Matthew 7 Bromley Baptist Church 1977 — George Verwer

Let's just unite our hearts for a moment of prayer as we've heard. Our God and Father, we thank you for this time together tonight. We thank you that we can come apart and be with you and hear something of what you're doing.

And we thank you for this great salvation. And we do want to spread the message around the world. And we thank you for every group, every movement, society, church, that's doing this work. And Lord, as we receive the reports of the victories we know, greater is He that is in us than he is against us.

Prayer for Workers and Gospel Advance

And we pray for this immigrant work this summer in Britain. And hundreds would be raised up to learn how to do this work and to do the work at the same time. A harvest is plenteous, the labors are few.

We as disciples have much to say before the end of the day. O Lord, we often sing O for a thousand tongues and fail to use the one. We ask you, O God, open our hearts, open our minds. We pray for the ship in Ghana.

We pray for the armies moving forward in India. We pray for the work in the warehouse that starts again on Monday morning. We pray for the work of the church. We thank you, our God, that you hear and answer prayer.

And we're trusting you and looking to you. In Jesus' name, Amen. I want to divide my thoughts and my message into two parts. Firstly, I want to share something about various countries that my wife and I have just visited.

Actually, some people come to these meetings thinking that George Burwell has just arrived in Britain for a visit, when in fact I actually live here in Bromley and have for quite a few years. So for a long time I spent with my family half of the year in India, then Nepal, and then the ship.

Now because our children are in secondary school, it's a little difficult to shift the whole family. So they're based here and I continue to travel. In fact, we leave in two days for our whole Easter vacation, taking about 30 meetings over in Germany.

But on this trip I had the privilege of taking my wife. Since I'd already just been away in Mexico, I just didn't feel that another seven weeks without my wife on this long trip was of the Lord. Normally her first task is the home and the children.

After some heavy negotiations with the children, they're all here tonight, we decided to go on this seven week trip throughout Africa and Asia. I can only begin to share just some prayer requests from some of the 11 nations that we visited.

I hope some of you will write some of these things down, because I committed myself to the Church and to the brothers and sisters in these countries that I would try to mobilize prayer on their behalf when I return.

And I want to do that right now. The first country we visited was the land of Egypt. And if you get one of these little sets of prayer cards, and I find these an enormous help, because I'm a mind wanderer.

When I try to pray, my mind wanders all over the place. And I find these little cards a great help in concentrating my mind. And I just can't tell you what my own packet of cards meant. Actually, I had to borrow this set because mine are soaking wet from Snowden.

But you'll find the little Egyptian card. And there you'll read the population is 36 ,000, 36 ,400 ,000. You'll read about the various kinds of people. You'll read that 88 are Muslim, 11 are Coptic.

And on the back of the card, you'll read some prayer requests for Egypt. I was amazed when I visited our team in Egypt, especially since the team leader was in the local prison and I never did get to see him.

This was shortly after the riot in Cairo. And somehow, really, I think by mistake, the leader of OM in Egypt was arrested during that time and put in the central Cairo prison for a little prison ministry.

He's now out. He's had to leave the country and is based in Cyprus. And I would ask you to pray for Bertil Inquist, a Swedish artist who supported himself for many years by doing paintings, now is the leader of OM in the Arab world.

The literature side of OM has now become a separate organization in the Arab world called Middle East Media under the leadership of John Furwerda and Terry Ascot who comes from Orpington. We'd ask you to pray for their work as well.

We had a wonderful meeting together and talked about some of the publication projects they are involved in. We have two kinds of teams in Egypt, one based in Cairo mainly trying to disciple Muslims and reach Muslims, the other in Alexandria where the ship had such an exciting ministry last year.

That team is mainly working with the churches, trying to get them to reach the Muslims and to reach out among their own people. It's a hard country and we need more prayer for our work there. A number of new books are coming off the press in Arabic and we're using those and also we're mobilizing young people to go from Egypt in their summer holiday, just as we go over to France and Italy and Spain and Austria in these countries, Egyptians we're hoping will go to other countries especially the land of Sudan.

Indigenous Leadership in Sudan

That was the second country I visited, a country of great challenge. Brother Kamal who received two years of training on the ship Lagos is now the leader of OM in the Sudan which we classify as part of the Arab world since we are working in the Muslim part of Sudan which is the north.

The team is having a great open door. In fact they distributed thousands of gospel packets. They look at something like that, a little smaller and they sell them at a very low subsidized price in the streets of Khartoum.

We had two evangelistic and challenge meetings in Khartoum. It was also my wife and I's 17th wedding anniversary so we wanted to do something special there in Khartoum so we went out selling Christian books to secular book shops which is a rather unusual thing that had never been done before in Khartoum.

We celebrated by having lunch together with Brother Kamal. But two secular book shops purchased Christian books including New Testament. These are being shipped out from probably this week if they haven't already gone, from the warehouse right here in Bromley.

Think of that, crates of books going out from Bromley right into the heart of Muslim Sudan. Some of our team members now have lost their visas but the main strategy in OM worldwide is as quickly as possible to get the work into the hands of nationals.

They can't lose their visas. They may get put in prison for a while but it's their own country and our work worldwide is built on this concept of putting the responsibility of the leadership in the hands of nationals as quickly as possible so that the work can become indigenous.

And our real work as foreigners, it's very important to understand this, is not firstly evangelism. It's firstly helping to train, motivate nationals who can work in their own country. We evangelize as well because we cannot tell them to do what we're not willing to do ourselves.

But the real work of OM worldwide is training nationals and internationals and seeing them become effective in their own country. And I hope the name of Kamal Fahmy will be burned into your mind tonight that you will pray for him.

His father is the head of the Bible Society in Sudan and his father's vision also has been expanding. So much so that on the quiet he wants to open a Christian bookshop in the heart of Khartoum where there is no Christian bookshop at this present time.

Kamal was sharing with me that in one area of Sudan there is a section of a million people, think of this, a million people where there is no witness for Jesus Christ. This experience that we had in Sudan was a great challenge to my wife and I and we'll never forget it and we feel committed to this country.

I believe the second or third leading political man in Sudan recently wrote Peter Tomlin. He's another brother who lives in Bromley but's hardly ever here, present in Kenya, coordinating all the African move of the ship.

But Peter had a letter from this number two or number three man in Sudan because the ship's been there already and he said, we want Lagos to come back. This is a Muslim and we're praying about the possibility after Lagos finishes their journey around Africa, we're praying about the possibility next October or November of revisiting Sudan and then even coming back through the Suez Canal to pick up books.

We loaded 150 who knows how many tons of books on the ship in Port Smith. And the book sales in West Africa have been beyond our wildest imagination. And before the ship can move on to Asia, we'll need to get at least another hundred tons of books out to her.

And that'll cost a lot of money if we have to ship it. So we're thinking and praying and you can pray with us of bringing the ship back through the Suez Canal. We can get very cheap fuel in Jeddah. Saudi Arabians are very helpful, you know how it is there.

They just sort of push a straw in the ground and out it comes. We'll come through the Suez Canal probably to Italy and then drive the trucks from Bromley and from London down to Italy to load books before she heads back to Asia in December.

Pray for the possibility of the ship revisiting Sudan. Pray for young people right from Britain who can go to Sudan next year. If they're only allowed to go for six months or a short-term visa, then we want to keep a steady flow of short-term people to work with the Sudanese young people for the accomplishment of the task of helping to evangelize Sudan.

Mobilizing African Christians for Unreached Regions

From there my wife and I moved on to Kenya. We had a little advance meeting of people interested in the ship coming to Kenya, some Christian leaders. Kenya, of course, is probably one of the most evangelized areas in the whole of Africa.

When we in OM go to a place like Kenya, it is with a challenge for them to move out to other countries. Africans reaching other parts of Africa. This is our message. We had a youth rally. We were only there 24 hours, so we only had about four meetings.

And in the evening challenge rally, we challenged these young people from Kenya to pray about Sudan, to pray about Somalia, to pray about Chad and some of the surrounding lands. Everything north of where my hand is is as un-evangelized as the Middle East or other Muslim lands that OM has been committed to for years.

When we talk about a lot of Christians in Africa, we're talking about Nigeria. And again, southern Nigeria, not Muslim Nigeria. We're talking about Kenya. We're talking about Uganda. Very small countries.

We may be talking about South Africa, but we're not talking about anything north of where my hand is, north of the Sahara. And Islam is moving like a giant flood, moving slowly. Just as the Sahara is moving slowly south, Islam is moving slowly south, grasping hundreds of thousands of new converts.

Perhaps the greatest challenge to the Church of Jesus Christ. From Kenya, we moved on to that unusual and perplexing land of South Africa, where Lagos will be visiting both Cape Town and Durban for an interracial ministry.

And if you think that doesn't have a few complexities in South Africa, obviously you don't read very much. And we need your prayers. There are many beautiful Christians in South Africa. Many of them are not happy about everything.

But they believe that God wants them, first of all, to be a witness. We had some tremendous meetings in Johannesburg and in Durban. We also were given opportunity for nationwide broadcasts on both radio and television to share something of the burden of the Gospel.

The man who interviewed me for television was somewhat of an opposition type of person, and his sixth question was a real tough one, about, you know, do you really believe that people who have not heard of Christ are lost?

You know, that's a difficult question to answer, especially on television. Fortunately, we got going so heavily on the first five questions that the time ran out before we got to number six. He was from Britain, by the way.

But South Africa needs our prayers at this time. In Durban, there are 400 ,000 Indians. Most of them have never been in India. But they need Jesus Christ as much as Indians who are in India. We feel they will be one of the primary targets for the ship Lagos when she goes to Durban.

There's a young man down there that I would like you to pray for named Graham McIntosh. He's one of our prayer partners. He's also a member of parliament for the opposition. He's got a heart for God. In fact, I had difficulty getting a visa when I answered all these questions on this gigantic form the embassy in London gave me.

They said, I will have to refer this to Johannesburg. Well, I started my name dropping and I said, would a phone call to some of my friends in Johannesburg be of any help? The lady sort of backed up a bit.

She said, well, if you want to. Anyway, within a day I had my visa. And dear brother Graham McIntosh made a few phone calls to Pretoria. You know, we have found all over the world, God has people in strategic places, in government.

Out in India where we have to do so much work on the ship, the man in the Mazagon dockyard, the number two man is a born-again believer who was interested in the ship six years before we had the ship.

No man, no single man has helped the ship more than that one man in the Mazagon dockyard. And it's exciting to see how the Holy Spirit goes ahead of us in this work. The Holy Spirit is our line-up department.

The real line-up. He goes ahead. Then our men follow. And this is why prayer is so important. From South Africa we joined the ship. Actually the Queen Elizabeth. We felt rather out of place with all the multimillionaires.

But there were a few inexpensive cabins down on foredeck. And we had a burden to sail to Singapore to have a little bit of break between the meetings. We were having three or four every day. And also because the ship was stopping at the Seychelles Islands, Ceylon and one other place that I desperately wanted to go to.

It was inconvenient to go to by air. Just a rather short trip. But we praised God for that visit to the Seychelles. And just to see those antennas out in the sea with Phoebus Seychelles beaming the gospel into the Middle East, into Africa, was a challenge we will never forget.

We only had five or six hours there with Brother Wheatley and Jeffrey Cook who actually went to Moody Bible Institute with me many years ago. And I would ask you to pray for that vital ministry. They also have many personnel needs.

I couldn't believe how many people they are lacking for that ministry. And that should be one of the key prayer targets. Also, they have no program into Turkey. We have been working with them for a program into Afghanistan.

And that is now being beamed in, though so far there has been not a single letter back. Now, some people may be hearing it. It's another thing to get an Afghani to write to a New Delhi address. But we'd ask you to pray for that 15-minute broadcast into Afghanistan.

But there's no broadcast from Phoebus into Turkey. Some of you may not realize, but the Christian radio station in Ethiopia has, I believe, been closed down and has been taken over by the government for the propagation of the revolution.

And this is a vital concern. There's a little bit, very little, going in from here into Turkey. And as they were sharing this with me, I said, What's the problem? And they said, No one to do the program.

No Turk who can do this program. And someone with him who can write the script. And I want to make this a prayer target. Dennis Alexander, the coordinator of our whole work in the Middle East, has this upon his heart.

He lives in Ankara. Actually, his mother and father are both involved in the Seychelles ministry. And his mother was sharing with me on the phone some weeks ago the burden to see a broadcast in Turkish from Seychelles into Turkey.

But another burden came to my heart when I was there in the Seychelles. And that is to visit those islands. There are many islands there. It's not just one island. Many islands. There are small ones. But those people are important.

And we believe when we have two ships, we are going to be able to spend far more time with one of the ships. It doesn't matter which one. Probably the smaller one. In these islands, there are hardly any local believers whatsoever in the Seychelles.

And that is true of many islands around the world. There is no church in the Seychelles among the local people. And we would ask you to pray. We can't do it on this trip. We hope to be visiting some islands.

The Camaros. Mauritius. Réunion. Much larger populations. But I don't think we are going to be able to fit in the Seychelles. And this is another reason why we are so burdened about this second ship. We moved on by ship to Sri Lanka.

Fruitful Follow-Up in Sri Lanka and Singapore

And again, our hearts were just broken during that one day. The ship has been to Sri Lanka a couple of times. I cannot begin to express the ministry the ship has had there. You know, you may think that many, many people are convinced about this ship ministry.

The ship has now been to Great Britain. We learned through the visit of the ship to Great Britain what we already knew. That it is very easy for people to pay lip service to this project. It is a big project.

It is an unusual project. It's hardly ever been done before in history. And so there's a high curiosity factor. But it has been proven to us since the ship sailed from Britain that it takes something more than looking at the Lagos to give a man a real burden.

That real burden can only come by the Holy Spirit. And it is our prayer that tonight in this meeting the Holy Spirit may put a burden of prayer, a greater burden of prayer on your hearts for the Lagos ministry and for the ministry around the world.

When I meet people who have doubts about the ship and wonder, well, you know, what's the purpose of it all? No, I just scratch my head. On the other hand, I can understand because I haven't seen it. And seeing it in London, seeing it in Liverpool is not like seeing it in Sri Lanka or Vietnam or Bombay or Mangalore or Madras where we had 15 ,000 people show up in one day.

We only had double that number come in London the whole period and we thought that was a lot. But as I went to Sri Lanka and it's been two years or so since the ship's had a ministry there I saw the permanent fruit.

Just two examples, we could give dozens. A Methodist pastor, most of the Methodists in Sri Lanka are Marxists or liberals or neo-Orthodox. But one of the leading Methodist pastors who came to one of the conferences on the ship was led to Christ by one of the Lagos crew and is now preaching the gospel full power in his church.

Do you think that fruit is worth praising God for? Another minister, an Anglican who was also a liberal was converted to Christ during the same visit. We're not talking about people in the street coming to Christ.

We're talking about pastors with big churches repenting and coming to Christ. I can't think of any ministry more important than that because these people have under their leadership thousands of other people.

Thousands. And they can lead them astray like false shepherds described in the book of Jeremiah. They can lead them astray. And now this Anglican has been born again and he's taking the lead in the evangelical Anglican movement of the British Isles together with a few others, I mean of Sri Lanka.

What a challenge. Many others came to Christ and they're looking forward to Lagos coming back there. There are many complexities in going back. One is we can't get any money not only out of the country, we can't even get it out of the bank.

In fact, one of the reasons I went there was to try to get money out of the bank. All we want to do is put it into Christian books. We'll even give the books away. But we can't really afford to do that.

Somehow we need to get some of the money back. We put it in the books and we sell the books and then we buy some tea and when Lagos comes we load up on tea like you've never imagined because the tea consumption on the NB Lagos, which is dominated by the British, is beyond all imagination.

And so we would ask you to pray for Sri Lanka. From there we sailed on to Singapore which has become one of the fastest growing sending countries in O .M. Singapore is not a target field. It's more evangelized than Bromley and that's saying something.

You've got many strong churches. But there's a potential of young people in Singapore. And I was thrilled to discover myself that we now have 38 Singaporeans or Malaysians full-time in O .M. around the world.

That's all happened in a couple of years. There are a number of key churches. The churches of Singapore, a number of key churches, would be ten times more committed to this work than any churches that we could find in the whole of London.

That's Singapore. They really, really stand behind the work. Every young person, almost every young person sent out from Singapore has the full backing of their churches. The elders, the deacons, the pastor, they're fully supported, they're fully backed.

And I tell you the potential. We've only scratched the surface. Pray for the churches of Singapore. The challenge is great. Pray for Dr. Alan Adams, a medical doctor who's given up his career, perhaps temporarily, I don't know if he's decided yet, because he has a burden for discipling men rather than repairing their broken legs.

Both are important. But so often, so often mission work, even to this day, has cared for man's body and has neglected his soul. It used to be the opposite. Evangelicals used to be accused of not caring for the body.

But as usual, we're great pendulum swingers and now the pendulum is over here and you can go to places like Bangladesh and up to recently, four out of every five missionaries, they're in relief work, caring for the body.

Of course, some of them caring for the soul as well. But places like Singapore, many of the other countries we work in, they don't want our medical doctors. It's an insult to them. But we can go in in other ways, other capacities and present Jesus Christ.

Pray for an army of Singaporeans to launch out from that little island city and Malaysians as well. We have a team working in Malaysia right now in recruiting and challenging the churches. Pray that they may launch into India, into the Middle East.

Flexible Mission Strategy in Thailand and Bangladesh

After Singapore, we took just a quick one-day visit to Bangkok again to follow up on the ship ministry. In each one of these countries, we have a nucleus of people praying for us to come back, preparing for us to come back.

Bangkok is a city we need to go to with a larger ship. In fact, that's true of many of these big cities. There are just so many people. There's so much to do. And Bangkok, Thailand, where my wife and I lived for quite a few months with our family, has never ceased to be on our hearts.

Pray for Bangkok, especially since most of the mission work in Thailand takes place more in the northern area. As you may know, Thailand is now one of the main targets for communism. It is one of their primary goals at present.

And there's a lot of terrorism and warfare on the borders. I hope every one of you will read articles about Cambodia. There was one in Reader's Digest. The ignorance of what communists do when they take over most of these countries here in Britain and throughout the rest of sophisticated Europe is frightening.

And I believe that every Christian should pray and read about Cambodia and what has happened to the Christians of Cambodia. And then we might be a little more prayerful about what can happen in some of these other countries.

And as we look at what's happening with communism in southern Africa, Mozambique, the Cubans now moving in desire, I tell you, it should drive us to our knees firstly and it should drive us to move in these open countries as well as the closed ones while we still have the opportunity.

From Thailand we moved on to Bangladesh, one of the primary purposes of our trip to Asia. In Bangladesh we do not work under the name of Operation Mobilization. OM officially in the early days was asked to leave the country and so we started a new work there called Young Christian Workers, mainly Bengalis.

It's one of the most indigenous and exemplary works of the whole of OM worldwide. We have 15 to 20 Bengali men. A number of them converted to Christ through our own ministry in that country. We have a few other foreigners there.

They go in officially with the International Christian Fellowship and then are loaned back to work among the Young Christian Workers. You see, one of the key things in OM is maximum flexibility and adaptability.

We're not interested in terminology, whether you want to call yourself a missionary or an engineer or a salesman or a carpet exporter. We got a man in Nepal who got a visa for exporting shoulder bags.

We have another man in Nepal right now where OM has also been kicked out. He's got a visa for teaching music. What's the difference? What's terminology? We've got to get into these places and we've got to be flexible.

If someone gets kicked out, we send someone else in. That's very simple. You don't even need to go to university to understand that strategy. And so God has kept us in many countries where we were thrown out.

Some of them we were never allowed in, like Turkey, except in jail. We have people there every year. And we need, as we think of world evangelization, we need to get some of the cobwebs blown out of our thinking.

We need to realize it is now 1977. We're sending spaceships out to the moon. We got satellites circling the whole of the earth. And though the gospel has not changed, the world situation has changed. We live in a global village.

In four hours you're in Washington from London. And this means that if missions is going to make an impact in the 20th century, there has to be a greater degree of flexibility. There has to be a greater degree of adaptability.

There has to be a greater willingness to adjust, to work side by side and under national leadership, to even take up jobs in these countries, to get a visa, to stay there. There are unlimited open doors.

In fact, the whole world is open for this type of missionary thinkers and strategists and workers. We had a conference in Bangladesh, and during the last evening we invited XO Emers to come. I couldn't believe it.

We have XO Emers and XLOGOC people working with almost every major evangelical mission in the whole of Bangladesh. There are a couple of dozen. I think a young couple has just arrived in town tonight.

I don't know if they're here, Bruce Littlejohn and his wife. But they just arrived in London tonight, and I've just found out they're going out to Bangladesh. Bruce was converted through one of our teams in Tehran years ago.

He's been our main diesel mechanic for many years. Like many of our long-termers, he found his wife in the movement, a Swede, and they're headed back to work with another mission in Bangladesh. And this is an encouragement, because this is one of our major strategies, to train young people, the longer the better, in one sense, and then to see them going out into these needy areas with other missions.

India, Nepal, and Nationally Led Evangelism

From Bangladesh, we took that Bangladesh Biman airline up to Nepal. You know, when you arrive in that little airport in Nepal, you realize you've got to the uttermost part. Ten to twelve million people in Nepal, 95 of them illiterate, an anti-Christian Hindu government, the only Hindu monarchy remaining in the world today, Christians still in prison for their faith, the Whitcliffe Bible translators at the same time, as educational book exhibits, the name we were working under in Nepal, both had to leave the country, and yet, there's still an open door.

We were in Nepal, not at this time, for the purpose of evangelizing Nepal, but because we were having our All India Conference in Nepal. It's a good change, a little cooler there, and during elections it was good to sort of get out of India for a while, and so 250, 200 of that number are full-time OMers.

Very few people, even people within OM, understand the scope of OM India. Not that this means that much in one sense, because we're not, our great concern is not statistics, but this army is now the largest single evangelistic body laboring in India today, as far as full-time workers, so my own conclusion, conviction, is that every Christian is full-time.

But I think you know what I mean. And what a joy it was to be with these brothers and sisters for 14 days there in Kathmandu, to be in their prayer meetings, and to worship together with them. They gave one and a half, two hours every day for worship, and for praise, and for prayer.

Then into the Word of God. You can share with these brothers for an hour and a half ministry from the Word. They won't hardly bat an eyelash. They just fill their hearts and fill their notebooks. There's a potential in our Indian brothers that I do not find in many Westerners.

And this is why I'm so happy that the work there has been built on Indian men. It's taken a long time. There have been many disappointments. Some of these brothers, we've poured seven years into them before they were ready for major leadership.

But now many of them are ready. And we are continuing a full-scale invasion of the Indian subcontinent. It looks like a small place, India, doesn't it? I can cover it with my three fingers. Can't do that for Africa.

Can't do that for South America. Yet there are more people living in this tiny single entity, this one country, than live in all of Africa and all of South America combined. More of them living there.

There are over 30 nations, I believe, in Africa. Every nation, you need another visa. Every nation, there are new problems, political complexities. But one visa takes you in Africa, I mean into India, and if you're British, you don't need any visa.

If you go there short term, if you go there as a businessman, if you go there with any reason in the world, I can give you a half a dozen, you don't need a visa. And I believe this is the reason God told me and my wife 17 years ago to leave North America with the thought, most likely, that we'd never return.

And I sailed on the Queen Elizabeth in 1960 to France and then met my wife. She came over by air because she was about to have my son. She flew into Madrid. It was with a thought that probably we'd never return, that God had a new place for us to make home.

We never knew where that was going to be for a while. We thought it was Spain and I had this great burden for Russia, but they weren't very friendly there and they arrested me in the third day and threw me out.

Then I lost the opportunity to get any further visas into India, which we really felt was home, and so I landed up in Bromley, Kent. I'm still trying to figure that out. But I believe one of the reasons is because the people of Britain have an open door into India without a visa.

And it is our prayer that even from this meeting tonight there might be some who are at least willing to consider firstly short-term service in the land of India. A number of the men with STL, Dave Scudder and others have labored in India.

And the reason they're with STL, one of the reasons, and they're laboring in that warehouse is because they know the little profit that we get at STL is firstly a ministry, is not firstly something that makes a lot of money.

You don't make a lot of money selling Christian books, I can assure you. Not as wholesalers when many times you're operating at a margin of 8%. Only because it's been a ministry, only because the Holy Spirit has been as much in Sherman Road as it's been on Lagos, has this STL even continued through the storms that have blown against everyone in the wholesale literature trade in this country.

But because these men have a vision for India, they see with their own eyes the possibilities and the open doors. They're here and in that way helping the work out there. There's not really so much more time, but I would ask you to pray for certain areas in India.

Strategic Church Planting in India

Saurashtra, the southern part of Gujarat, 10 million people, only 10 churches. Can you imagine that? Can you imagine London with 10 churches and half of them dead? The other half with less than 20 people?

That's what it would be if it were Saurashtra. And yet if you say Saurashtra to most people, they'd probably think you're taking them down to an Indian restaurant to give them some kind of special food.

Saurashtra is a strategic area, as strategic and as important with God as the whole city of London. And it's got 10 million souls, and it's got only 10 churches of any type, a Protestant or Evangelical.

And our teams are making that a primary target. We'd ask you to pray. Also, for Madhya Pradesh, right under my thumb, in the very heart of India, a state of 48 million people. We're uniting together with the churches.

In fact, we have pushed this campaign onto them. It is now their campaign, it's not our campaign. And we are working under the churches of Madhya Pradesh for a massive effort to reach millions of people with the Word of God.

In no place in the world can you reach people so quickly as India, and so inexpensively, not that that matters that much. Recently we sent 50 men to a Mela. You know what a Mela is? It was in the British press, it was on the TV, someone told me.

A Mela is a Hindu festival, a very religious, semi-sacred festival. And to this Mela in Allahabad, right there, between 20 and 30 million people went. Most of them to take a bath in the Ganges. Incredible!

Some of them never lived, to tell the story. Nowhere in the world so many people together. It's unheard of in history. And that team moving among those people, they couldn't go in the holy area, but on the borders, even during this time of emergency, reached face-to-face 2 million precious people in 14 days.