On Wednesday morning we set off for a four hour drive from Nagpur to a small village where we met with a man considered by many to be the father of the house church movement in India.

For 4 hours we listened to how God had moved in this man's life to give birth to a vision outside the box of traditional missions.

In the early 1980's in his village 30% of children were dying in their first year, another 30% before they were 5 years old. The reason was because of a lack of education for basic hygeine. To help meet the need he sarted putting hand pumps around their region, 3,000.
This small step drastically changed the health problems.

In addition as he look around he found that many of the children could not read or write so he sought a way to provide informal schooling in the evenings for children who had to care for cattle during the day. He hired 12 Hindu boys who were just literate enough to teach others and set up system by which every Saturday he would build a lesson plan with them and they would teach others his one requirement was that they include stories from the Bible. He started Saturdays teaching them the Bible stories. At the end of a year the 12 boys asked to be baptized. By 1988 when he left to move to North India he had more than 250 baptisms.

After spending several years in North India practicing medicine and getting involved in evangelism with the poor, God began to teach him that see people won to Christ and baptized was only part of the job. Now they needed to be discipled into a life of faith. He looked to the established churches for help in discipleship but wad very discouraged when the rituals became more of a focus in changing these new believers. What he discovered was that many disgruntled Christians who had left the church were much more receptive ti discipling new believers into a life of faith that did not take them away from a mandate to reach their families and friends.

Today he leads a network of hundreds of thousands of house churches. For him a house church is a group of believers living out a life of faith in a given locality. A particular city or village in his network is one church though it may be made up of multiples of believers gathering in various places. One of his guiding principles is the preisthood of the believer (his words not ours). In fact in one instance he had a woman who had seen multiple friends come to faith and wanted to see the baptized, his response was you baptize them. I'll teach you but God has equipped every believer to be his instrument. There is no special leadership in their network.
On Indian indepenence day 2009 they had a vision for 50,000 baptisms, on that day they saw 68,000 people baptized.
After that they began to ask God for 100,000 baptisms on the day of Pentecost 2009. That day they baptized more than 253,000. In one place alone they had more than 50,000.

God is working mightily through this network. They are seeing an outpouring of His spirit through his people in these days. With all this growth comes the need for many leaders and he says that is their biggest challenge today. Pray that God would raise up more harvesters.

That evening we made the 4 hour return to Nagpur and caught the last flight out for Mumbai.

On Thursday in Mumbai we met with NL.

Mumbai: 16 million pop.
17,450 slums more than 8million
12% rich and famous
25-30% middle class
150,000 Nepalese
50,000 of them Nepalese women in sex trade/red light district.
100,000 She-males, eunuchs

NL is made up of cell churches in Mumbai that also gather for celebrations. The 3 values they reinforce are:
1) Autonomous
2) Indigeneous
3) Self supporting

Church of all India -
Divided India into 7 zones
By 2020 they want to see a church for every 1,000 people; that India would be 20% Christian.
NL is responsible for Western zone - 3 states Maharashta, Goa, Gujarrat
150 Million people
Vision 150,000 churches

Goa 1.2m people, will be a state model for them where they hope to complete all 400 districts reached by next year.

End of 2006 started revival in Mumbai.
2008 - Jan 27,000 members
2008 - Dec 51,000 members
End 2009 - 100,137 members
9,387 cells churches
668 celebration centers
127 prayer centers around city

2010 NL vision for Mumbai:
Believing God for 200,000 new believers
20,000 cell churches

Postal code vision
Pop. 200,000
2,000 believers
200 cell churches

Neighborhood vision
Pop. 10,000
100 believers
10 cell churches

Frustration -
Winning people not the problem.
Discipleship is big difficulty.

Challenges:
1) 2015 planning for 1/2 million congregations in Mumbai
Most of conversions coming from lower class. High physical need.

2) Leadership: growing at 10 cells/day, and they need to do better preparing leaders.

Challenge for church of India:
1) Return to the book of Acts
2) Radical in our thinking / revolutionary in our approach

Thursday evening we flew back to Chennai where we will be spending our time the rest of the trip.

Photos:
Temple by road on way from Nagpur -

Rest stop -

Slum in Mumbai w/ high-rises in background -

More slums -

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Location:HBI Headquarters, Chennai