2015 brought many changes to the India Connection ministries. In an atmosphere of heightened persecution, by the grace of God our local churches continued to grow in numbers. Pastors in Andhra Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Orissa, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan and the northeast states report that the Holy Spirit is moving and souls are being added to the Kingdom every day.
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Thank you for praying with us and for us through 2015! So many times this year I have experienced your commitment to the joy and challenge of the gospel. Certainly I hear stories of struggle and frustration amid the demoralizing moral, spiritual and economic decline of our culture. Sometimes we as Christians are on the receiving end of community anxiety and disgruntlement. Inside the church, changes in the way we do things today fill many of us with an unsettling combination of excitement and worry. Few of us are fully comfortable with change. But in the midst of all...
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In the book of Acts the story of the church at Antioch gives us a glimpse of what is available and necessary for a movement from God. While Antioch was not a perfect church, there are some foundational things that were present that allowed them to sustain as a thriving body in a very difficult time of persecution and tremendous growth. Antioch was the third most powerful city in the Roman Empire behind Rome and Alexandria. It was a place known for business, commerce, sophistication and culture but also very much known for its immorality. So the birthing of...
Read MoreOne hundred years ago, if you had the capacity to survey every person in the world regarding religious belief, you would have discovered that 34% of the world’s 1.65 billion people had checked the box “Christian” in one of its dominant forms of Catholic, Protestant or Orthodox. Today, with the explosion of conversions all over Africa, Latin America and Asia, with prolific church planting strategies and effective evangelistic outreaches like the Jesus film, the percentage of Christians is still at 34%. With our current population near 6.5 billion people there are, certainly, many more Christians today than in the year 1900; but the percentage has not changed. To create a different future–to change the trajectory of the church– we need to think differently and act differently. What is the one thing that is most deadly to the spread of the gospel to every tribe and tongue? Many would say the lack of money, manpower or vision. I believe it can be safely argued that dependency and the passivity it breeds is the most deadly problem for the spread of the gospel. Whether it is dependence upon foreign missionaries and foreign funds or even our own dependence upon the pastor of our local church. Dependency is a ministry killer. It burns out the people and ministries that people are dependent upon and it prevents God’s people from realizing their full...
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When you read autobiographies of men like William Carey, Hudson Taylor, George Mueller, and the Moravian missionaries, you learn of people whose lives demonstrate why some of us need to “go” to a mission field in a foreign land. Over the centuries, these missionaries have written letters back to their home churches, challenging them to send and support workers in the harvest fields of Asia, Africa and South America.
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