God has moved so dramatically among one Last Frontier people group in South Asia that the Southern Baptist missionaries working among them since 1997 are planning to shift their focus to another people without access to the Gospel.
God has moved so dramatically among one Last
Frontier people group in South Asia that the Southern Baptist
missionaries working among them since 1997 are planning to shift their
focus to another people without access to the Gospel.
When Marty and Jodi Hunter* decided to accept
responsibility for taking the gospel to India’s Lingayat people, other
Christian workers didn’t offer them much hope of success. In 1997,
researchers could count only 800 Christians and no churches among the
Lingayats, a high-caste Hindu group that numbers 15 million.
“People discouraged us, saying the people were
hard-hearted, that the work would be fruitless,” Hunter says. “Today
we’re looking at about 3,000 believers – most of them people who
have come to faith in the past two years.”
The number of Lingayat believers is growing so
rapidly that Hunter believes they will see 18,000 believers in 1,000
house churches by 2006 – a movement strong enough to be left in the
capable hands of local believers trained to reproduce themselves.
Several factors have played a role in sparking this
church-planting movement, evidencing reflecting a spontaneous, rapid
multiplication of the Gospel:
• Prayer. “Southern Baptists prayed specifically for
this people group in 2000,” Hunter explains. “Not many months later, we
began seeing an amazing outbreak of the Gospel that has been going on
now for three years. We see a direct link between the outpouring of
prayer and Lingayat people coming to Christ.”
• Lingayat witnesses. “We knew that, ultimately, a
Lingayat is going to receive the Gospel message best from one of their
own people,” Hunter notes. “Previously, we had only trained willing
Christians from other people groups. We saw a turning point in 2002
when we trained the first Lingayat believers to reach their own people.”
• Customized material. “We had some Lingayat
believers write Gospel tracts for their own people, using some of their
own distinctive symbols and vocabulary,” Hunter says.
The Lingayat team had planned to print 10,000 of the
tracts, but the Bible society insisted on a minimum press run of
100,000.
“We saw the principle of sowing abundantly and
reaping abundantly holds true with Gospel seeds,” he says. “Before
long, we found ourselves ordering a second 100,000 tracts – now we’re
on our third!”
• Family evangelism. “When Hindus have come to
Christ in the past, they often were encouraged to leave their
families,” he says. “New believers became isolated
and didn’t have a voice with their families.
“Now we emphasize that new believers should go back
to their families with the Gospel,” he continues. “We point out that
the Geresene Demoniac wanted to leave his community, but Jesus told him
to go home and tell them what the Lord had done.
“When Jesus came back, a multitude of 4,000 people
wouldn’t leave His feet,” he adds. “When Lingayats see that God’s will
is for them to stay and win their community to Christ, the Gospel
spreads rapidly.”
• Training trainers. The Lingayat team also trained
new believers in a set of simple concepts they could easily pass on to
people they led to Christ – harnessing the passion of new believers and
transforming them into multiplying trainers.
“In one case, I trained a group of 10 believers,”
Hunter recounts. “They came back and reported that 30 people had come
to Christ.
“I told them that when we came back in another 10
days, we would not discuss who they had led to Christ, only the
experience of those 30 new believers who had been trained to share
their story,” he adds. “When they came back, they reported that those
30 new believers had led 270 people to Christ!”
Even when the time comes to leave the work entirely
in the hands of Lingayat believers, the Hunters won’t have a hard time
finding another people group in need of the Gospel.
“There are nearly 1,000 other people groups just
like the Lingayat in South Asia – hidden people groups that have been
overlooked with the Gospel,” Hunter says. “About 50 percent of Last
Frontier people groups are Hindu peoples. That is such a major bloc of
the Great Commission – one that’s really neglected.” (BP)
*Name changed for security reasons.