Dear friends,
Thank you for all of your prayers and encouragement. It’s been a few days since I came home, and now I can tell you a bit more about what really happened in eastern Nepal.
The truth is that the first bomb threat actually came two weeks before the crusade. The marketing campaign had just gotten underway when our coordinator got the first phone call. “Cancel this crusade or we will bomb it.” Was it a serious threat? Yes, absolutely, since only a few months have passed since a Catholic priest lost his life in a bombing.
But that wasn’t all. The pastors in the committee received death threats as well, which resulted in them backing out. Two weeks before the crusade nearly everyone had backed out. This led to big problems, because a crusade is built up around a leadership committee, where each leader represents a department. The department in its turn is responsible for different tasks based on a job description in the PTL Gospel Crusade Manual.
So we had to quickly call in people from Kathmandu whom we had worked with before, and so it continued. Letters were spread throughout the region that both threatened and slandered the purpose of the crusade.
That’s why there weren’t many people there on the first evening of the crusade. We had three levels of security. The local police collaborated with us, so they were there. We had also hired a private security force, and in addition there were some plainclothes former Maoist freedom fighters mixed in among the crowd.
When the first meeting started there weren’t more than 1000 visitors, and I would estimate that 90% were low-caste Hindus who had come down from the mountain villages. When I started to preach I felt the presence of Jesus right away, and the Holy Spirit and the anointing grew as the meeting went on, and when I finally invited them to pray the sinner’s prayer, everyone wanted to receive Jesus. They were incredibly willing, and when I started to pray for the sick in Jesus’ name more people were healed in proportion to the size of the crowd than I’ve ever seen, and it continued. Amazing healings like deformed feet that were turned to the correct position, eyes that were opened and as you’ll read further down, one woman had been healed was even able to report back that the doctors confirmed her healing.
Each evening more and more Hindus came, and Jesus really met them. However, each day the threats increased. But when Saturday came and the final meeting was over, none of the threats had been carried out.
What’s happening there now? Now we are starting a church in this place, and it is already underway. In the villages the pastors are following up the ones who got saved and we really stirred up something in eastern Nepal!
Nepal is the only country in the world where it is stated in the constitution that the country is to be a Hindu nation. Nepal is extremely poor and under-developed, and they need all kinds of help.
There are currently about 200 pastors in our network. They all have small churches and none of them has any training. Lots of churches are in the process of being established, but the problem is that the pastors have no training whatsoever. What they need is a helping hand, not just from PTL, but from many, many people.
We would like to reach in and help this network, with training, support and friendship. But it is a big step to be responsible for so many people. We are asking for resources: we know that if we can help these 200 churches and pastors get established and start to grow, then Jesus, through them, will be able to reach so many of the Nepalese.
Please, if you are reading this, stand with us in prayer. Nepal is like the roof of India, and if the gospel can have a huge impact on this nation, then Nepal can begin to impact the parts of northern India that are very closed today.
