People often ask about our travels around the world, questioning how we navigate vastly different places like China, Uganda, India, or Cuba. This question really reflects how we approach missions as Christians—how we transfer ourselves from one culture into another. It takes a lot of work, reading, research, listening, and prayer because it’s not easy to go from one culture to another.

I have always thought that the basic way we do our work is to remember what the Apostle Paul wrote when he talked about his own journeys outside of his own tradition and culture and going out into different cultures. He wrote this: “To the Jews, I became a Jew in order to win Jews. And to those under the law, I became as one under the law”. Meaning, even within Judaism, there were some people that lived a more restricted life with more rules than other groups and he adapted to those particular subsets. “To those outside the law, I became as one outside the law,” referring to the law of God—those who lived by the commandments and those who did not. Then he goes on, he says, “To the weak I became weak that I might win the weak”.

This has been particularly helpful because many decades ago, I started to figure out how we could reach mothers in a way that would effectively bring them to a place where they would choose life. My approach was this very verse. Become like them, think like them, learn their language, learn their experiences, learn everything that’s going on in their life so that you’ll know how through your spirit of sympathy to do for them what you would want someone to do for you, which is the golden rule. To the weak become weak to to those who are in an unplanned pregnancy, become like one in an unplanned pregnancy. This gives you key insight into what would be most helpful. Now, we’re extrapolating that concept to many parts of the world and particularly right now we’re trying to gear up to get more and more involved in the country of India.

India is a land of 1.4 billion people now. I believe that there are more people in India now than in China, which has traditionally been the country with the most people. It’s got 4,635 different people groups within that one country. So just going to India doesn’t mean anything. It’s what state you are going in India and what part of each of those states or territories you are dealing with. They’re infinitely complex. There are over 200 different languages in India. Fortunately, most of the people in India speak either English, Hindi, or Bengali. So you want to start with the major languages and then work down to the minor ones. As we go into teaching in India, we’ve got to create documents and training materials in different languages.

There’s also the caste system that overlays everything within India. The caste system is central to the religion of Hinduism, and therefore, even though it’s against the law to discriminate against people with a caste system and is forbidden by their constitution, it can’t be stopped because Hinduism requires it. It is an entire religion that works through a caste system worldview, and there are over 6,400 different castes. Each of these limits your social interactions with other people and defines your life depending on what cast you’re in.

This is an infinitely complex culture. There’s a quote that I learned long ago that Winston Churchill gave in describing Russia: “It’s a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma”. Having worked in China, I always felt that Winston Churchill was way off. I’ve been to Russia and I’ve been to China, and China seems a lot more complex than Russia. But, the more I learn about what we’re doing in India, I think it’s really India that is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma; it’s infinitely more complex than any other country that we’ve ever been in.

Therefore, we’re being cautioned that whatever we do in India, we need to think a little bit more long term, and we need to think about small incremental steps. Maybe we’ll see some breakthroughs, and maybe we won’t, but we know that going in, we’re up against a genuine stronghold when it comes to abortion, infanticide, and gendericide. This is made much more difficult because there’s so many different pockets of different cultures and complexities and religions and people groups and ethnic warfares and tribalism within the country.

On the positive side, however, we have some incredible examples of how God has used everyday ordinary people and given them extraordinary giftedness, insight, wisdom, and endurance. Perhaps the great hero of our work in India needs to be William Carey.

William Carey was a Baptist from England who went to India over 200 years ago, and he may still be the greatest missionary that ever went to India according to what he accomplished there. He not only wanted to bring the gospel into India, but he wanted to see that as the gospel changed individual lives, it had a social impact and changed the whole culture. He was very broad-minded in the types of things that he was involved in.

• He was an industrialist and he introduced the steam engine to India.
• He also built a factory in which they produced the first indigenous paper that was then used for printing and publishing in India.
• He set up the first printing and publishing of books and using modern scientific publishing methods in India.
• He introduced astronomy into the academic circles in order to counter the worldview of astrology which is much more religious in nature. With astronomy, you have a god that is a god of order where things can be measured and things can be planned. So it’s a worldview-changing moment.
• He started many schools and hospitals and medical clinics throughout the parts of India that he worked in.
• He started the first college, the Serampore College, which is near Kolkata.
• He was busy translating the Bible, and by the time he was done after 40 years of being in India, he had translated the Bible into 36 different languages—the whole Bible or parts thereof, meaning probably the gospels and some of the psalms.

At the same time, he found out that the question of life and the dignity and the sanctity of human life was also much destroyed by the culture. For example, he found out that every year about 400 babies were thrown into the Ganges River to be eaten by alligators. He knew that the tradition of widow burning was very common in different parts of India. All of these were violations of the sacred order that God created life in his image and is to be respected rather than intentionally destroyed. Since India at that time was under the rule of the British government, he began a pro-life crusade that eventually succeeded in passing a law against infanticide in China, which was named Car’s edict.

This is a great tradition and legacy that has come down to us today in India that I expect us to use a lot. The reality is that India is plagued by abortion today, by infanticide and by gendericide. There are whole villages that haven’t seen a baby girl born in their village in a couple of years because they’re all identified and aborted before they’re born. So it is an incredibly deep, powerful stronghold for our work, and we’re gearing up more and more for it.

It’s not even clear what parts of India are going to be the most open or where the most resistant, but we’ve been to India now over nine times, and we’re learning enough to see where some of our opportunities are and what some of the obstacles we have to figure out and overcome. We’ve already gotten our materials translated into Bengali and Hindi. We’ve got another five that we’re going to be working on over the next year. All of this leads me to say we need to rise up in terms of our mission and continue to go to the hardest and the neediest places, and that means India among the many other places that we’re working, but especially now in India. We welcome your prayers and your ongoing support.

This article is adapted from the episode transcript.