Day one in India

So we got to Dubai and New Delhi safely, our plane landed at 2:45 am local time, which is 3:15 pm Idaho time. We saw a Lot of interesting people Shaikhs, Sheik's, Muslims, allot of Hindus, and a monk or two along the way. Anyway along the way I got to hang out in the nicest airports I have ever been too. All of the airports were recently re-done, Dubai had a mall in the terminal which was very interesting to see. (btw the burger king menu is totally different internationally) 

When we got to New Delhi passing through customs was a breeze. Picking up our bags was a hassle but no biggie. After recharging our Indian cell phone we eventually found our cab driver to our hotel, the hotel star. He didn’t speak a word of English except hotel star, which we hear many times. He knew what he was doing, and other then driving down a one way street the wrong way for a 1/4 mile it was a safe ride.

Had an interesting experience the first hotel, nice place with.....character :). 

After a nice breakfast we were picked up by a friend of ours named Randy. We drove with Randy for about 30 min until we reached a place called 'Good Shepard'. 

Now I have to tell you strait that I have no idea where or when we are going on this trip, and what i saw today completely blew me away. We came into the compound called 'Good Shepard', about 5 acres or so of buildings similar to a campus of a community college from the 50's. We walked through the main gate and immediately the sound of Indian worship music filled our ears. We walked to the back of a large chapel building and saw 300+ Indians the building singing songs then listening to a lesson. From what I have gathered this was much more then a church service. What I was witnessing was the beginning of a 3 day long training conference for church planters, there are around 500 church planters being trained this week. After lunch they met and had a lesson on the parable of the sowers. They then broke into 4 groups and began more in depth lessons, now they broke into four groups because in the 500 + people there are 11 languages the people speak.

In India there are basically two categories, the first is engaged people groups where there is at least a 2% christian population. The other is unreached people groups. In India there are around 600 unengaged people groups, we are talking hundreds of millions of people who in there entire culture there is not a christian presence whatsoever. Now we as Christians have an obligation to help reach these people, what these people are trying to do is not to send missionary's from the west to India, but rather make the Indians themselves missionary's. The goal is to train church planters who will go village to village and preach the gospel starting churches. In this way the people that the west can help are the master trainers, some of whom I got to see in action today. The people known as the master trainers are the people who train the Indian Christians to be church planters and spread Gods work like wild fire, the ultimate goal of this is not simply church planting (CP) but to spark a church planting movement (CPM) a CPM is where after a church is started and has matured a bit that they would then go and start other churches in neighboring villages, and they would in turn start other churches. This exponential growth is not just an idea, there are church planters who have seen churches started beyond the 4th generation. I was honored to see some of these master trainers in action today.

Its incredible, in these people there was a group who I believe were at a conference like this one last October, in this group of 30 or so many had started up to 8 churches since! Its estimated that there are 10 churches planted every day in India and these people are how the Gospel is being reached to a dark nation.

So after lunch today we were all standing around not sure when the next thing would start so a Asian guy from Texas named Toni decided we should try to play a game, the next 30 min were filled with me and Toni trying to explain the rules of the 'human knot' game, after much confusion we finally unraveled and no one was hurt :)

On the drive to Randy's place we passed by many slums among the rising sky scrapers.

Shrines to gods on corners, and a few grand temples. The one above is the 'Hunuman' Temple, this deity is the monkey god in Hinduism.

So far the trip has gone very well, God has blessed us with friends and amazing opportunities to see what he is doing with men and women here in India, And this is only day one!

One down, fifteen to go. Please pray for the men and women being trained this week here in New Delhi, they are the men and women who God is using in India.

(More details of the stories shall be furnished upon request)