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July/August 2015 • SR
In May of 2015 I was able to visit the two groups of
Seventh Day Baptist churches in India with Nicholas
Solomon from the Salem SDB church in West Virginia.
One was the established SDB World Federation confer-
ence in Andhra Pradesh (the Kerala, India, conference
was no longer active). The other was the group that
had just started holding services in January of 2014
in the remote Indian state of Manipur bordering the
country of Myanmar.
The Manipur group had their start from a visiting Indian
pastor at a conference in Seoul, South Korea, when I
was there meeting with Seventh Day Baptists in late
2013. The Indian pastor was invited by my hosts to
come and learn more about our beliefs and polity from
sessions I was going to be giving to the Koreans. He
came and quietly listened, introduced himself, and I
expected that was going to be the last I would hear
from him. To my surprise a few weeks after my return
to the office, I received emails from a far eastern part of
India that contained images of meetings being held with
a banner advertising sessions regarding the teachings
and beliefs of Seventh Day Baptists. Today their group
has two churches on each side of the Indian-Myanmar
boarder. They are anxious to reach people of Burmese
descent in the region, particularly in areas where
Christianity is a tiny minority.
This was not the only amazing event regarding this
visit. Even before entering the country, I had been
praying that the Holy Spirit would open the hearts and
minds of the Indian SDBs to a closer walk with Jesus
by better understanding and applying His true
love in their lives and ministries. Then the first
morning there before I was going to be speak-
ing with a congregation, I was reading a Bible
scripture passage as a devotional and found it
articulated just what I had been praying for
the Seventh Day Baptists in India.
This was the prayer from the third chapter of the book
of Ephesians:
14
For this cause I bow my knees unto the Father of our Lord
Jesus Christ,
15
Of whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named,
16
That he would grant you, according to the riches of his glory,
to be
strengthened with might by his Spirit
in the inner man;
17
That Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith; that ye,
being
rooted and grounded in love
,
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May be able to comprehend
with all saints what is the
breadth, and length, and depth, and height;
19
And
to know the love of Christ, which passes knowledge
,
that ye might be filled with all the fullness of God.
For me this was a blessing and a miracle for multiple
reasons. One reason: it affirmed to me that morning
this was a worthy prayer for me to be praying for the
struggling churches in India — because Paul, the apostle,
had been praying this prayer for the early Church in
Ephesus. Also, because Paul had written it about two
thousand years earlier, what I wanted them to clearly
understand was available and already converted by
others into the local languages by Bible translators.
Both of the groups I visited embraced this prayer for
them and requested that others pray for this and their
ministries.
Please, consider making these groups a
priority in your regular prayers. I would like to find
each of these groups a prayer partner congregation to
share each other’s challenges and victories. Maybe your
church could be the first to ask to be a partner in
prayer with them?
Clinton R. Brown
Executive Director
FOCUS on Missions
Partnering with India in Prayer
SR
