Hello everyone.  Here is a brief report from our first week in India.  Also please see the attached photos. - Scott and Kim Gerhart

Church Mission

When we arrival at the airport at 2:00 am Saturday morning we were whisked off to the church to find that the congregation was there fasting and praying for us.    

It was encouraging to see that the church has grown numerically since our last visit but more importantly the church has grown by leaps and bounds spiritually.  For those of you who visited you will remember Babu, Shivaraj and Shakkar.  They are still there and very committed to working with Patrick in leadership.

The church is alive and active giving themselves wholeheartedly to the work of the Lord.   It is proving to be a bright light in a dark area of Bangalore that has no Christian witness.  The oppression and opposition in this area is strong and sadly, on Monday, a radically anti-Christian party took power in this State for the first time and we don’t know what to expect.  But that is why we choose to plant churches in this part of India; it does not have a Christian witness. 

Scott spoke on Sunday and we enjoyed the Lord’s Supper together with our Indian brothers and sisters.  After the service we prayed individually for those wanting personal prayer and handed out rice to some local poor people.  Later in the day we observed a Kid’s Corner in progress as they practiced for there Christmas program in December. 

Our tailoring and computer class students gave a special choreographed dance presentation.  These students are all of Hindu background are all now attending the church on a regular basis.  This outreach ministries have proven to reach the lost for Christ and change lives forever.

The wife of Babu, one of our leaders, was very pregnant when we arrived and we prayed for her because she had a problem in the past with low blood count and lost a 1 day old baby because of that.  Today she delivered a perfect baby girl.  We went to the hospital tonight to visit her.  That was interesting in itself.  The “maternity ward” was just a long open room with about 50 beds lining the walls jammed with visiting family members.  They wait a month before naming children here but rumor has it her name will be Kimberly.        

Business

We have been working around the clock to get the office fully operational.  We added PC’s, installed a local area network and are testing web platforms for the online tutoring business.  Prem has been diligently working along side Scott and has proven to be quite knowledgeable and skillful.  We found the Internet speed to be too slow and we are upgrading our Internet service tomorrow.  Kim has been teaching him one on one American accent training and has already seen a difference in Prem’s pronunciation in just a short time.  We found that one of our church leaders, Shivaraj, is a bookkeeper and will plan to use him in the business to keep the books for the Indian and American Companies and manage the office.  We have interviewed two teachers as candidates with impressive backgrounds and impeccable English.  We discovered that as we expected we will have no problem finding excellent teachers.  More candidates will be interviewed in the next weeks to come.  Just as soon as we get our info systems in place we can begin our personal one-on-one online tutoring business.

We are busy day and night with all this but will try to report as often as we can.