What If You Didn’t Speak English?

Imagine you live in poverty in the most populus nation on Earth. You not only don’t speak English, but you also have little if any access to education for yourself or for your children. You purchase your food the day you eat it. No work; no food. Your travel is restricted to the distance your feet carry you. Sometimes you travel in secret to house meetings to avoid violent extremists determined to crush the 2% of your countrymen who profess Christianity.

But for God’s Providence, those of us who have multiple Bibles and stacks of Christian books in our homes, who regularly access biblical teachers speaking in our language, and who worship in comfortable churches in the light of day, would be as the people of North India.

These are the souls who are loved, prayed for, and served, by our pastor friend, who we’ll call “Joe” because we don’t want to risk revealing his identity. He is one of many pastors Love Worth Finding seeks to equip to share the Gospel and make disciples.

Joe left work as a software engineer when God called him to ministry. He received his Master of Divinity from an American seminary and returned to his home in India. While he and his family enjoyed the greater religious freedom of the Southern region, Joe felt called to take the Great Commission further north to people who are impoverished, despised, and too-often forgotten.

“It gets harder the further away you go from the South,” Joe said. “But there is so much potential.” The people, he explained, have more than a million silent gods they can call out to; yet they remain locked inside the lives they inherited through the caste system. Jesus is the God who reaches down and offers personal freedom and relationship.

While the poor are interested in the Gospel presentations Joe and other pastors make, meetings are often interrupted by “extremists wielding clubs and rocks” whose goal is to stop Christian evangelism and to secure Hindu nationalism. Spies also attend meetings and report pastors and parishioners to the militia. To accept Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord often means risking brutality as well as the loss of family relationships.

“The pastors and even some of the church members are persecuted,” Joe said. “I ask for prayer for the physical and emotional healing of the many victims of religious violence in India.”

Joe said he often uses Pastor Adrian Rogers’ teaching materials as he plants churches (23), trains pastors (more than 400), baptizes and disciples new believers, and ministers to poor widows and orphans, who are truly outcasts in the culture.

Joe dreams of being able to offer LWF audio resources to the people he works with in the language they speak, Telegu, one of 28 official languages spoken by India’s 1.4 billion people.

“My habit of listening on Christian radio (in the U.S.) has been replaced with the MyLWF app,” he said. “I can hear Pastor Rogers’ voice wherever I go.”

“You are penetrating places you don’t know” he said of Love Worth Finding.

“There is a rich harvest of lost souls.”