Bringing Christ to the Community

How do Christ-followers in Muslim-majority countries live out their faith in places where following Jesus sometimes means being marginalized in the workplace, cut off from your family, or even subject to physical violence? 

For one Langham-trained pastor living in a sensitive South Asian country, the answer is clear. “We cannot just stay inside the church. We must go outside,” says Pastor *Rani. 

Pastor Rani leads a church of 300 in a Muslim-majority country where Christians and Muslims peacefully coexist—but there is sometimes tension beneath the surface.

For his congregants, Pastor Rani finds that their biggest struggle is loving their neighbors amidst this pressure. Despite this hurdle, Rani is helping his congregation love and serve the surrounding community in hopes that those who might oppose them would experience the love of Jesus. 

Showing Them Love by Meeting Their Needs

For Pastor Rani, “going outside” takes on a variety of forms, including serving the homeless, offering ambulance services, and financing pedicab purchases. 

Every Saturday, the church opens up to provide the homeless with meals. Rani says his church members will linger and talk with those they are serving who come hungry not just for a meal, but are starved for connection. “We give our time to chit chat with them, because usually they’re feeling lonely, they don’t have a family. We come and we give food, but we talk so much and then they feel that we come as friends for them.” 

The church also offers a free-of-charge ambulance service—a critical need in the community since the government doesn’t provide this service to the public. In this impoverished nation, only the wealthy few can afford to call for a private ambulance, leaving the rest to make their own way to the hospital. Rani explains, “if you are sick, you must go yourself. You cannot go by ambulance because it’s too expensive. So I run that service, to give the community health so they can use the ambulance.” 

Rani’s other outreach is an innovative response to a desperate community need: A rent-to-own program for pedicab drivers. 

Pedicab (bike taxi) drivers in this country work for years earning meager wages because they cannot afford to buy their own pedicabs, and the majority of wages go to the pedicab owners. This keeps the drivers economically fragile, with little hope of doing better. 

So Pastor Rani and his church started the rent-to-own program to give a path to vehicle ownership.

“They work as a pedicab driver, maybe for about 20 years but they never have their own pay. So the church gives them a loan to buy a pedicab. They buy, pay the rent until they finish and then they have their pedicab by themselves. So, they can work more easily,” Rani says. 

So far, 30 drivers have purchased their own pedicab and have completely changed their economic situations. 

Hearts Motivated by God’s Word

One of the only things that rivals Pastor Rani’s passion to demonstrate God’s love for people is his passion for the Bible, where he sees God’s love revealed. 

Rani says, “My hope for my members is that [people] would know God when they meet us. How can I prepare my members to do that? With the Bible.”

To grow as a skilled Bible preacher, Rani attended Langham’s training seminars, which unlocked the Bible for him in a new way—and his congregation noticed. “You are a different preacher since you went to the training,” one of his church members told him.

Rani is passing on the Bible study skills he’s learned from Langham to other preachers and lay leaders in his church. And, he has a weekly 80-member “Whatsapp” texting group where church members discuss the weekly Scripture teaching.

Living Out the Bible

Since his Langham training, Rani sees an urgent need for lay leaders in his church and surrounding churches to get plugged into Langham seminars, and for more literature resources to support their Bible learning. He says that when his congregants love and understand the Bible, they will have the strength to boldly follow Jesus outside the church, too.

Learn how your partnership with Langham provides training for pastors like Rani, and literature resources for his congregation. 

Make a gift that trains more like Rani who bring love of Christ  into their communities.