India surprises

Erich Bridges

Throngs pass through the open markets, shops and restaurants near Mumbai's rail stations.

MUMBAI - Where can you find thousands of millionaires - and nine of the world's richest billionaires?

India.

Who makes more movies than Hollywood?

India - by far. "Bollywood," the vast film industry based in Bombay (now Mumbai) churns out about 1,000 pictures a year, roughly twice as many as Hollywood.

Which nation boasts the world's biggest democracy?

India.

Which country now counts more than 24 million Christians - nearly 19 million of whom are evangelicals?

India.

Which country has a middle class that numbers 300 million - larger than the entire U.S. population - and a booming economy that was forecast to grow 8 percent this year?

You guessed it. India.

Astonishing diversity

Make no mistake: India still faces enormous problems of poverty and need. About 300 million people still live on less than a dollar a day.

But India has made amazing progress on many fronts - economic expansion, education, technology.

Here's a tip to avoid cultural schizophrenia in India: Realize that you can find anything you look for there. Staggering wealth and appalling squalor. Showbiz fantasy and harsh reality. High-tech companies and age-old cottage industries. Mega-cities and remote forests. The latest trends and ancient traditions. Holy men and atheists.

Hundreds of India's ethnic, religious and caste groups live in geographical or social isolation from each other, looking at the rest of this vast "nation of nations" with curiosity or suspicion. Many a south Indian, if set down somewhere in the north, would be as bewildered by the customs and languages as someone from the Mississippi Delta parachuting into Scandinavia.

A large population still growing

"Diversity is India," observes a leading Christian strategist who lives there. "You could pour a thousand lifetimes into India and never exhaust it."

But even a thousand lifetimes dedicated to spreading the gospel won't make a real dent in India - unless they are lives focused on multiplying disciples and churches.

India's 24-million-member Christian community is growing, but remains a small minority of the national population of 1.07 billion.

"As India goes, so goes the Great Commission," contends the Christian strategist. "And how is India doing? Not that well, quite frankly. Not because it's inaccessible - because it's neglected.

"If this is truly the last of the giants, God is giving it to us on a silver platter. There is no excuse for not getting the gospel out here."

More workers needed

In the cities, at least, Christ followers can readily gain a hearing in the noisy Indian marketplace of ideas. In the more traditional and resistant villages, growing numbers of believers are boldly proclaiming the good news.

"We've seen so many people come to Christ, so many churches started," says the strategist. "We just need more people implementing church-planting movement strategies. That means moving from planting an individual church and bringing a few people to Christ to saying, 'What's it going to take to see a movement that sweeps through a people?'"

It's already happening in some places, like the huge north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, where more than 5,000 house churches have sprung up in less than two years.

It will happen in many more places, because wherever the light of Christ is lifted up, He draws people unto Himself.

"Our job," says a believer, "is to turn on the light, turn on the light, turn on the light!"