Church Planter on Mission to Save India

On a bright December morning in 2008, while most Americans were busy buying and wrapping Christmas presents, Jagdish Kumar* set out on an 11th-hour mission to save his ministry—and all of India.

The 34-year-old elementary school principal had devoted the past 12 years of his life to sharing the gospel in Bihar, India’s poorest state. But in that time he had started only a single church and witnessed a mere handful of his countrymen follow Jesus.

Worse, he knew many of those who believed were perilously weak in their faith. The results were discouraging, especially compared to the explosive response to the Gospel experienced by Jesus’ disciples in the Book of Acts. What was the point if no one seemed to care about Christ? Jagdish deemed his ministry a failure and convinced himself to abandon it completely—almost.

He couldn’t shake the nagging feeling that, before he quit, God was asking him to try one more time. He had recently been given a new tool from a friend and fellow church planter, Elvin Trueb,* a Southern Baptist missionary from Life Church in Leander, Texas. Trueb had spent the past six months training Jagdish in a church-planting method known as RAD (Rapidly Advancing Disciples).

It employs a strategy to bring the Gospel into unreached villages based on Luke 10, where Jesus sent out disciples two by two, searching for “men of peace.” RAD had never been used in Bihar, and Jagdish doubted it would make any difference. But, since he was on the verge of quitting, he reasoned he had nothing to lose.

 Jagdish chose a village about 20 miles outside of town and went to work that December morning, just a few days before Christmas, field testing some of the techniques he gleaned from training. Rajeev Kumar,* a church-planting partner who was in Jagdish’s RAD training group, accompanied him. As the day wore on, Jagdish’s doubts about RAD and his utter failure as a church planter seemed to be confirmed. Once again, no one was interested in hearing about Jesus.

But as the pair wandered into the last corner of the village, Jagdish believes God presented him with a divinely appointed opportunity. Two men were sitting together, talking. When Jagdish introduced himself as a disciple of Jesus Christ, he was surprised to find they genuinely wanted to know more. So, Jagdish shared the gospel—and one of the men immediately accepted Christ.

“He was saved!” Jagdish says with a grin, remembering the sweetness of the moment. It was a Christmas present tailor-made to encourage a weary church planter. But what Jagdish didn’t realize was that he’d barely taken off the bow.  

The man invited Jagdish and Rajeev into his home for dinner. Recognizing this was a “man of peace” that Jesus spoke of in Luke 10, they accepted. Over that meal the men formed a bond that quickly blossomed into the village’s first church.

“I said, ‘This [RAD] method looks good to me,’” Jagdish recalls. “We will apply this method in 2009. And after that we have applied this method wherever I go. It’s very good news.”

Using RAD principles, Jagdish started six churches in the first three months of 2009. Rajeev started five in a similar timeframe. More and more Bihari villagers came to Jesus as new churches were planted. There was discipleship, communion, evangelism and dozens of baptisms—all marks of healthy, growing churches. Jagdish and Rajeev wasted no time in teaching the church-planting techniques they’d learned from Trueb to each of the 11 churches they started. Within two years, second- and third-generation churches were popping up across Bihar, all offspring of the original 11.

The effect was exponential. Over the next few years, God continued to multiply Jagdish and Rajeev’s work, starting with that single new believer they’d met that December morning. Armed with the RAD training and a passion for making Christ’s name known, Jagdish and Rajeev watched the Book of Acts come alive in Bihar. Together, they have been the catalyst that God used to start more than 300 new house churches across the state since 2008, representing more than 3,000 new believers—the foundation of what’s known as a church-planting movement (CPM).    

“It was amazing for me, but I have not done this,” Jagdish says with humility. “This is not our method. I have only applied the method [in Luke 10]. This is the work of God.”