Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi won re-election this past May in a critical victory that has been a blow for religious protection in India. Narendra Modi is part of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), a Hindu nationalist party with many in the party who have pressed for India to be a Hindu-only nation. BJP’s president and Modi’s right-hand man, Amit Shah called Muslim immigrants “infiltrators” and “termites” and promised to “remove every single infiltrator from the country, except Buddha, Hindus, and Sikhs.”[i]
Other members of the BJP party include Pragya Singh Thakur, who is currently facing terrorism charges connected to a bomb attack on Muslims. Indian President Ram Nath Kovind declared that “Islam and Christianity are alien” to India.
In this environment, religious hate crimes have risen dramatically. In the past decade, 90% of the hate crimes have been committed since Modi was elected in 2014.[ii] A group of leaders have vowed to rid the country of Christians and Muslims by 2021. The group’s leader and member of the BJP party, Rajeshwar Singh proclaimed, “The Muslims and Christians don’t have any right to stay here. So, they would either be converted to Hinduism or forced to run away from here.”[iii]
And yet, in the midst of this hostility, God’s church is flourishing in India. Only 2% of Indians are Christian, and yet even that number is miraculous. Many of those who have come to Christ out of Hindu backgrounds have suffered rejection and beatings from their families.
This past January we were blessed to go to India for the first time to visit an exploding network of indigenous Indian pastor-missionaries in Southern India. While there, we met hundreds of Indian pastors and heard dozens and dozens of their stories of how they came to believe in Jesus Christ (many of them are miraculous stories) and of the persecution they have faced and are facing in their ministry.
Of all of the pastors we met, there was only one pastor who shared he was not currently facing persecution. Almost all of the pastors had been beaten and many of their families and congregations had been beaten as well. Just within this past month a godly and gifted pastor we met was beaten so badly that he lost sight in one of his eyes. The threat of violence hangs over these men and their families. And yet they persevere joyfully.
Church Father Tertullian once said, “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.”[iv] Tertullian’s statement is true today. And the church in India is living proof. I don’t believe Tertullian was suggesting that the church will rapidly grow numerically during such times of persecution, but rather that such persecution is the soil for a prayerful and spiritually deep community of believers and that such a family of faith is unstoppable.
Several weeks ago, we had the blessing of having Brother Vee, the founder of the network of pastor-missionaries in India, with us at New Life. Every time I am around these Indian brothers and sisters I am humbled by their faith, humbled by their courage, and humbled by their prayer life. We have so much to learn from the persecuted church, and so much to gain from such gospel partnerships.
I have the blessing of joining the next team as we head to India in January and look forward to see how God chooses to use us to bless our brothers and sisters in India and to be richly blessed in return. May Christ build up his body “until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ” (Ephesians 4:13).
Would you join me in praying for the persecuted church in India? Would you please pray for our team? And, if you feel led, would you financially partner with our team or the network of Indian church planters?
[i] https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/29/asia/india-modi-muslim-fear-intl/index.html
[ii] https://time.com/5617161/india-religious-hate-crimes-modi/
[iii] https://www.opendoorsusa.org/christian-persecution/stories/hindu-leader-demands-all-christians-leave-india-in-publicized-video/
[iv] Apologeticus, Chapter 50.