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You can now see all my posts to date about India by clicking the ‘India’ category in the right sidebar on the homepage of my blog. And with that, I’ll probably be back to blogging about Mexico for a while…

I intended to get a post up shortly after the India trip to try and summarize our findings and what we’re currently thinking about the prospect of beginning work there. I don’t suppose this still counts as shortly after…

As Rob Thiessen said after the trip, we met with 19 different church planters, including several Indian nationals as well as foreigners from 5 other countries. They represented 9 different ministries and organizations. Each one had a unique perspective, and we returned with a far greater understanding of factors involved in making disciples in India and with new insights to help us in our work in other parts of the world as well.

The short answer is yes, we are feeling like GFM is supposed to begin a long-term work in India. The ultimate reason is the overwhelming spiritual and physical need there. It is true that much good gospel work is being done in India, but the job of making disciples of all nations (ethnic groups) in India is far, far from done. Statistically, I think it has to be considered the most unreached country on earth. One Indian national church planter told us that, despite the headway being made in certain parts of India, population growth is outpacing the growth of new believers. In other words, in strictly numeric terms, the Church is losing ground in India. Many of the church planters we met with are very skeptical of the accuracy of large numbers being published of how many new churches are being planted in India. By this we were saddened. At the same time, though, we were greatly encouraged by some of the excellent disciple-making work we saw being done. This gave us an exciting vision of the possibility of helping people in India respond to God in a way fitting to their culture.

Where we would work is a very complicated question, and one that could probably not be answered until someone were to spend an extended period of time exploring different places. The thing that makes India very complicated is that its people groups are all mixed together, at least in the big cities. In Mexico, the ethnic groups are much more distinctly separated geographically. Besides that, India’s thousands of language groups are further broken down by castes, some of which refuse to interact with each other. Part way into the trip we started feeling like we might need to forget about focusing on specific groups at all and instead just settle down in a city and start making reproducing disciples. By the end of the trip, I think we were somewhere in the middle. We should probably find a city or town where not too much work is being done, then seek out a specific needy group in that place on which to focus.

What would be the church planting team’s platform, or occupation, is an even more complicated question. Here are a few intriguing possibilities for a team of Westerners:

• Start a travel agency that shows tourist groups around, then make disciples of the Indians with whom you share your life.
• Teach North American English to some of the many Indians going to the United States or Canada to work.
• Teach Spanish. India is developing good trade relations with Mexico, and many Indians also go to Spain to work.
• Start a consulting business to help Westerners coming to India learn language and acculturate.
• Be a full-time student in a university.
• Be a businessperson and reach out to upper class and upper caste Indians – an extremely unreached segment of the society.

Who will be on a GFM team moving to India has yet to be determined. When they will go is also a question mark and depends on a number of things, such as how soon we get a team into Thailand, how soon we have a trained team willing to go to India, and whether we have a sufficient labor force to continue the work in Mexico.

The trip was sobering. We have been hearing reports of huge church planting movements taking place in India with thousands of churches being planted and tens of thousands of people coming to the Lord. This may be true, but we saw more than enough to convince us that we can’t waltz in there expecting things to be exploding in a few years. The stories we heard sounded much more like what I’m used to hearing from the Muslim world. Church planters work for 10 or 15 years in order to raise up just a few disciples and maybe a small fellowship or two. Work in India is not for those wanting cheap, quick rewards.

But we feel that God wants us to send a team to begin working there. We have been captured by the Revelation 7:9,10 vision of seeing all nations worship the Lamb, and we cannot overlook millions in India entering eternity without ever having heard the name of Jesus.

This story to be continued…

So obviously, I haven’t posted much lately. One day maybe I’ll be a professional blogger who posts every day, but it doesn’t look like that day will be getting here any time this summer. Between traveling back to the U.S. from India, spending two more weeks visiting in Colorado and Texas, driving a few thousand more miles, and then hitting the ground running here in Mexico in preparation for the arrival of summer interns, blogging time has been scarce! I do want to continue blogging as much as possible, in order to help people plug in better with what is going on with Global Frontier Missions, as well as to allow us all (me the post author and you the comment authors) to share with one another what God is teaching us.

I had a couple more posts I had wanted to get up about the India trip, so let me do that. Waiting so long to finish talking about the trip may not meet blogging best practices, but hey, who ever said I’d meet all of those, right?

I mentioned in an early post during the India trip that I was surprised at how similar India and Mexico are. I want to share a bit about the similarities I saw, as well as some differences. Here goes:

Ways India and Mexico are similar

1. Religiously, I found the dominant beliefs of Hinduism to be very similar to the dominant beliefs of southern Mexico, believe it or not. The belief system of the majority of Hindus has an animistic flavor to it. People honor (though they don’t necessarily obey) all sorts of different gods in order to invoke the gods’ favor and avoid their wrath. Southern Mexico is very similar in the way that people depend on the Catholic saints and virgins, while not necessarily sensing a strong need to obey God. As we walked into shops and rode in taxis in India and saw all the altars to the gods and images of them hung everywhere, it was uncanny how similar it was to Mexico, where people have altars to and images of the saints. The Hindu temples with their various idols felt, in many respects, similar to the Catholic cathedrals of southern Mexico.
2. India and Mexico are both what we call hot climate cultures. People in hot climate cultures value relationships over tasks and often do not stick to a rigid schedule. Other similarities between the two cultures (in contrast to North America) are the greater respect given to elders and those in positions of leadership, the greater sense of community and lesser individualism, and the indirect and non-confrontational manner of communication.
3. Both Mexicans and Indians are very hospitable. When staying in the home of an Indian family, we cheerfully pleased our hosts by digging into the continued servings of food offered at each meal.
4. In India, as in Mexico, I was often stopped on the streets by friendly strangers who speak some English and wanted to know about me and talk about the United States.
5. Many Indians migrate to North America to find work, as do many Mexicans. It was quite common to talk to people in India who had family members who were living or had lived in the U.S. or Canada.
6. A staple food in India is chapati, which is a round flatbread usually made of wheat. That, combined with frequent servings of rice and beans felt a lot like reaching for a tortilla and digging into a meal in Mexico.

Indians look like Mexicans! We saw a number of people in India who could have been right off the streets of our Mexican town or who even had a striking resemblance to particular friends of ours in Mexico.

Ways India and Mexico are different

1. Despite the presence of hundreds of distinct ethnic groups in Mexico, Mexico’s culture is still much more homogenous than India’s. India is extremely fragmented with thousands of languages, numerous castes, several major cultures/religious systems (Hinduism, Islam, Sikhism, Jainism, Buddhism, Christianity), etc. All these mean that India is divided into literally thousands of different groups of people who are willing to have only limited interaction with one another.
2. Some of the outward cultural norms of India were quite different. For example, in Mexico we greet everyone, usually with a handshake. In India, strangers don’t greet one another, and even men and women who know each other will rarely shake hands.
3. The strong sense of honor and shame in India, and what it means to preserve an individual’s/family’s/village’s honor is something I have not really seen in Mexico or elsewhere in North America. I might have shared this already, I can’t remember, but I read a story in the newspaper in India where a young woman who was raped begged the court to make the man who violated her marry her, in order to restore her honor.
4. Though I would say that Mexicans have greater respect for family than, say, North Americans, I felt like Indians honor and care for family members and family structures far more than the people of Mexico do.