We thank God for all his protection, love, care and dear presence as he enables us to follow his will, it was once again a month of experiencing lot of grace and love from our God. We would like to thank each one of our friends for their prayers. We were able to conduct one Teaching Learning Event [TLE]in Orisa for our group of pastors, please see the TLE report after the brief news. 

Our lives in PTS are useful as well. We were able to talk with most of the students offering them counseling, guidance, prayers for their needs and future plans of ministry. Promila’s teaching of “Life of Christ” is going well. She has seminary students’ wives as her students. Both kids, Hanokh & Harshmaria are growing in the Lord and in Hindi culture very well. Recently the Holi festival was their prime attraction since it was kind of first Holi for them to experience as children of their age. Both of them enjoyed watching and finally we allowed them to play just both of them on our roof top. 

Anup has started preparing for his ordination and he is preparing faithfully, needs lot of prayers from all friends.

Over all this month was the month of serving the lord and his people with great learning experience from the filed. We are sure that the Lord is working we are his chosen instruments, he is the master potter and we are clay. Nothing will threaten us as we serve the Lord of Lords and King of Kings our savior Jesus Christ.

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Orisa TLE report:

Dates:

We as a committee were glad that the dates were finalized 25th to 27th February 2007.

Teachers were selected by the committee:

Rev. Hiralal Solanki and Mr. Anupkumar Arun Hiwale

Travel plans:

We decided to take local transport, auto, trains, taxi and airlines to make this trip cheap and save lot of time and money on travel.

Subjects were selected with prayerful thinking:

Giving to the Lord and biblical accountability in the church: - Rev. Solanki

What are sin, true righteousness and saving grace of Lord Jesus Christ? - Anup

How to pray based in Heidelberg QA116-119: - Anup

Teaching Details:

Rev. Solanki prayerfully gave the best biblical teaching and taught “Giving to the Lord and biblical accountability in the church.” Teaching on these topics changed whole idea of handling money in the church and giving perspectives of all the pastors. In the presentation Rev. Solanki asked them to write on a piece of paper some of the information of their family and church including their monthly income and the average income of their church members as well as the monthly collection that they receive in the church. It was very sad to know that the income of these churches is lesser than the tithe of the income of their pastors. There Rev. Solanki gave an illustration making sure that the pastors understand that even they are not giving their tithes. Some pastors with tears said the Lord has spoken with them. Rev. Solanki later gave the church order of Presbyterians and emphasized in his teaching, how best accountability builds humble and godly Presbyterian and Reformed churches?

Mr. Hiwale prayerfully taught five points of Calvinism, with very simple fashion. As we were talking about the total depravity and its huge effect on relationships; relationship with God, family, neighbors, fellow church members, country men and all. Pastors told that they never had thought that how depraved we are…when we spoke of true righteousness, saving grace and atoning sacrifice and its solidarity in Lord Jesus that changed the feel of the room again and we could see that the Lord gave great humble joy in each face and there was lot of testimonies these men shared with us, how joyfully they would serve the Lord from now, they also understood that it is He who is building the church and we are not at all alone. He is the lord of our weakness and lord of our success in the ministry. Mr. Hiwale gave elaborated teaching from Heidelberg LD 45 QA 116-119. This went on and on…there was tea time the pastors said we should skip the tea… then came the time of lunch and the pastors said we should eat lunch little late and this total discussion went on for three hours and forty-five minutes. It was very meaningful and we all were blessed.

We are glad that the Lord day by day building these men from Orisa. Some churches that we visited gave a humble thankful testimony that their pastors have changed a lot and there is good change in them, these churches are thankful to God for the simple work of MPM-India.

Some problems that we faced:

On 25th we were suppose to meet in one of the churches for worship, but a night before we reached Bhubneshwar (Orisa’s Capital place), some radical Hindus demolished the worship hall, they call it a church building. We went to see the place and took interviews of the Christians there and found out that they are afraid reconstructing the building again because it was very expensive for them to build it and now they also are afraid of the anti-Christian elements in their neighborhood. So we had to find someone’s house and worship in a very small house, some were sitting out and were worshiping the Lord. It was a problem but the Lord gave us strength.

Rev. Solanki and Anup, both of us had some food poisoning and got very sick, Rev. Solanki was very sick as he reached Delhi on 27th he called me and told me that it was not good, he threw up, and almost got unconscious. There was a doctor traveling in the plane who gave him some immediate care, the crew almost thought they should do emergency landing. But in the Lord was gracious and he gave some relief to Rev. Solanki. They vacated some sits in the plane and asked him to lay down. Last whole week he took some treatment, he is feeling better now. Since I stayed back visiting some village churches, and preaching in the open air meetings. After finishing one of our meetings, we were heading to the other place for meeting but I felt very uneasy. So I asked driver to stop the car somewhere, so they turned car to one of the pastor’s house, his wife is a nurse and in their house I went to the toilet and threw up twice. There they took very good care of me giving me medicine and some head massage. I slept there for an hour, later we continued our preaching meetings. We had four open year meetings but I could preach only in three places one place we just visited and prayed for the people. It was food poisoning, I had yet two days of travel left and we were praying that the Lord gives us safe journey. Apart form this there were no problems all went on very well.

Plans for Orisa:

In our next TLE in Orisa we will be forming a group of pastors as a committee for MPM-India’s Orisa work and practically teach them Christian accountability. This committee will do all the administrative work, they will also handle paying of the bills of TLEs done for them under the supervision of MPM Convener.

We are praying to place a PTS student in Orisa for summer work that is this May-July 2007. He can teach pastors in the area and learn more of their problems. We will have to pay for the summer student for three months.

We are praying that we will run some economic development programs for these churches to help them grow in their faith; i.e. goat projects, leaf-plate making, auto-riqshaws etc.

Since Nav Jeevan Presbytery is working on developing some system of ordination for pastors who do not know English and has not gone through the formal theological training, such as our Orisa pastors etc. We will help NJP in placing before them the actual ordination kind of needs of Orisa churches along with our other places (Indian States) of interest, which will help NJP to plan well.

MPM-India will facilitate church planting in Orisa and make sure that these men are prepared with complete reformed understanding so that they can appear before the NJP for ordination in few years time as well as they become teachers for their kind of people.

MPM-India sees the need of having confessions in Orisa state language. Pastors know Hindi so we are teaching them with our Hindi confessions but the congregation needs to read confessions in their own mother tongue. We have few student from Orisa in PTS and if we can spend some time and money on these students we will be able to get these translated one unit at a time.

MPM-India sees that entire Orisa state is open for the gospel and the poverty, social living, Christian doctrines of this sate need lot of Christian attention.

Needs of Orisa Pastors:

We have learned that these pastors need lot of teaching material for their congregations, beginning with confessions

It will be very helpful to build some fellowship halls for these poor congregations in four different villages that we have personally visited

We need some base in Capital place of Orisa called Bhubneshwar, for our statewide focus in Orisa. This base can be used as the central place of running theological institute for Orisa as a whole.

They need improvement in their income, we can put some projects towards it for long term work opportunity for these congregation.

Take a look at one of the combined picture: