Ask people around Bangalore, India, what a Christian looks like and many would
describe Rebekah Naylor, the Southern Baptist missionary surgeon who has labored
at Bangalore Baptist Hospital for the past 30 years.
Ask people around Bangalore, India, what a Christian looks like and many would
describe Rebekah Naylor, the Southern Baptist missionary surgeon who has labored
at Bangalore Baptist Hospital for the past 30 years.
Some have seen Naylor, the cool, precise, professional medical doctor who has
performed countless surgeries and other medical procedures. She has saved lives,
delivered babies and relieved suffering for thousands of people over the years.
Others know her through her soft-spoken but persistent sharing of the gospel,
her training and encouragement of Indian Baptists in how to witness and plant
churches. In this role, she has helped bring eternal life to thousands and relieved
tahe spiritual suffering known by many here who fear Hinduism’s vengeful
gods.
For Naylor, the missionary calling and the drive to become a physician were
one calling. It came when she was 13. “God spoke to me very clearly about
personal involvement in foreign missions service,” she says.
That calling combined with her interest in medicine.
“My ambition in medicine was basically to use it as an avenue to share
my faith in Jesus Christ,” she says.
Already, she had plowed new ground; few women became physicians, much less
surgeons, in the 1960s.
By the time she arrived in India as new missionary in 1974, she had managed
to get through university, medical school and related training. On the field,
she quickly found herself stepping through India’s poor who slept on sidewalks
for want of homes.
Naylor arrived to Bangalore Baptist Hospital when it had been open just six
months. At the time, the building sat on a bare, 15-acre site outside the city.
The Indian staff and the 12 patients present welcomed her warmly.
As years passed, the city grew out to surround the hospital compound. The hospital
also grew, from 80 beds to 160. The hospital began to help educate doctors and
train Indians to become X-ray and lab technicians. Today, the hospital delivers
1,500 babies a year, treats more than 100,000 patients a year and impacts five
times that many for the gospel.
Naylor served in several key roles at the hospital, including administrator,
coming to be accepted more as family than foreign staffer. She also became honorary
“auntie” to hundreds and hundreds of Indians.
From its inception, the hospital maintained pastoral ministry and outreach.
“Its reason to exist was to tell people about Jesus Christ,” Naylor
says.
Today, Indian Baptists point to a map of Bangalore that is dotted with Baptist
churches, most the result of the hospital’s outreach. When workers went
to one community a couple of miles from the hospital years ago, there were no
Christians and no churches. Within a year, there were 20 baptized believers.
Today, Trinity Baptist Church is a thriving congregation that has started 18
other churches and is working in many other communities to start more.
When a man died at Baptist Hospital some years ago, the staff presented the
man’s wife and family a Bible. Though they grieved, they began reading
this strange book they had never seen.
It was only years later that the hospital staff learned the family had turned
to Christ and that all the children had become ministers.
Naylor has a treasury of such stories.
Despite a career most missionaries and physicians would envy, in recent years,
Naylor says she has realized that even the many churches started through the
hospital’s ministry never will be enough to reach all of India. In Karnataka
state alone, 52 million people represent 300 language/cultural groups. Missionaries
have learned that when a group begins to respond to the gospel and start new
churches, the growth stays within the group and only rarely crosses into another.
To reach the lost people in this one state, Christians must deliver the gospel
in 300 different languages and in 33,000 villages, towns and cities linked by
few roads.
“I think this gives you just a small picture of one part of India as to
how difficult it is and challenging it is to access all these different communities
and people groups and languages and to communicate effectively,” Naylor
says of the situation.
Beyond the people group divisions, India’s social castes create still
more barriers, she adds. “It is difficult for a person of one caste to
reach into another, but I firmly believe that this can happen.”
Her experience has made Naylor into a cheerleader for the whole nation and
its peoples. “When we think of all of India, our vision is that we would
like to see at least 1,000 workers come into India,” she says.
Southern Baptist workers have identified 50 mega-cities (with populations more
than 1 million) and 1,100 unreached people groups in South Asia, most in India.
“In order to engage them with the gospel, I think it’s evident that
many, many, many workers are needed,” Naylor pleads.
India’s millions are open to the gospel – and they constitute an
open door, Naylor insists.
“They are waiting to hear,” she says.
“They are ready to respond.”
