At Grace Fellowship, we believe in supporting our members and regular attenders as they go out into the world to carry out the Great Commission. I would like to share with the church body the information that I received from Matt Hodge, on his mission trip to India that starts today.
Matt is currently a student at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.
Please also pray for Matt’s wife Jenny and their son Benjamin in Matt’s absence.
Matt’s Email Letter:
In a few short hours I begin my long journey (29 hours in the air/45 hours
total) to Calcutta, India. I will actually be in India for only ten days,
but will be away from the States for two weeks.
This is a trip with my school, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.
There are eight guys going and we will be working with a missionary who
works with the Muslims of Calcutta. Our main missionary contact has had to
come back to the States due to a health problem with his wife. Because of
that we are most likely splitting up into two groups and my group will most likely be traveling with the remaining missionary. The other group will be more or less on their own (they will be traveling with a Southern professor who is our team leader).
The full extent of what we will be doing is still somewhat up in the air.
What we do know is that we will be getting the chance to teach church
leaders (most of them will be leaders of house churches). I have been
instructed to prepare for subjects such as marriage and family, money, hope in suffering, discipleship, OT/NT surveys, and the book of Ephesians. Most of these lessons will be at the level of a Sunday school class here in the States. The key will be to make these lessons both culturally relevant and also easily repeatable for them to teach.
In addition, we will be doing some witnessing to Muslims. India is a
non-conversion country (you cannot openly attempt to convert someone), so
this will mainly be through one-on-one evangelism. This will mostly take
place through telling Old Testament stories which point to Christ (for
example the story of Abraham and Isaac or the story of the Passover lamb).
I would greatly appreciate your prayers for me and the team while I am gone.
Here is a list of prayer requests:
1. For safe travel – we are flying to India from May 22 through May 24,
and we return from June 3 to June 5.
2. For team unity – that we would not irritate each other too much,
that our conversations would glorify Christ, and that we would build each
other up.
3. For our teaching – that the Spirit will guide our words and that the
Spirit will work in the hearts and minds of those who we are trying to
communicate to. Especially pray for us that we would make the messages
sensitive to the needs which they are facing.
4. For our witnessing – to give us hearts for those we will be
encountering and for God to work in the hearts of those we witness to so
that they may come to know Jesus as Lord and Savior.
5. For the missionaries – I currently am only aware of one missionary
working in Calcutta which is a major city. Pray for encouragement for him
and pray that God would bring more people to work with him.
6. For our families – four of the team members are traveling away from
their wives, and two of us (Dr. Vickers and myself) are leaving behind young children.
7. For God’s glory – this is the whole purpose behind the trip, pray
that God would be glorified through our actions and words and that we would represent him well to a people who, for the most part, does not know him.
Thank you all for your prayers.
Matt
Thanks Kevin. You will have my prayers, Matt, while there. Thanks for your efforts.
Thanks to everyone who was praying for me while I was gone. Since Kevin was so gracious to have posted my prayer request, I thought I would post a report of how the trip went.
I have been back for a week and I am still trying to process everything. I will try to give the highlights of what we ended up doing and a little bit of what the culture is like. Before I get to that I wanted to correct one of the items I mentioned in my previous e-mail. I previously stated that India was a non-conversion country. However, the country as a whole does not have laws against conversion. Some individual “states” of the country do have non-conversion laws. The state I was in, did not have these non-conversion laws. However, among Muslim groups there is a strong social law which is essentially non-conversion. In some cases Muslim converts in that area have been threatened, beaten, and had their homes vandalized. So while, the state allows conversion, it is effectively a non-conversion area.
The Southern Baptist’s International Mission Board uses the strategy of house church planting in India. While this works especially well among Muslim groups which have strong social and religious biases against Christianity, it has a negative effect of not having very well trained leaders in the churches. This is where our group came in. We first trained a group of house church leaders in the city for a few days. One half of the group was led through the Bible story line and how it points to Christ (led by our trip leader), while the second half of the group was taught various topics by Seminary students. The groups then switched the next day. The teaching was very encouraging as the house church leaders seemed very interested in the topics. They came from all over and stayed for hours to hear us share from the Word.
We then split up into three groups, one group of four and two groups of two, and went outside the city into the farming areas. I was with the group of four, who again split into two groups of two for teaching. My partner and myself went into a little village and taught for two and a half days. The first day I took them through the book of Genesis showing how various aspects points to Christ. My partner then went through some areas of Exodus and the Passover, again showing how it related to the New Testament. The next two days we walked through various topics, such as marriage and money. We did have a few issues during this teaching due to the fact that we did not get the translator we were expecting and had to work with a believer whose English was not quite as good. I think the second day went better when we were more focused on the practical aspects rather than the more theological ones, though at the very least we were able to get them into reading more of the Old Testament (most had to look up the OT books in the table of contents).
As far as evangelism went, there were not as many opportunities as I had hoped for. We went out one day to talk to Muslims in the city. We were given a set of questions about Muslim beliefs which we could use to start conversations. It did work to start conversations, but the first time my group of three started asking questions we were immediately surrounded by 30+ people. This did not lend itself well to giving the gospel. Instead we focused on asking questions which would show the inadequacies of the Muslim belief system. At one point, one of the men answering our questions was told by others to stop because we were confusing them. They are not taught to question their beliefs and basically just do and believe things because they have always done them that way. Hopefully our time going out in the city will churn up the soil to make them more receptive to the gospel.
So that is a very brief look at what we did. But what was India like? Well there are two main impressions which come to my mind when I think of India. Hot and poor. The area where we were really wasn’t much hotter than the Atlanta area (it was in the 90’s with about 100% humidity). The only difference was that most buildings and vehicles did not have air conditioning so it was hard to escape from it. The heat in itself was somewhat bearable but when you combined it with the heavy air pollution and the garbage lined streets it just seemed to make everything else just a little more uncomfortable.
The poverty is the other thing that stands out. I have seen poor areas of cities before, but pretty much the whole city was lined with beggars and people living on the street. Just a block from our hotel there was a woman with two young children (probably 3 and 1 years old) who we would see cooking food in a can on the sidewalk. You also had children and mothers holding malnourished infants come up to you begging for money. It broke your heart, but you couldn’t give them any money. The children most likely worked as a group who would take all the money back to an adult. The infant probably didn’t belong to the mother, but was passed around from woman to woman to aid in their begging.
We also got to do some more touristy items. My group of four which went out of the city were able to play our first game of cricket. We also attended a church service at the church William Carey started and we also got to visit the college he started outside of the city. We also went to visit the Kali Temple where the Hindus worship the goddess Kali (who is essentially the goddess of war/vengeance – she is evil incarnate, wearing a necklace of skulls around her neck). Right next door to the Kali Temple is the first “Mother House” started by Mother Theresa. We went inside and visited with some of the sick there. The contrast between the two sites was amazing. On the one hand you have people worshiping an idol and on the other you have people trying to share mercy and kindness by meeting real physical needs.
I could write much more but I don’t think I can ever get across the emotional and spiritual impact of a trip like this. Once more I would like to thank you all for your prayers. As you remember, please continue to pray for India, both for its spiritual and its worldly needs. Please pray for those house church leaders whom we were able to teach. Pray that God’s Word will have worked in their own hearts and pray that they will be able to replicate the teaching to others.