Hello to all! Evangelism in Nepal was tough. Tough spiritually and tough physically walking through the villages of Nepal was exhausting. Yet, in spite of the rough conditions, by God's grace, it was a fruitful month.
To start off with, my team of seven people partnered with a local Kathmandu ministry called Good Feet Ministry of Nepal. They have been my favorite ministry partners on the race thus far! The senior pastor of Good Feet is a man named Krishna and he began the ministry 20 years ago when it was illegal to be a Christian under the Nepali monarchy.
As I began speaking with Krishna, he said that he wanted the church he started to be straight out of the book of Acts. Talk about music to my ears! And as I began to learn more and more of Good Feet as the days went by, I was encouraged by the churches priorities. Good Feet is aggressive in expanding the gospel throughout Nepal, something which, due to treacherous mountains, poor roads, and rolling electrical blackouts is something much easier said then done. Yet, in spite of all of this, Good Feet has planted a half dozen full-fledged churches all across Nepal and regularly holds Gospel conferences in cities and small villages alike. And the pictures of river water baptisms in every church building I visited proved it. Every church would have this picture board of photos that would have dozens of photographs of baptisms in the natural Nepali rivers, and photos of gospel meetings and youth meetings. It was cool seeing the historical growth of this ministry.
As for my team during the month, we traveled to two mountain villages that were hours away from the Kathmandu capital. This first village was called Gorkha, and is famous in Nepal for its warriors and outside of Nepal for being the body guards of Prince Harry from what some of the local Gorkhans would told us. In any case, the people of Gorkha looked pretty formidable. We lived in the church house, which was just one really big room with an outside kitchen, and two squatty potties in an "outhouse" type structure on the side of the building. Mosquitos we're a constant haressment. The locals called them flying elephants which labeled them quite well I thought. Showers took place every 3 days either in a river or a waterfall that was hidden in the mountains.
Ministry was door to door, except door to door in Nepal is not quite the local neighborhood back home. So to reach the village we hiked A L L day to reach each successive family. When we would get there we would speak to them the gospel, hand out biblical tracts, give them bibles, and tell them the numerous images they would see in their shops and homes where idols that had no real power, and that Jesus is the great Savior and Judge of all mankind. Thankfully, our team was blessed with EXCELLENT translators, Bikram, Shiva, Isha, Pastor Yam, David, who all loved Christ and always seemed to have boundless energy.
Our toughest day was when we hiked up along "Gorkha mountain" where at the peak of the mountain were old ruins of an ancient Gorkhan fort and a modern temple ground where modern animal sacrifice still take place. But to get all the way there we had to hike 5 hours up extrememly steep terrain. The houses along this hike were few and far between so ministry seemed more like a rugged mountain hike than gospel proclamation for the largest part of it. Except when we were almost at the top of the mountain, merely 20 minutes from the very top, our team stopped at this noodle shack that sold 20 cent pepsi's and 50 cent noodle bowls. We dove into this small shack that was 5 ft tall and ordered lunch and all of the sudden two women walk in who ask us to tell them about Jesus!?! Like.. we didn't visit their house, make an announcement over some loud speaker, or even pre-announce our coming, these ladies just waltzed in from I don't know where, and WANTED to know about Jesus. So I begin talking to one lady and the other lady goes into the back room where most of my team was and for 45 minutes my team and our translating brothers tell these ladies the gospel. We gave them Bibles, and every pamphlet we owned, told about key verses, I asked if they would like to be baptized, they said they wern't ready to do that just yet, but said they wanted to begin to follow Jesus. It was really amazing! Only after reaching the peak of Gorkha mountain and looking into the distance for miles did I realize that God had our team hike all this way, all day, for these two ladies. I stood there staring at mountains upon mountains and thought, "All that work for that little moment near the threshold of the summit."
Yet that was the wrong perspective all together, for it wasn't a little moment, it was a BIG moment by God's grace, a destiny moment for those two women. I pray those women always have that same passion for God they had on that day.
Brother in Christ,
Matthew
Last day in Gorkha village
