Sword & Trowel 2016: Issue 1
ANDHRA PRADESH, INDIA News from Pastor Sunath Kumar, Reformed Baptist Church, Vinukonda
T
WENTY-TWO village pastors recently completed their two-year course at the Bible Training Institute (BTI) in Vinukonda, ten of whom we supported. Pastors Samuel Boppuri and Kiran Nalluri with Tom Babu (a member of our congregation) have been involved with me in this ministry and we believe that the Lord has bless- ed our efforts to bring greater biblical understanding to men working in a very mixed religious context. On the one hand, we have false
religions such as Hinduism and Islam and on the other hand a huge tide of nominal Christianity. In certain parts of Andhra Pradesh it was largely the Dalits (the suppressed castes) who accepted Christianity around 100 years ago, so Christianity is viewed as a religion of the lower orders of soci- ety – the Lord Jesus being viewed by some as the deity of Dalits! The fi rst few generations may well have been largely genuine Christians but since then many have become ‘Christians’ in order to gain access to free education,
medicine and good jobs. At the same time they brought all the
trappings of Hinduism with them. Currently all the mainline denomina- tional churches are fi lled with nominal Christians for whom Christianity is much like any other religion. We now have all kinds of denominations in our region and most of the village pastors are not even born again. There are thousands of villages without a Gospel witness. The pastors who are training with us are striving to make the Truth known in these circumstances and it has been our privilege to teach them, but it has been challenging because most of them are not well educated. For our January intake we have 16 new students and some have asked to con- tinue and repeat the course so that we had 40 men at our last meeting. Most of these pastors are the only elders in their churches and we are encourag- ing them to fi nd at least one man from their congregation to be trained to help them in the ministry. Please pray that all these pastors may be greatly blessed in preach- ing the Word in season and out of season and that the Lord will build strong local churches to his glory.
Telugu literature
The BTI students are able to take away some Telugu literature for their study but
Andhra Pradesh, India page 25
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44
