India calls (part 2)

In the first part of this account, I told how I first met John Babu, one of the most amazing men I have ever encountered. And I told something of his incredible but true story. It was 1978 when God spoke to me about India. He did not open the door for me to go until 1996. The delay was not disobedience on my part, just the timing of God. When God gives us a word or promise, our greatest mistake (especially if the promise is a good one) is to assume it will be fulfilled tomorrow. More often, we find ourselves in the good Biblical company of Abraham, who “through faith and patience” inherited the promise (Heb. 5:12). If God has promised you something, don’t give up because it does not immediately fall into your possession. Press into God, wait on him, see what he is doing in your life and submit to it, and allow him to fulfill his word to you. Remember what Paul said about God’s faithfulness to Abraham: “Whatever he has promised, he is able also to perform” (Rom. 4:21).

I could try to describe myself as a Christian version of Indiana Jones, but I don’t think I could get away with it. The truth is I was quite apprehensive about traveling to India, and so I enlisted the help of my friend Andy Gower, an English businessman I knew who travelled extensively and would be able to hold my hand in case of unknown third-world terrors. Just as well, for when we landed in Mumbai, even though it was midnight we were immediately disgorged into a seething and uncontrolled mass of humanity. Amidst the chaotic order that is India, Andy hailed a taxi to take us to the domestic terminal for our internal flight to Hyderabad. The domestic terminal was a long ways removed from the western airports I was used to. I recall thinking, “Oh my goodness, this is like the third world!” and then realizing it was the third world (Indian airports have greatly improved since).

We arrived at Hyderabad and received a warm greeting from John’s sons. As a matter of fact, we had garlands of flowers placed around us. Was this Honolulu? Well not quite, but it was a great welcome. John and his family lived in a compound right next to a Hindu temple dedicated to the goddess of traffic accidents. It seems people often fell into a coma and were killed in accidents as they drove by the place. John’s sons later informed me they had regular visitations from demonic spirits from next door angry that the kingdom of God was invading their space and ruining their party. This was all a very faith-building experience as you couldn’t get in or out of the compound at all without driving by this temple.

Lots and lots of amazing things happened during our visit, but let me tell this one story. The church had started many outreaches in the sprawling city of Hyderabad. One night, John said I was to speak at one of these, located in a slum area. I overheard John telling his son under no circumstances to leave Andy and I alone. More faith-building! We drove and drove. Finally we left the car and continued the journey by foot as the road gave out. We left the hubbub behind and proceeded by footpath through darkened areas. We were warned to look out for cobras. Through all this I naturally maintained perfect peace of mind! Finally we arrived at a small concrete hut and in we went.

Let me tell the story of the family who lived there. Just a few weeks before, one of this couple’s six children was diagnosed with meningitis. They had no money to pay for medical treatment and the child became critically ill. They heard that the Christians who held meetings in a small meeting place nearby had a god who could heal the sick. The dad carried his dying son into the meeting. He was prayed for and instantly and completely healed. The entire family became Christians.

When I entered their tiny concrete hut, I saw the shelf where only weeks before their idols had sat. In their place was a picture of Jesus not unlike what used to be on the wall of my Sunday school classroom growing up! Not an idol however, simply their way of honoring the living God. About forty people were crammed into the twelve-foot square room that was home to this family of eight. Under the dim light of one 25-watt bulb, I could barely read my Bible, let alone see who was sitting at the back. I was asked to preach on the work of the Holy Spirit. Never have I felt so helpless, trying to convey my sophisticated western thoughts through translation to a group of people so utterly foreign to me I didn’t know how to communicate with them even though I desperately wanted to.

I finished. I prayed for some folk. I felt I had failed. But after we left, the pastor told me four Hindu folk had given their lives to Christ that night as a result of what I had said. That was truly the Holy Spirit, not me.

I remember many things about that visit. The night the cobra visited right outside my window and was killed while I slept through the excitement. The mosquito bites I had that turned out to be bed bugs. The amazing young men and women at the Bible school at which I taught and their sacrificial abandonment to the cause of Christ. And my dear friends Prem and Neelima. Prem was John’s youngest son and Neelima had just become pregnant. The doctors told her she had only a small chance of carrying the baby. I prayed over her, told her the baby was a boy and would be born without any issues. Abishek is now a young man almost twenty years old!

As I drove off on my way to the airport in an old Jeep with an exploding tire, John sat on his porch and waved good-bye to me. That was the last time I ever saw him. He passed into the Lord’s presence not long after. He was a father in God. I look forward to seeing him again.

India calls

Here is the latest instalment in my Chronicles of Faith series.  The story starts a long time ago and involves a lot of miracles. If you’re interested, read on! I went to England in 1977 to do a PhD in New Testament studies at Durham University. One of the first friends I made there was a guy called Richard Peach. Richard and I used to have heated theological arguments. They often infuriated me because even though he was a school teacher, not a theologian, he was often right and I was wrong. Richard had an unbending sense of call to India. When he finished his studies, he was hired as a teacher at a school for missionary children in a place called Ootacamund in the southern state of Tamil Nadu. One of the last things I recall him saying was this: “God has called me to India. I don’t care if I ever see England again.” The fact is, he never did. One day Richard took a group of children from the school out swimming and in the process he was caught up in the river current and tragically drowned. When the news reached Durham, many of us grieved. Why would God take such a young life so full of commitment and promise? But God encountered me in the midst of it with a word, and the word was this: one day I also would go to India and do what Richard wanted so badly to do -- to share Christ with the Indian people.

The years went past. I returned to Canada from England. Every time I heard someone talking about India, my ears pricked up. But nothing happened. Until the day a friend in Canada told me he had an Indian leader coming to visit his church, and would I be interested in having him to speak. He casually dropped into the conversation that he had been to India to visit this man and they had visited a small town in south India called.... Ootacamund. Of all the hundreds of thousands of towns and villages in India, this was the one he mentioned. Immediately I knew this was my doorway to India.

And so John Babu, the great apostolic leader of Andhra Pradesh, walked into my life. I use “apostolic” in its simple Biblical form, as function, not title. John extended the boundaries of the kingdom into the regions beyond and the regions unknown, and he did so by the love of God, and by undeniable signs and wonders. Let me tell his story as he told it to me.

John Babu was one of a small group of national security advisors to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. His self-description as a policeman was a gracious understatement. John was a non-practicising Hindu. He drank a lot. He beat his wife up most days. He was not a great dad to his eight children. But he was good at his job. One day his doctor told him he had damaged his liver so badly he had only four months to live.  Distraught, John visited a nearby Hindu temple to plead with the gods. Once inside, he heard an audible voice saying these words, “I am the god you are looking for. My name is Jesus Christ.” The voice instructed him to leave the temple immediately. Stunned and trembling, he sat down on a bench outside. The voice continued to address him. He heard that if he died, his fate would be to be thrown into a lake of fire. He saw the lake in front of his eyes and was terrified. But, the voice continued, if he put his trust in the one who was speaking to him, he would be saved. John immediately surrendered his life to a god he did not know. The Holy Spirit took hold of him. Immediately, he went home to tell his family what had happened. His oldest son later told me it was the first time his dad had not come home and beat somebody up. He was a visibly changed man. As he shared what had happened, his wife Anna and all eight children put their trust in Christ. The next time he visited his doctor, he was told he was completely healed.

But this was only the beginning of the story. A few months later, Jesus spoke again to John. He was to leave the police, move to a town called Armoor and start a church. John obeyed the Lord. He left all his earthly security, his position which gave him many advantages in the city and state, and his government salary and pension. Armoor was the place he had previously gone to arrest Hindu militants, and John was not popular there. He was sold a plot of land with a tin shack in the middle of it. John, Anna and their eight kids took up residence in the middle of what turned out to be a cobra-infested swamp. The militants who sold him the land expected him and his family to perish. But instead, they prayed the cobras out. The locals expected the entire family to die and were perplexed when nothing happened to them (read Acts 28:1-6 for a similar story!).  Before long, a thriving church existed.... with no fewer than two thousand people converted to Christ. John began to travel from town to town and village to village, eventually establishing several hundred congregations throughout the state of Andhra Pradesh.

In his life, John saw six people raised from the dead. I don’t know if the following incident counted as one of the six, as John was not physically present when it happened. Let me tell you a story that would be unbelievable if it were not demonstrably true as it was witnessed by hundreds of people. As the churches grew, outreaches were established not only in the larger towns but also the smaller villages. Andhra Pradesh had a population of over eighty million people and had thousands of towns and villages as well as larger cities such as Hyderabad. A high-caste (Brahmin) Hindu lady died in a village a small group had been started in. The omens were consulted and the cremation was set for the time determined to be the most auspicious for the best hope of a higher form of reincarnation. As the funeral pyre was about to be set alight, the Hindu priest halted the proceedings. In a mocking voice, he said Christians had come to the area and claimed to have a god who could raise the dead. He ordered the small group leader to be brought to the ceremony. “Now we will see,” he declared to the man in front of the assembled crowd, “what your god can do.” Trembling with fear, this ordinary believer held out his hands over the pyre and called out to the Lord for help. The woman lying dead on the pyre was physically resurrected. And no, she was not in a coma, nor had the doctor made a mistake. She had been dead for many hours, and her body was decomposing in the Indian heat. As she rose from the dead, panic spread throughout the crowd of hundreds who eye-witnessed the event. The small group leader began to preach Christ. Half the crowd became Christians, the other half fled in terror.

But the most amazing part of the story is this. When later they asked the lady what had happened to her, this is what she said. She recalled experiencing darkness, but into the darkness stepped a man. The man was dressed in clothes so white they were blinding. As he held out his hands over her, she noticed he had bleeding wounds in both wrists. Then she woke up. But a strange thing occurred. There was another man standing in exactly the same position as the first man. His hands also were stretched out over her in exactly the same way. But his clothes were ordinary and there were no wounds in his wrist. That man was the small group leader.

The militant high-caste Hindus put out the equivalent of a contract on the lady. Her response? “I’m not afraid of death. I’ve already died once!” Many many hundreds of people came to Christ because of her testimony.

How often do we realize that we stand in the place of Christ? That ordinary man represented Christ in a way even he had no concept of. Christ, in one sense, is made flesh in us. An army of theologians trying to explain how Christ is made real in his many-membered body, the church, could not have come up with anything so closely approaching the truth as is illustrated in the experience of this humble, (to us) nameless, and probably illiterate Indian brother.

Have I got your attention? Then read the next instalment!

Changing history through prayer

When I graduated from seminary in Toronto in 1977, God spoke clearly to me about going to England. The immediate purpose was to do a PhD in New Testament studies, but I knew there was more to it than that. The “more than that” turned out to be more than I thought. This is how it happened. For two years, I worked with students in Durham University in northern England, as well as with my local church while working on my degree. The third and final year of my funding approached, and I was faced with a choice. What was I to do and where was I to go if God wanted me to stay in the United Kingdom?

At the same time, I made a good but sometimes annoying friend -- the kind of friend who, like the widow in Jesus’ parable, pesters her opponent until she gets what she wants. The “widow” in my case came in an unlikely form, a very proper upper class English gentleman called Robert Ward. Robert’s “problem” was he was convinced of the need to rise early and seek God. His early morning prayers occasionally aroused some resentment among the slumbering theological students in adjacent rooms, but he persisted.

Robert got the idea that we should start an early morning prayer meeting on the university campus, and furthermore, that he and I should lead it. That presented a problem for me, as sometimes I didn’t go to bed much before Robert got up! The fact is, and I admit it, I hated getting up in the morning.

But Robert had a plan. I needed a ride from Durham to London, and he was heading that way with space to spare. Once I was aboard, I became captive to a four hour harangue on the necessity of early rising if one was to be in right relationship with the Lord, and that an early morning prayer meeting had to be established, and that he and I had to do it. Like the unjust judge in the parable, I relented. Did I mention that Robert had previously been enjoying his profession as a barrister (a British term for top lawyer!) in London? Now he was also judge and jury. I was placed on the stand, cross-examined, convicted and thrown into the prison of early rising.

At the beginning of the next academic year, we received permission to use the thousand year old Norman chapel deep in the bowels of Durham Castle. It was completely sound proof, and we could pray and sing as loud as we wanted as early as we wanted. What happened astounded me. Within a short time, we had so many young men and women crowding into our meeting at 7 am every morning to seek the face of God, we had to find a second location in another college. The meetings continued six days a week for the entire academic year, with an average of 100 students attending. Many were converted as a result of the change in these students’ lives. God did miracles.

And in the midst of it, something else happened. I began to fast and pray about my own future. And he spoke to me words that changed my life: “I am calling you to stay in this city and found a church.” I can still remember exactly where I was that day in January 1980, when I heard the voice of God so clearly it was like another person speaking to me. What happened after that is another story in itself. Suffice to say that nine months later, Emmanuel Church Durham was born. In the years since, churches all over the world have been planted directly and indirectly from that base. Thousands have come to Christ. Leaders of stature have been raised up. All I did was plant the seed. Through many others, God brought the harvest. I am privileged to visit Emmanuel every year. It is still a dynamic church, for many years led by my good friend Alan Bell, winning people of all types and ages to Christ, and a vital witness in one of the great university cities of England. As this is being written, it is planting out another church just a few miles down the road.  And what about Robert Ward?  He went on to plant a pioneering church called St Luke's at the edge of the university campus in the city of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, where prayer is still a prominent part of all that is happening there.

Have you got the important point in all this? History is changed when men and women begin to seek God. I saw that when I visited the Outer Hebrides (again with Robert, and a second time with Elaine). I heard how a small group of Presbyterian folk sought God through the night hours and vowed to stay in his presence till he brought revival, which he did. I have never felt the presence of God more in a geographical location than I felt it there. The agenda of every prayer meeting and church service we attended included beseeching God to send revival again.

Anything can happen when you begin to pray. Prayer is the most important thing a Christian can do. It is more effective than a thousand ministry programs or strategies. It is the lifeblood of the church. That is the testimony God gave me in 1980, and he hasn’t changed his ways since. The most effective way you can change history is the same way I did.  Pray. Why don’t you try it?