Church Planting Indian Style
Pastor Rajan M (A new church is born!)
Often a church is planted through a healing or other miracle but most of the time churches are planted through much prayer and hard work! Pastor Rajan was very excited to take part in the Serve India Ministries church planting training. Along with 20 other pastors working in his district, he identified 5 villages around him that needed to hear the Gospel and have a local church.
Pastor Rajan initially focused his attention on a particular unreached village called T M*. The key strategy for effective church planting in India begins with daily prayer for the village along with regular visits for house visitation and tract distribution. Pastor Rajan was particularly gifted to share the love of the Lord with villagers. Even though many months of visits did not yield any good response to the Gospel, he did not lose hope. Pastor Rajan continued to pray and visit, and finally a family came forward to offer their home for a prayer meeting. As God began to minister, more people began to come to the prayer meeting. Now the prayer meeting has developed into a church in which 15 people attend regularly. Pray that this church will grow in its ability to minister to this community.
Pastor Rajan is an example of how the current 450 pastors partnering with Serve India plant churches. The goal of each pastor is to plant 5 churches in 5 villages in 5 years. Currently these pastors are targeting more than 2,000 unreached villages where a Gospel witness has never existed.
Serve India Ministries is all about church planting; specifically, partnering with local churches to plant churches. After 10 to 20 pastors are identified in a district, each will agree to target 5 area villages to plant churches in and meet together once a month for 2 days of prayer, training and fellowship. Serve India Ministries assigns a facilitator to train the pastors through a 5-year curriculum that was written by our partner organization called BILD International. Having this many pastors in one room together is an incredible time of encouragement and greatly builds the faith of soldiers of faith!
To sponsor a missionary pastor for $35 per month
*Pastor Rajan's full name and village not given for security reasons
