Churches for Communities

                                                                                A BRIEF REPORT                                                                               Church Inauguration at Guguitar on 1st May 2014

Guguitar church

I give a brief report of the worship place (Church) constructed at Guguitar, Purulia for the Glory of God.

Background The people at Guguitar comes from Santhali background.  Pas. Harilal Gope, NF Missionary, though not a Santhali but God gave him a vision to reach this village with the Gospel. He did lot of hard work to get entry into the village.  One day God opened the door as Pas. Harilal prayed for a sick person who was healed.  That made other sick people to come to him for prayer and they were also healed. In the beginning there were 3 families who accepted Jesus and started praying and worshiping Lord Jesus.  Within a year almost 10 families came to know the Lord and accepted Him as Savior and started worshiping. The villagers were threatened by seeing that many people have accepted a foreign religion and therefore they put up a fight with those who were going to worship place and forcefully chased them out from the village saying if they don’t renounce their faith in Jesus, they cannot enter the village.  Police was not getting involved in this matter and believers rushed to the house of Pas. Harilal. The police asked them to stay away from village until the anger of people subside. Somehow people managed with little food at Pastor Harilal provided at his house. God satisfied them with little food and the believers grew strong in their faith. They spent more time in praying for the situation. After two weeks, to their surprise they found that some of those people who had chased them out were looking for them.  The persecutors met with these believers and asked them to return back to their village and it is because they found after these believers left the village many problem arose like scarcity of water, sickness among children etc to other villagers. So they understood that God’s hand is with the believers and requested them to return back. Praise God! Though these people happily returned back but due to cast system the believers were not allowed water from the common well and very soon God helped them to have a Tube Well through National Fellowship.  Now there was no more opposition and people started coming to the worship place which was a mud house. The numbers grew and the house did not occupy so many people. So they started praying that God would provide them a Church of their own. God hears prayers The Church members started collecting money to build a room for worship in the place donated by a Church member.  Looking at the pattern they were collecting/raising funds, it would have taken at least 15 years to collect the money to build a worship place. When they approached NF office that time they had bought some sand and stones to build the worship place. The other reasons to have a worship place was that the mud house where they were worshiping collapsed many times due to storm and heavy rain. Though they had little money but they had unshakable faith that God would provide them a worship place. They continued in their prayer for the worship place. Praise God that God heard their prayer and the prayers of National Fellowship and through the Crossings Church and Helping Hands in Motion, God provided the exact need to build a worship place.  Pas. Harilal was very systematic in building the place and the believers joined hands and labored hard to build a strong structure. The worship place was constructed in 5 months time. Present Status The worship place was built on 20ft/ 40ft area. The outside was colored in white cement and then the two other colors used were Green and Saffron representing the color of Indian flag.  The Church name is “New Indian Church’ and the verse written in Bengali is – Jesus said, I am the Way, the Truth and the Life (John 14:6). The Church was inaugurated in the presence of the believers of the Church and also few Pastors were invited from nearby Churches to dedicate in prayer.  Pas. Shyamal Acharya, a senior Pastor of National Fellowship solemnized the inauguration program.  The Pastors and believers praised, worshiped and went around the Church claiming each brick of the Church and the whole area for Jesus. Then prayer was offered together and a senior Pastor was asked to cut the ribbon and inaugurate the Church on 1st May 2014. I could not be there for the inauguration due to sudden death of my father so also pas. Robin Sarkar’s brother died the day before the inauguration, but from NF we had Sanjay Sarkar as our representative to bless the occasion. The believers were thrilled to have their own worship place and they praised God for that so also Pas. Harilal expressed heartfelt thanks with tears to God and to all the donors, prayer partners , NF office and Helping Hands In Motion for being instrumental to make his dream a reality. We praise God for Guigutar Church and I on behalf of Guigutar believers and  National Fellowship Board express my gratitude to Bro. Richard & Sis. Debi Fields of HHIM and Pas. Pam Millington from Crossings for their love and trust on us. May the Lord bless our endeavor and help us to build many such places for worship where believers do not have a proper place to call upon the Lord together as a Church.

 Sudipta Nanda                                                                                                                                                                National Director                                                                                                                                                                    7th May 2014

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