NCMO Story – India
You know that this month is when North Carolina Baptist churches celebrate and pray over the ministry accomplished through the North Carolina Missions Offering. The week of prayer and offering is September 7 - 14 and the emphasis this year is on the Eternal Impact of those dollars that you so joyfully give. All throughout the year, we tell you stories about how our ministry and missions are magnified and amplified because of the fact that North Carolina Baptists pool our money together to do some things that we would have a much harder time doing as individual churches. Those dollars come back to you in many ways and sometimes you may not even realize the benefit they bring. But if you’re going to get the full blessing out of your giving, you need to know how many ways your offering is having an effect. Toward that end, we’ll feature two stories in this edition of UpClose that are funded directly from your giving to the North Carolina Missions Offering.
The state of Bihar in India has long been considered by many missionaries as a near hopeless wasteland. Countless local missionaries have tried to reach out to this vast collection of villages, many of which do not even have safe drinking water. Biju Thomas, Founder of Transformation India Movement Ministries, remembers how his calling came to this forsaken area.
“The executive director of Trans World Radio was a friend of mine and he talked to me, ‘Biju, there is nobody willing to go to Bihar and I wanted you to pray with me so that God may send someone because we want to start a ministry in Bihar.’ I told myself I’m not the person to go. And even if someone affords me the best facility available in the world, I’m not going to Bihar. And that was my stand. But the gentleman kept calling me every day, ‘Biju, did you hear anything from the Lord? We want someone to go to Bihar.’ So I just wanted to say a final answer to him ‘God hasn’t called me.’ So I decided to fast and pray and after fasting and prayer, I opened my Bible to read and God straight away lead me to Romans 10:14 – 15 and it says, ‘unless someone preach, how can they hear? Unless they hear, how will they believe, and unless they believe, how will they call upon My name?’ And those three sentences really touched my heart. That was like an audible voice from God speaking to me saying ‘Biju, you need to go to Bihar because the people of Bihar need to hear the Gospel.’ And I committed myself to go to Bihar in 1995. I came here and pioneered the work for Trans World Radio India and worked with Trans World Radio for seven years.”
Now, North Carolina Baptists are joining hands with Biju and Transformation India. In addition to a goal of digging a well in each of the 45,000 villages in Bihar, they are training up Christians to share news of the Living Water to the villages as well.
“The Great Commission training school is where we train our new believers, to disciple them and then also to encourage them to be a witness to their own friends, neighbors, communities. There are 45,113 villages in Bihar and most of these villages are without a Christian witness. And when we train these new believers in our Great Commission Training school, these new believers are first of all disciples and secondly, when they go back they go and share the Gospel with their friends, neighbors, villagers, and communities and the Gospel is spreading from one village to another village. And we have been able to cover more than a hundred villages by now and we have planted thirty-eight new churches within the last two years time.”
In addition to this, the Partnership is assisting at a home for orphans.
“The Mercy Home which is called the Ray of Hope Mercy Home is where we have orphaned boys with us. These children have come from ministry fields where they were living a really hopeless life. They didn’t have anybody to look after them. They were not going to school, they were in the street, with ugly dress, and they did not know where they were heading for.”
The orphanage is not only providing a safe and loving place to live, but also work skills that will assist them when they leave the home.
“We want to help these children to have some technical skills while they are with us. We are sending them to school where we give them a quality education. We want to treat them just like our own children and we want them to know what difference Christ brings in their life. And these children have come with the hope that this Mercy Home will be a place where their future will be different and what they have not experienced back in their village back in their home, they are experiencing here. They are having much better bed, much better food. They are hearing discipline. They didn’t know any discipline. We are disciplining them how to eat the food, what are the manners, and how to keep their bed neat and clean, how to use the toilets, how to behave with one another, how to respect their colleagues or companions.”
Inside the orphanage and throughout the thousands of villages, the goal is to share Christ, giving the people the opportunity for the Hope that will never forsake them.
“The work in Bihar is so important. They live in superstition. They live in idol worship. Most of these people have never heard the name of Jesus, not even once. I believe it is so important for these people to come to know Jesus or to hear the name of Jesus at least once in his or her lifetime. There are only 0.05% Christians out of the 85 million people in the state of Bihar and these people will have an opportunity to come to know Jesus only when we capture a village or when we put a missionary in all of these villages or only when we train new believers who will in turn go into other villages to share the Gospel.”
This partnership with India and the missionaries of Bihar is funded in part by your giving through the North Carolina Missions Offering. The North Carolina Missions Offering and Week of Prayer in your church is September 7 – 14.
