A key to success for Serve India Ministries as we partner with independent pastors in India is the mission field leaders known as facilitators. Each Mission Field is coordinated by a facilitator who is a seasoned missionary with years of experience. The facilitator brings the missionary/pastors together once a month for a time of training, encouragement and fellowship. Bringing these independent pastors together helps to bring great synergy in the overall church planting effort for the region and allows each pastor to be much more effective.
*Pastor Thomas' Testimony:
Pastor Thomas was three years old, playing in front of his house, when he saw some men dragging another man by his hair and shouting at him. The man looked old and frail, but they beat him and jumped on him and jumped on a trumpet-like object he had with him, denting it badly. When they were through, they left their victim lying in a pool of blood. Little Thomas was terrified, but his mother brought the man inside and took care of him. The old man had been street preaching, in this completely non-Christian village, using a homemade megaphone.
Pastor Thomas was sixteen when he first learned about Christ, but his memory of this gory incident shaped his response. He made his own megaphone by rolling a sheet of tin. Then he carried a light wooden table to a street corner,climbed up on it, proclaimed the word of God and urged onlookers to receive Jesus as their Savior and Lord. A crowd gathered out of curiosity, but they soon were riveted by his impassioned words.
Pastor Thomas worked at a tea plantation as a laborer and later as a foreman, but he always felt that his true calling was to evangelize the villages nearby. Daring and persistent, overcoming obstacles ranging from angry villagers to wandering elephants, he would eventually reach 250 villages, start dozens of churches and raise up more than forty full-time servants of God. Now 61 years old, Pastor Thomas oversees a mission field, the first that Serve India Ministries started. He works to train and to equip twenty pastors who share his passion: to plant churches in unreached villages. Their work is going well. Right now, a film team is in India shooting footage of this mission field for a show that will air on the Christian Television in March of 2010.
* Name Changed for Security Reasons
