Ministry Update - Both USA and India

January has been a very busy month in that I have spent 10 days in California and in Oregon introducing Serve India Ministries to key churches and potential partners. We are talking with 3 churches and one business in LA that are seriously considering sponosering a mission field each. This would represent 60 pastors working in 300 villages. I then traveled to Portland where I had a booth at the Missions Connexion which is a major missions conference in the Northwest. Taking advantage of being in the area, I stayed over in Portland for 3 more days and was able to have a serveral more church visits with a church in Corvallis and a 5000 member church in Portland. The church in Corvallis is very interested in sponsoring a mission field in India and while I was there, they were spending an entire week as a church fasting and praying for God's direction for their church. If they do decide to sponsor, it will definately be because God is leading them. The church in Portland is actually already working in the state of Karnataka in India and we have 3 mission fields right in the same vacitnity so they were very interested in learning more to see if they could expand their church planting in the area. This is the same area where there are many Devadasi Temples and they have a burden for these little girls that are being offered to the temples.

In India, Brother Ebey and the ministry leaders are putting the finishing touches on adding 300 more pastors to our 5 year church planting/training program. This will put us at 1100 pastors working in 5500 villages. It is exciting to have a part in this great work.

One of the major challenges for our US office is to raise enough adminstrative support to serve all the pastors in India as well mission field supporters here in the USA. It is very important that we expand our US administrative fund so that we can properly keep up with the rapid growth on the field. I am currently working with a communications group that will help us get our messaging out on the web and drive thousands of potential supporters to our web site. It will take considerable investment to be sucessful but hopefully in a years time we will have a sustainable growth of our US admin fund as well as 20 - 50 new pastor sponsors per month. If we can find these new sponsors via the internet, this will keep up with the growth we need to reach our goal of 100,000 churches by 2020.