Last month, I had the honor of spending two weeks with Pastor Sujoy and his family in India. I and the others on my mission team worked beside him teaching computer and English classes, caring for kids, teaching them about the Bible, and sharing the gospel with villagers in the beautiful Sundarban Islands.
Pastor Sujoy, a stocky, serious, yet cheerful man, is the driving force behind multiple Christian ministries in West Bengal. He’s the pastor of Grace Community Church. He also leads the Grace Community Centre, which includes a Bible academy, music academy, computer academy, and a day care ministry. He leads translation and publishing projects, most notably the first-ever Bengali hymnal with musical notation, which he and his wife recently finished. Every year he leads mission groups like ours on outreach trips to the villages to share the gospel. I could also see that he loves his wife and three daughters very much. He works hard to spread God’s love, but he’s humble enough to give God all the credit for the work that is being done.
I also met Pastor Sujoy’s brother, Pastor Sukrit. I learned that Grace Community Church is one church in a network of 130 churches that have been planted in India in the last 25 years through Sukrit’s organization, Christ Mission Ashram.
At dinner one evening, I asked Pastor Sujoy how he became a Christian. I thought maybe he would tell me about meeting a missionary or going through a some other conversion experience as a young man. Instead, I learned that both of these brothers are fourth-generation Christians, raised by Christian parents. Their father was an elder in the church, and it was their great-grandfather who was converted by Christian missionaries about one hundred years ago. He responded to the gospel message and passed on the faith to his own children, resulting in three successive generations of faithful Christians.
It’s amazing how small seeds planted in Christ’s kingdom can grow into large trees. One missionary went to India with the gospel. One man’s heart was changed. He loved and taught his children, who again loved and taught their children, who are now pastors and evangelists serving and preaching in the name of Christ. Thousands of people have now been touched because of what one missionary did, and because of what one father and mother taught their children.
When we’re faithful to God, He can accomplish things through us that we could never even imagine. We can be part of God’s enormous plan for redeeming the world if we will faithfully serve Him, and if we will faithfully point our children to Christ, trusting Him with the results.
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