain insight into new methods, drawn upon by their studies and through the Spirit, that will allow them to reach more Indians for Christ.