Church in India

It’s Sunday, so naturally it’s church day, and today I’ve had the pleasure of accompanying Janaki to two churches here in her part of India. They’ve been really wonderful visits, and I had the honour of being able to preach at both of them as well as pray with church members afterwards. The worship was as you’d expect for an evangelical Indian church and although I didn’t know the translation of the words, the spirit of the singing crossed all language barriers and was wonderful to be part of. But, the context against which the Christian church is living here in India is one of increasing persecution by the majority Hindu religion. The ruling party in government is also Hindu, and so laws are increasingly being passed that make it harder and harder for churches to exist, and for Christian organisations to function. The level of persecution varies between states, but no state is completely free of it. Arrests, church attacks and all sorts of harassments are becoming increasingly frequent, with church leaders in particular finding themselves in jail, or beaten and attacked in the streets. The impact: a church that is growing, with more and more people coming to Christ. As I saw today, the prayer lives of the Christians is fervent and passionate as they cry out to God for their country, for their community, and for their families – for protection of those who are Christians, and for those who have Hindu family members that they would see the light and convert across. With the increase in numbers of Christians, more churches being planted – including in communities that have never had a Christian church in them before. In many cases the church plants are in the form of house churches, as it is becoming too dangerous to meet in the open in community buildings, and a church leader will often have 3 or 4 house churches that he is overseeing. These will all be in neighbouring communities, and their service times will be coordinated to allow the church leader to travel between all 4 churches every week to oversee the services. As well as the obvious challenges of persecution, other challenges that the church is facing include the training of new leaders to serve in the new churches. Because it is so difficult and often dangerous for the leaders to travel too far to join with others, it is hard to deliver leadership training in a collaborative and meaningful way. There is also a need for more leaders, in response to the increased number of churches, and a need for increased funds to help cover the costs of the leaders. In the past, the church leader would have been paid through financial and food gifts from the church members. But with the churches moving to house church status, the churches are becoming smaller in size (cos they’ve got to fit inside someone’s house), and so the money that comes from those congregations is smaller, which impacts on the stipend of the leader. But despite these challenges, the over-riding theme is one of hope in the power of God to do the impossible, and to speak into the life, politics and religiosity of the country. There are new elections in May 2027, so the prayer is that things will change for the better at that point, but for now – the prayer is for the spread of the gospel now, and for the hearts of the Hindu leaders to be impacted – that they will move from persecuting others, to living in harmony with them.