Mark Nicholson: Good to see you. Yes, this was my eighth trip to India in the last few years, spanning COVID time. So it was great to be back there. You’re so right, John, I really want to get you over to India at some point. It is an amazing place because everywhere you go in India, it is bustling with activity, movement, sights, sounds and smells. It’s just almost overwhelming to the senses in most places in India. But in many ways it’s a beautiful thing. It’s these exotic Hindu temples, monkeys, animals, jungles and it’s exotic foods, overcrowded cities, and colorful dresses.
John: In many ways it’s more mysterious to me than a place like China just because of the cultural outlook of the place. I know that there’s just overwhelming challenges between Hinduism and Islam and some of the fractions and attacks there are against many of the Christians, especially in the north. I know that you’re going to India because it’s our mission to go to places of greatest need in terms of abortion, infanticide, and gendercide, wherever those are most concentrated. That’s kind of our top priority and that’s what’s brought you to India.
Mark: Yes, the first thing that took us to India was the idea that probably more gendercide occurs in India than any other country. In India and in most places that of course results in baby girls being aborted or put to death in favor of baby boys culturally. But the abortion issue and even the infanticide issues are also tremendous mountains to be tackled in India.
John: Yes, I know you told us that story once about the miracle baby. It really illustrates some of the enormous spiritual and rational challenges that we face in India. Tell us about that.
Mark: I love a couple of things about the story, but one of them in many ways is that it encapsulates in one story part of the real heart and core of why PassionLife exists–to see what God will do and it’s not just about babies, but it’s about the Gospel. So this story comes from the Punjab area, the Sikh religious area of Northwest India. I was teaching a small group of pastors there a few years ago and one of those pastors took the Four Questions training. About two or three weeks later, he just succinctly preached this pro-life theology in his small church of maybe12 or 13 people. And there was a Christian woman in his congregation who was listening and she started thinking about her non-Christian neighbor who she had recently found out was pregnant and going to have a baby. So the Lord stirred her to go next door after the service and speak to her neighbor, who was of course a Sikh and a non-Christian. And the woman said: “No, I have an abortion appointment scheduled for tomorrow morning at 9am.” The Christian woman said: “Oh, I mean, is this something that you want?”
And the non-Christian said: “No, no, I would love to have this baby, but we have learned by ultrasound that the baby is a girl. My family won’t allow me to have a baby girl. I must have a baby boy first. It’s my duty and responsibility. So we’re going to abort this baby.” The Christian woman was so distressed and talked with her and showed her compassion and support because she could tell that this lady would be happy to have a baby girl. It was just that her husband and father wouldn’t allow her to. In the end of their conversation she said: “You don’t know my God, but my God knows you and my God knows your baby. And if you will trust me, I will put my trust in my God. You will see God move to help you, to bless you, to protect your baby, to provide for you everything that you need.” So the woman skipped the abortion appointment the next morning, but didn’t tell her family. All week she was worried that people would find out. Eventually she went to a second doctor to get an ultrasound to check up on the health of the baby. Long story short, the baby that the second doctor found by ultrasound was a boy. Now there was question at first as to whether or not God had miraculously changed the gender of this female baby into a boy to protect its life. But what we know from India is so often doctors who perform abortions will lie to a woman about the gender of the baby in order to sell that abortion to her. In other words, this was probably a baby boy and the doctor said it’s a baby girl knowing that she would pay him to abort the baby, go home, get pregnant and come right back to him and he would be able to make more money. So when this woman told her family the story, her father stood up in the assembly of the extended family and said the Christian God has provided a miracle to save the life of our precious baby boy. And the entire extended family, whether that be 3 or 10 people, made a profession of faith that day because of what they had seen God do to intervene on behalf of the baby boy that they all wanted to see born.
John: So, maybe in their mind you’re saying that in some ways they’re seeing that the miracle rescue was somehow changing the baby’s gender in utero, but the real miracle is that the neighbor went and talked to her in the name of Jesus and appealed to her, slowed things down and then gave God a chance to work things out in a life-saving way.
Mark: Of course, the miracle is that God changed her heart. We can’t change hearts. This Christian woman who spoke to her neighbor really can’t change hearts. All she can do is obey by speaking up and then God uses that obedience by changing this woman’s heart. That led to life change for an entire group of her family members. It’s a beautiful, beautiful illustration.
John: Well, I do think that it represents the moral and spiritual darkness as well as the power that we have in Christ to go out and make a life-saving difference to people. Our vision around the world is really to summon the Christians to the biblical vision of being an army of good Samaritans and providing life-saving help and do it in a life-changing way, rescuing the innocent in this way. You are just now really diving into India as the great, great big challenge of PassionLife going forward. I know that you’ve been building a very strong partnership with Pastor Amit Paul. Tell us about Amit and what’s about to happen here.
Mark: Amit is a pastor who lives in Calcutta and he had the vision or the burden of pro-life ministry laid on his heart just recently, right before I met him. I was introduced to him through another missionary who was aware of his burden. So I went over there in November of 2018 for the first time. And again I’ve made eight trips and have always worked with Amit. But for the most part I’ve been training Amit to do the PassionLife theological training and to train other people to do that. Amit has been doing it primarily in the Northern part of India, which is more non-Christian or unevangelized, as compared to Southern India where most of the Christian activity in the last hundred years has taken place. So Amit has been working in Calcutta and North Bengal primarily, but this trip was a little bit of a branch out for that.
John: Well, Mark, when you go to hard places and you do hard things with people, it’s exciting. We want to see it. I’m eager to meet Amit and introduce him to our support community.
Mark: Great, there he is. Amit, thanks so much for joining us today. It’s great to see you. How are you doing?
Amit Paul: I am okay, by the grace of God. I’m really thrilled to see what God is doing in our country in recent days.
Mark: So we spent maybe eight days together in India traveling all over. We had this wedding, and then we did all this heavy travel. Maybe you could share with our friends who are watching the video today what you thought some of the highlights of our time together were or what you thought was special that God was doing as we traveled together.
Amit: There were two main areas I would say this time when both of us traveled together in different parts of our country. The number one thing was we were prioritizing our vision, not only for West Bengal, but for the many different parts of India. So that is one area. The second area was we were seeking to raise up more leaders or joining with more leaders so that the multiplication work may go rapidly. We believe that in the days to come they’ll take the baton in their own hands and they will really do good.
At the same time we went to Bangalore. We got a huge response from the student groups, the women’s leaders group, and pro-life pastors. They all came together, even filmmakers. So they were there and they got the vision and they’re really taking some initiative. So this is one area where we had some good success, not only the pastors, but also the student groups. So the second generation is also interested in their own circumstances.
Mark: That’s right. Part of the work that we were doing there in Bangalore was in a way piggybacking on previous work that had been done with another pro-life group that we know and work with called Pro-Life Global. They had been there stirring up student groups and now we were reinforcing, if you will. So that was a bit of a highlight. We went to Coimbatore and we met with leaders who have been in the pro-life movement in India, working mainly by themselves, trying to work with other people, but they’ve really been long-term workers and visionaries for a long time. We were in Mumbai where we connected primarily with the Catholic group of pro-life workers. So really everywhere we went we worked with a different group of people. We were in a Bible college in Dehradun, speaking with leaders there. Some real highlights.
What do you think, Amit, going forward will be the fruit of our traveling together? Do you think it will be just the connections that we made or encouraging people from different parts of the country to look together and work together? What do you think the fruit will be of our time together?
Amit: Yes, Mark, there are really some positive things because it is not only the connections. Yes, we got connected with many leaders around the world. Some of them I knew earlier, some of them I also met for the first time. Some of them I knew them by phone, but I didn’t see them. But now we see them face to face and we exchanged our vision. But it is not only to connect with them or meet them, but I have full faith because they will continually keep in touch. Like the Coimbatore man who was traveling to West Bengal for some other reason. He was speaking at a pastor’s conference, not on pro-life issues. But while returning, he was just connecting with me and they are keeping in touch. And then the Delhi group we met with, only a few key leaders. One of them got connected with the Bihar group in Patna, where his cousin’s brother is a pastor. So he called me over WhatsApp and said: “Pastor, I am really amazed by hearing the things that the vision that you got. So please enroll me in your vision. I want to eradicate abortion from Bihar.” So in that way we are seeing the people that are getting interested. Some of them are really catching the vision. Tomorrow or the day after we are going to see a very great harvest in India.
Mark: Yes, to the glory of God. That’s a great faith vision. Well, Amit, we’re so thankful that you were able to join us here for a few minutes and give your thoughts on our time together. Thanks for joining us. I know it’s getting late at night there.
Amit: Yes, my greetings to all and your families there.
John: Well, Mark, it’s exciting to meet Amit and to get a sense of who he is and his passion and commitment. I can understand why you enjoy working together side by side from city to city. I know you got sick on this last trip, so I know there are moments where it isn’t all mystery, wonder and beauty. It’s just crushing determination. I know you had an example that I think would be good for our people to know that this kind of work has a lot of those really hard moments.
Mark: You never know exactly what God is going to do or what’s going to happen. And sometimes it’s wonderful and sometimes it’s exhausting. But as you mentioned, John, we were doing a seven cities in seven days tour where we would fly in the morning, teach all afternoon and into the evening, crash in a hotel room near the airport and then fly the next morning to another city. But one night in Mumbai when we got in a little bit early, Amit came to my room right as I was getting ready for bed, 7:30 or 8:00 at night. He said: “I have a family that I know in Mumbai that I’ve connected with. Their nine-year-old daughter has cancer and we have been supporting them and praying for them. They’re not believers and I’m going to go out and pray for this girl tonight. Would you like to come?” John, everything in me wanted to say no, because I was starting to get a little bit sick at that point. I was tired from our travels. But there was something about Amit’s excitement about going to pray for this family that just made me think this is really important. So I summoned my strength, not with necessarily the best inward attitude, but I went and we took off in a little tuk tuk which is a little rented vehicle. We drove across the city, about an hour each way. We wound down a narrow corridor and climbed up almost like a fire escape through a hatch to an apartment that was on the third floor. This apartment was one room, about the size of my home office. That one room was their kitchen, their bedroom and their living room for the seven people who lived there, including this nine-year-old girl who had a cancer diagnosis. We sat there and I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to understand a word that was being spoken in Hindi. This was a poor family without much education, no English. They fed me as if I was the most honored guest they had ever had in their home. I sat there with this nine-year-old girl in my lap, though I couldn’t communicate with her. I just listened to these people interact. You can see in the video there’s even a mattress that folds down off of the wall onto the floor so the seven people in this family can all sleep together on the floor of their one room apartment. Just a touching, beautiful time of seeing the culture and connecting with the people. For some reason it was important for them to have me there, I guess because I was a foreign guest. In the end, I was very thankful that I went, but we got home at about one or two in the morning, exhausted but feeling like we had done the right thing. This is missions. Sometimes it’s gritty. You know this, John, you’ve experienced it before in various places. I don’t necessarily know what to say about that story and the importance of it other than to say I want our people to understand that missions is a shifting thing. We never know exactly what to expect when we go out, but we do sense that God is working. Building relationships with these people is so important and I’m just excited about what God is doing all over India as we meet people from various walks of life.
John: There’s no doubt that it’s hard to really get a sense of what we’re doing if you don’t share some of these hard moments in which all of your strength and all of your energy has already been spent. And yet you still have to go one more step and one more effort is required to fulfill God’s will in that setting. So thanks for answering that call. And now what’s before us is coming up with a larger plan for India in the next several years. I just want to show everybody again that part of the plan includes making and distributing 20,000 or 30,000 of what we call the Littlest Missionary or the PassionLife Tiny Baby. These cost about a dollar a piece. They’re 3D printed, scientifically accurate, and wondrous to behold. We call it the Littlest Missionary because everybody who receives one of these wants to show it to somebody else. I know that you have some plans to go out and print up 20,000 or 30,000 of these almost immediately.
Mark: That’s right. You can make these models in Colombia, South America, or you can make them in China and ship them into places like India, but you get caught sometimes at the border with custom tariffs. So another kind of breakthrough for us on this particular trip to India was we found a manufacturer who is able to go ahead right away to start reproducing these models in high quality. We were able to give him everything that he needs to get started and we’re hoping to be able to get 10,000, 20,000, or 30,000 of these models made up in the next several months, specifically for use in India. So we need to tackle that challenge now.
John: If you are watching this and you want to be a part of this big challenge in India to bring the gospel of life to one of the neediest places in the world, this is a good entry point. You know, you can give $10 and pay for 10 of these. You can pay $100 a month and be underwriting the cost of 100 of these every month. But we need to raise the money to make these in India and start getting them distributed there as we go out and teach our Four Questions.
There’s another way that you can really respond to our challenge in India. I also recently wrote up this little booklet called The Moral Crisis of Abortion and World Missions. What’s the connection? You could go to our homepage at passionlife.org and download this. I really invite you to do that. Read it over and then begin to share it with a couple of people, maybe at your church and church leaders. There’s a lot of people who are interested in places like India from a missionary perspective, but are closed-minded to seeing the moral crisis of abortion as an entry point for Christian evangelization. Then, of course, there’s a lot of people who are pro-life who never think outside the United States border. So we’re trying to bring these two groups together to marry one another, to bring the work to the neediest places. Since the U.S. only accounts for 3 percent of all abortion in the world on an annual basis, we really want to grow our community and start to target the neediest places like India. So that’s two action points right there that you can jump in on as well as begin to pray specifically for Amit and for Mark as he leads the charge there in India. Mark, any wrap-up thoughts?
Mark: Yes, I would just say that missions is not just trying to teach people but we’re trying to start movements and I can see God work in lots of people coming together, working together for His kingdom and reproducing that. So I’m very excited about what God is doing in India and the fact that this trip connected us with so many new places. It was like we were throwing a stone in the pond with new people in new areas. It’s really exciting and we ask people to pray with us for India that we’d be able to see and trust God to start a movement of good Samaritans who will rescue babies in India. So that’s my wrap-up. I’m really thankful that people joined us today. John, it’s good to talk to you.
John: Thank you Mark for your time. Thanks for going over there. Thanks for all of you who have prayed and sent some of your charity. We have to push a rock up the hill, so let’s do it together for the glory of Jesus. Thank you.