INDIA: Defeating Dark Powers in the Jungle

Source: Christian Aid, March 17, 2016

In one of India’s most remote jungle areas, among one of its most primitive tribes, a most unlikely candidate to be a missionary wandered aimlessly among the wildlife as mental illness deprived him of his right mind for weeks at a time.

“Pratik” would intermittently come back to his senses and return to his wife at their village home in an undisclosed area of Chhattisgarh, one of India’s poorest and most illiterate states. For six years he bounced between lucidity and insanity, caroming between home and jungle thick with flora and predators. His wife feared for his life.

This cycle might have continued indefinitely if someone from an opposite background—a well-educated man from a Christian home in a more modern part of India—had not hit upon a compelling missionary model. In 2002, after working as a near-culture missionary planting churches in central and north India for nearly 20 years, “Siddharth Subramani” was concerned about the thousands of people groups in India yet to hear the message of salvation in Christ.

In prayer, he received the idea of concentrating efforts on the more responsive people groups, who in turn would set off movements to embrace Christ among other peoples—a “chain reaction” strategy.

He began with the Gonds of central India, idol- and nature-worshiping animists who suffer daily from hunger and other conditions of poverty. With the power of the gospel and the Holy Spirit, Subramani and his team of indigenous missionaries gradually saw Gond villagers’ addiction to alcohol turn into zeal for the Lord.

Hut-to-hut evangelism, praying for the sick, evening meetings, and proclaiming Christ through music—a powerful communication tool in India—gradually produced worshiping congregations. Literacy programs and Christian schools addressed a major impediment to the advance of Gonds, many of whom had only a third-grade education. New believers were then trained to minister to other near-culture groups.

» Read what happened next.

» You might also be interested in another story from India, Amira Meets Jesus on Her Cell Phone (Mobile Ministry Forum).

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