Jesus for the whole country

A snowball can turn into an avalanche. Our partner in Sri Lanka is guided by this principle. He recently trained 500 evangelists in winning others for Jesus.

Pastors who preach the gospel in Buddhist Sri Lanka are often confronted with religious and legal obstacles. Our partner Pastor L. and his team have been training evangelists in several ways for years: Around 3,000 Christian leaders have already been trained in discipleship courses and sent out to village areas covering the whole country.

The Christian communities in the villages are small. And Christians are often met with fierce resistance from the Buddhist majority in the form of bullying and social isolation. It is therefore very important that the followers of Jesus can experience time and again that they are not alone, but are part of a nationwide network, a national discipleship movement.

That is why our partner recently gathered 500 of these Christian leaders again for a conference lasting several days. "Most of these people are young, uneducated and come from rural areas," says Pastor L. "Our main aim is to give them the kind of spiritual authority that the first apostles had. In other words, they were sensitised to recognise and use their own gifts of the Holy Spirit. They learnt not to be intimidated by older pastors. And they were trained to listen to the voice of the Holy Spirit when praying with strangers."

This is the fourth phase of the ‘School of Workers for Harvest’ (SOWH) project in Sri Lanka. The mission of these 500 people is now to lead seven people each to the Christian faith. In a snowball effect, this should lead to 3,500 new Christians within a few months.