FIRST PERSON: A Kolkata pastor shares about struggles

By: Upendra Basant*

When God first called me to ministry, I took this work as a profession, something I have to do. Then God changed my heart from considering ministry a profession to considering it a passion. My goal in this life became seeing people come to the Lord. I consider this goal worth any price we will have to give as a family.

My wife and I have worked together from the very beginning and she is very good at working in many different areas of ministry. She is very talented in working with children, not only our two daughters but also the children at the school. According to the registration lists, there are 564 children at the school. She is also a cell group leader and finds time to be a pastor’s wife. It’s very hard to find the time but she does. We pray together and share the burden of ministry, leaning on the other leaders in our church.

As a church, we want to see people come to the Lord and that is a reason we do outreach. Through the school, we can reach out to many families. Cell groups are also outreach into communities. Cell groups’ leaders are challenged every week to preach and to evangelize their community. We also practice mission work as a church. Cell groups get together to do volunteer work. Sometimes they go to a village and pray for the village, clean the streets of the village, or pray for the pastor and visit different families.

One of the big struggles here for people to come to faith in Jesus is the belief in Karma and the Hindu traditions. Karma means that you do something to be saved. Bengali Christians sometimes have big troubles and it is very hard for them to totally depend on God’s plan because of this. In most Hindu houses, you will see there are many pictures of gods and goddesses. They don’t worship or serve one god or goddess; they believe in many gods.  In one way, it is very good, you can access any Bengali house to teach and preach about Jesus and they will be very happy to hear you. But the dangerous part of this is that they will say Jesus is only one of the many gods. It is very difficult for a Hindu to accept that Jesus is the Son of God and the only Way to Him.

Still, we have seen the church growing in this city. God has given us three sister churches in the last two years. One sister church has grown from 10 people to about 70 or 75 people. The other church has around 40 people.

We also run a school. Some people tried to discourage us but everyday through the children’s ministry we felt comfortable in our work. We have a chapel everyday for these students and everyday we teach them the Bible for at least half an hour. We want the school to help the children in three ways: body, mind and soul. Many of the schools only serve the body and mind. But we went to help the kids grow spiritually too. Children have a simple faith. They accept what we are teaching them and they practice it. God has used the children as a bridge to reach many families in our society.

Even as we grow, we have struggles. We started the school as social work; it is not a self-supporting school. The church runs by itself and they are trying to ask people to give their tithes, and as much as they can give, so that the church can run and support ministries like the school.

Pray that God will raise church planters with a passion for working in West Bengal and that we will continue to see the Father growing His church here and that the church will be the agent of change in a city with so many needs.

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*Name changed.