If you’re planning a trip to rural South India, you may expect to be shocked by the culture or disturbed by the extreme poverty, but nothing will prepare you for the conviction you will experience as a Christian from the West. If you attend a Sunday morning church service, you will see a congregation kneel in humility and adoration for the one true God. You might also see a little boy in the front row singing words of worship at the top of his lungs, eyes shut and arms reaching up as high as he can stretch them. 

Church services, while allowed under specific government permissions, are still dangerous in this part of India where it isn’t uncommon for Hindus hostile toward the Gospel to beat up pastors, burn down churches, and even murder those who profess Jesus as their savior. Yet, the Church is still growing. 

The Light a Candle team in India risks their lives daily to bring the light of Jesus into places shrouded in darkness. With the threat of persecution ever nipping at their heels, village pastors tirelessly press on in the work of loving and caring for those living in rural India, those who have been forgotten. 

At Light a Candle, our hope and prayer is that God would use the child sponsorship program to bring up a generation of men and women who are passionately in love with Jesus. This new generation can change the spiritual trajectory of India as a nation, and that isn’t too big of a dream for God. He is already doing it in nations like Saudi Arabia, the bedrock of Islam. Why not India? Our head of operations in India calls it a nation of worshippers. He says Indians love to worship; they just need revelation of the only One worthy of their worship.

In the West we enjoy freedom the persecuted church in India does not. But we are all called to participate in the work God is doing in the nations through our prayers, our finances, and by going where He sends us. Whatever He asks of us, there is JOY in saying “yes!”