Source: Email from Missions Catalyst reader, October 2017
For the past 14 months or so, we have been having weekly meetings at our house, very small meetings, and almost every week we get an update from an elderly gentleman (he is 86), who has been holding Skype meetings with a congregation in a remote area of South Asia. He preaches, the pastor translates, and exciting things are happening. These happen once or twice every week.
During the past year, all unadvertised (except by the Spirit), the congregation has been reaching up to new villages in that area, and each week many people are healed of all kinds of disease—diabetes, heart issues, blindness, deafness, demonic oppression or possession—and many hundreds are coming to Christ. Over the course of the past year, about 5,000 people have been become Christians, a few at first, then more as the momentum accelerates. This is just the count reached directly by the core church, not those indirectly reached.
Sometimes, God has prepared a person ahead of time—not yet a Christian—who has told the people in the village that a messenger of the truth was coming; in one village where that happened, almost the entire village, about 1,500 people became Christians. Another time is was “only” about 250.
The meetings are not advertised—people would be arrested and killed in that case—but, like those Brother Andrew discusses in God’s Smuggler, arranged as seeking people get together, being led by the Spirit.
I am very encouraged by these ongoing reports, and felt led to spread the encouragement. After all, Peter does the same: “…encourage one another with these words.” Indeed, the Lord’s coming is nigh, when the word of God is being preached to all the nations, even remote villages in difficult-to-reach countries.
» Note: As Christians commemorate the 500th anniversary of the Reformation of Christianity in northwest Europe, says Steve Bell of Interserve, let’s not airbrush the supernatural out of the biblical narrative.