When people hear that our church is involved with outreach to India they often ask me why. After all, there are a lot of hurting people all around the world, including here in Littleton. Our world is a broken place. There is poverty and corruption and pain all over. So why do we focus on India?

In 2007 my wife read an article in the New York Times about the Dalits in India and she was captivated. She had never heard of this people group and was shocked to hear that these atrocities were taking place in our time. You can read more about the Dalits here (link to last week’s post). Emily felt God tug at her heart, and she wanted to do something.

So she came to me and told me about the Dalits in India. I read the article, and I felt bad for the Dalits. The facts and figures were staggering. It was horrible. But to be totally honest, I wasn’t sold. My first response was, “aren’t there a lot of people right here in Denver that need help?”

After reading a few more articles and watching a documentary on human trafficking, Emily and I agreed that we should take a trip to India to see for ourselves. And when we did, everything changed.

What we saw there is impossible to describe. We were captivated. God took hold of us like we had never experienced before. Our hearts were broken for the Dalits, these people who were told that they were worse than slaves—they were even worse than animals. They were told that they had sinned in a previous life and so they had to be punished in this life for it. The would be abused, beaten, and denied every human right because they were born a Dalit.

Just yesterday I got this email from a friend in India.

Kindly pray for Pastor. Chandrakanth, of New Life Fellowship, Bijjahalli, Haliyal, Karwar Dist.

Yesterday evening Pr. Chandrakanth went to a believers house for prayer on request. After the prayer around 8 pm a group of 50 members from Youth Mandli, attacked the pastor brutally and locked him up inside a temple after that police came and took the pastor to Haliyal Police station. At present he is in the police station, without any first aid treatment.

Sadly, this kind of thing happens all the time in India. The more we saw, the more God broke our hearts. Sometimes, it was more than we could take. We wanted to grab every child that we saw, adopt them, and bring them into our family. After what we saw, we wanted to–no we had to–do something. This was not a trip that we could just come home from and return to life as normal. That was simply not an option.

We had no choice but to act. So when we returned, we talked to the AGCC leaders and asked them to form the India Initiative, now called Touching India. And as a church, we have worked to make a difference in India. We are a little church. We don’t have a lot of people or a lot of money.  But when we say, “Go change the world” we mean it. And so we are doing our best to do just that.

But a funny thing has happened in the process. While we have worked to help change India, India has also helped to change us. I am not the same person I was before I went to India. I see the world through a different lens. I spend money differently. I pray differently. I understand God differently. Yes, our church has helped to change India. But India has also changed us.

Join me today in praying for the Dalits. And I hope you will also join us on Sunday, Feb 19 at 6pm for A Taste of India, a night where we can eat some Indian food, talk about what is going on in India, and pray together for our brothers and sisters in India. I hope to see you there.

Michael Ballard