Church Planting in India

Church Planting in India
by Felicity Dale @ SimplyChurch.com

Towards the end of last year, we had the privilege of hosting a young Indian couple in our home. For security reasons, I will call them YM and Joy. They are seeing a remarkable move of God happening in their area.

YM: I started to church plant using a strategy based on Luke 10. I decided to test prayer walking. I adopted two villages. In one I prayer walked and in the other I did nothing. After a few months, the village where I prayer walked had 45 families come to Christ. I was chased out of the other village!

Our strategy is to prayer walk for three to six months. During that time, houses start opening. People ask why we are praying in their village. They come with prayer requests. “My son is sick; can you pray?” We see miracles.......we now have 962 churches in 7 years. Our definition of a church is that it has to have 10 baptized members. If it has less than that we do not call it a house church but a house group. We have more than 1,500 house groups. Each house church has five or six families so there are 20 to 30 people in a typical house church. We now have 20,000 baptized people in the movement.

FD: Why are you so specific about the numbers?

YM: We do not want the work to come into disrepute because we have exaggerated the numbers. These groups have all been verified. There may be even more than that.

FD: Tell us something about the lifestyle of the believers.

Joy: In our movement we meet twice a week, not necessarily on Sunday. It depends on which day the people have off. They meet together in the evening. Hindus worship in the early morning and make offerings to the sun or to plants. Believers use this time to get into the Bible and to pray. In the evenings they come together for Bible readings, to sing songs and pray and to bring in their neighbors. There is praise and worship. We use Hindu music but with Christian words. Many of them are oral learners so they do not learn by reading the Bible in their meetings....They are always eager to share Gospel. We have trained them in this from the beginning.....As part of the discipleship process we teach the new believer, “You are also a church planter. We immediately release them to plant churches.

For example, we recently started training some secret disciples from Bhutan. The only thing we knew about them at the beginning was that they were believers. On the last day of the training we told them they are church planters, and that this is the Great Commission. This command was not given just to Jesus’ 12 disciples but also to the 500. We told them they can baptize. They said to us “Our pastor will never release us. He will say ‘No, you are trying to break the church.’”

Since that time they have planted 16 churches in Bhutan.

My wife, Joy, has trained 305 women. She said to me, “You are doing everything for the men. If you teach a man you just teach that man. If you teach a woman, you teach a whole family. If you tell them, 'Don’t tell anyone but your relatives,' the first thing they do is to tell the community." So we find it we reach the women, the whole community comes to Christ. These 305 ladies started 763 verified house groups within 10 months.

See the rest of the story at http://www.simplychurch.com/