“The next country is India” was proclaimed in a prophetic address in 1996. A new wave of mission was at hand for us as a church. We had done a lot of work in the former Soviet Union, but now the Lord was directing us to Asia as well.
Immediately, the first preachers and missionaries started traveling into the country and making contacts. Through the new local networks, our work was established in Kerala, in southern India, and also in Delhi, which is in northern India.
Our founder and pastor, Ulf Ekman, began organizing large campaigns in northern India that brought together thousands of leaders. Pretty soon we began to realize that there was a rather obvious need for Bible teaching and the first full-time Bible school started in 2002.
Over the years, we have had several schools in different parts of the country and graduated over 6000 students. Many of our students returned home to their villages and towns after finishing school and started churches. Our movement and our Bible schools have become a spiritual home for many over the years and we have also trained and raised up local pastors and Bible teachers in recent years. Previously we only sent pastors and teachers from the West, but now we have many local teachers which has also given us great opportunities to reach rural India with faith teaching.
At the same time as we started Bible schools, we also set up our own publishing house in India to supply our schools with materials. Now, 20 years later, we have distributed more than 600,000 books across the country!
In 2009, we moved our headquarters to Kolkata. God had spoken to us earlier that: “Kolkata will be a key city that will open up the rest of the country for us.” This is something that we really see happening in a big way. Our office has now grown spiritually strong and taken the work to a new level.
One of the tools that has been effective in Kolkata and West Bengal is the BTC (Bible Training Course). This course has materials for 50 lessons of Bible teaching that combine eight of our main Bible school topics and then form an easy-to-use teacher’s manual.
These materials can be given to former Bible school students who can then go on to run their own Bible courses. In this way, we can pass on good teaching to new churches and help them grow.
One of our former Bible school students, Farah, was a woman in her forties and a housewife when she started our Bible school. God started calling her to share the Gospel with people, but she was shy and didn’t really know how to take the step. But during her year at the Bible school, she began to understand that God really wanted and could use her.
Later, in a BTC course she organized in her home, there was a woman who worked as a teacher. After the course ended, the female teacher talked to the principal of her school and together they decided to invite Farah to share the Gospel with the 600 students attending!
“I was so nervous, but I knew that if God is for us, nothing can be against us. So I boldly proclaimed the Gospel to them!”
All these Bible schools and church plantings led us in 2019 to start our own Word of Life India church network which is then also linked with our international Word of Life movement.
Many of these young leaders feel that the Word of Life is their spiritual home and want to be part of the movement. Our focus now is to build strong church networks that can then spread across India and be a blessing to many.
