By Caroline Anderson
Ronald Acheson, senior pastor of a church Okla., washes an Indian man's feet. This man is from the "untouchable" caste, social station, and had never been touched before by someone outside his social station.
SOUTH ASIA—Tears streamed down the Indian man’s face as Ronald Acheson,* a senior pastor of a church in Oklahoma, washed the years of grime off of the man’s feet.
The man told Acheson he couldn’t touch him.
“It’s OK, we don’t have the same god,” Acheson told the man. “Our God wants us to touch you.”
The man is “untouchable,” from the lowest and most ostracized caste, the social station or status people are born into in India.
“These people, who had never been touched by anybody considered to be ‘upper caste’, as we were washing their feet, they were just crying,” Acheson said.
Acheson is an International Mission Board trustee and the chairman for the South Asian affinity’s subcommittee. There are a total of 90 trustees who serve on committees for the IMB’s nine affinity groups. The trustees are responsible for determining policy for the IMB and interviewing and approving missionaries for overseas service.
This January, seven trustees on the South Asia committee made the trek to visit the missionaries they serve.
“It was one of the most incredible things that I’ve ever been a part of,” Acheson said.
The purpose of the trip, Darren Cantwell,* the South Asia Affinity Group leader, said, was to allow the trustees the opportunity to see and participate in the ministry first-hand and encourage the missionaries and their national partners.
The trustees split up and traveled with missionaries to different cities in India, Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.
IMB trustee Marvin Flannery, pastor of a church in Littleton, Colo., visited northern India, an area with a large population of Muslims.
Marvin Flannery,* a trustee from Colorado and pastor of a church in Littleton, Colo., traveled to western and northern India.
Flannery came to observe, listen and encourage, but he came also with the purpose of forming a long-term partnership with an unreached people group or region.
“God called me to pastor a little church … but I have had a heart for church planting,” Flannery, who has helped plant 13 churches, said. “I have been committed to that for 22 years and now, I think what I’ve learned, I have a desire to take to the ends of the earth.”
On his trip, he had the chance to participate and connect with national pastors in a two-day church-planting training of Hindu background believers, Muslim background believers and believers coming from Christian homes.
Flannery also had the chance to speak in several churches in villages, pray over the sick in the slums and hear testimonies of national believers.
The highlight of the trip for Flannery, though, was being present at a baptism of four Kashmiri believers.
“The thing that was most impressive, [was] watching those Kashmiri brothers be baptized, and knowing that they were counting the cost,” Flannery said.
It’s a big step for Muslim background believers to be baptized. In the militarized Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir, converts to Christianity can be killed. Baptisms make a believer’s decision public.
“These men had already prayed to receive Christ, they were followers of Jesus, but they understood what that one, symbolic move would do,” Flannery said. “Their brothers, that evening, said to them, ‘You will be tried, you will be persecuted.’ They fully expect to go back and face persecution and even the possibility of death.”
The challenge for the American church, Flannery said, is “to identify with our brothers and sisters in places like this, to step in those waters, to identify with them, with the cost – that’s what I’ll take back.”
Flannery is taking back the stories of these Kashmiri brothers to share and will be praying with his church members about a church partnership to help see the Great Commission through to completion.
A local believer in South Asia opens his home for IMB trustee Marvin Flannery, pastor of a church in Littleton, Colo.
Milo Hiatt,* IMB trustee and pastor of a church in Texas, traveled with missionaries who are fulfilling the Great Commission in Nepal.
Hiatt said it was amazing to see missionaries share the Gospel as hundreds of worshippers spun prayer wheels in a 700-year-old temple in Nepal.
Hiatt had the chance to share truth at a magic show. He watched a man “heal” a boy after he’d stabbed him with knives.
“He [the magician] was talking about miracles, how he can perform miracles,” Hiatt said.
“Pretty cool miracle,” a man in the crowd said to Hiatt.
“No,” Hiatt said. “I know someone who can do miracles.”
Hiatt shared about the “true miracle worker” with the man and introduced him to a local IMB worker. The man later called the worker and said he told his whole family about Jesus, who is the true miracle worker, and his family and friends wanted to hear more.
The trustees left behind many men and women hungry to hear more, not only in South Asian countries, but also in Bangkok, Thailand.
The trustees spent their last day working with IMB worker Darryl Pogue.* Pogue works with South Asians who live abroad.
“There is an estimated 35 million South Asians living abroad,” Pogue said. It’s his task to develop strategy for sharing the Gospel with these men and women.
Trustees went out on the streets of Bangkok in groups of two and three, some with the assignment to share with Sikh shop owners, others to share with Pakistanis.
Hiatt had the opportunity to share the Gospel with a Nepali-Burmese man on the street.
“Yes, I want to accept, that’s what I have been waiting for,” the man said after he heard about hope. “I knew you had something to say.”
The man prayed to receive Christ as his Savior.
*Name changed.
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