KAKINADA, INDIA - India’s missionaries train here.
They come to the Kakinada School of Preaching from across India — including Bihar and Orissa states, where Christians routinely suffer persecution. Some bear the light skin and Asian features of Mainipur state in India’s far east. A few are from Myanmar, a nation in Southeast Asia where religious gatherings often are restricted or prohibited.
Despite the risks, the students intend to return to their homelands after graduation and plant churches.
The school began in 1971 with the goal of training “reliable men who will also be qualified to teach others,” president Nehemiah Gootam said, quoting the words of 2 Timothy 2:2.
Those “reliable men” come increasingly from the Global South — India, Southeast Asia, Latin America and Africa. Churches of Christ in these locales have boomed in the past century.
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These numbers are possible because India is a huge country with more than 1 billion people. Today one of every six people in the world lives in India.' By Ron Clayton
For The Christian Chronicle
November 1, 2005
I have been working in India since 1979. It has been quite a ride! On my first trip, I worked with one American and many Indian preachers for 25 days. I preached 61 times.
As a team, we baptized 900 souls. Much of this work was in new areas where teaching had been done, but churches had not yet been planted.
The idea that Americans go to India, preach and baptize hundreds after they hear the gospel one time is false. In each of the places I went, local Indian preachers had been working for months — sometimes, years. They had been teaching, planting and watering. Learn More
NEW DELHI, INDIA - The nimble rickshaw puller squeezes between street vendors on the narrow streets of India’s congested capital.
