149: The Church in Northern India (with Sonam)

Our guest this week shares from his personal experience with and research about the Indian church specifically, as well as the global Church as a whole.

• To learn more about the International Day for the Unreached, listen to Episode 109: The Alliance for the Unreached.
• “The Church is influenced by society [...] and yet, we are also different because of the human-Divine meeting in the church. It is not just another human plane of belonging, but there is this coming together with the Divine in the church, which gives us another dimension of being.”
• “Ultimately, we are united through one Lord Jesus Christ [...] but we are also enlivened by the Holy Spirit, who is present everywhere, and He speaks to us all in our languages in our own spaces, and we are all adopted as sons and daughters of one Father.”
• “There is no other way for the Church to be but connected in the local and the global; if it’s not connected, then it’s not the Church because then there’s no one Jesus Christ, there’s no one Father, there’s no one Holy Spirit. And yet, we are also diverse and different also because of where we are.”
• “An ideal vision is that all would be equal - all would have equal opportunities, equal passports - but that is not the reality that we experience.”
• “If we are one Church, one people, one body of Christ, [we are called] to share and participate deeply in the needs, the pain, the joy of the other also.”
• “How does the Church reach out in mission? To be very simplistic, by being Church.”
• “If I were to point out one thing [that the global church could learn from the Indian church], it’s maybe the capacity to be okay with the knowledge that you will be persecuted. [...] Being okay with that does not mean that I am saying there is no pain, there is no suffering.”
• “Life has been difficult from a human perspective, but in the midst of all of this, I have experienced God in a new way.”

What’s changing our lives:

• Keane: A network of children’s museums
• Heather: Hard-boiled eggs
• Sonam: Watching his son grow and learning to be more flexible

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