Mahesh was the pastor of a church in a very difficult part of India. His small church met in a small room above a supermarket in the big city, and many of the people who attended his church were middle class Indians. They wore blue jeans and other Western apparel and enjoyed the conveniences of modern life.

But what about everyone outside the city? Mahesh thought.

On multiple occasions, he organized trips to the surrounding villages. These places were known as very conservative locations, where the locals were uninterested in ideas beyond the traditions they had practiced for centuries. When Mahesh first visited, they picked up on his city accent and shunned him right away. He tried bringing some of his most faithful church members with him, but in the villages they stuck out like a sore thumb!

“Brother,” said one of the women. “You come to us with foreign religions. We cannot change our religion any more than we could change the color of our skin!”

Mahesh even invited some of them to the city for a wedding he was conducting so they would have a chance to hear the gospel. But the women laughed during the ceremony as soon as the bride walked down the aisle in a beautiful white dress. In their culture, white was the color associated with funerals, not weddings. For the village women, it was as if the bride’s life was over, now that she had to be married!

Dejected, Mahesh was ready to give up, but that is when we met another Indian man who encouraged him to reimagine church. Mahesh learned that church could be as simple as sitting in someone’s home, reading the Bible with them, and obeying what it said. If it didn’t say, for example, that a bride must wear a white dress on her wedding day, then there would be no reason for her to avoid a red sari on her wedding day.

Surely, this is what Mahesh had been searching for. He started practicing this in the villages and saw some fruit! A few small house churches had been established. But before long, the village priests began to take note. They began to drive Mahesh out of every village he entered, threatening to call the police and charge him under anti-conversion laws! What was Mahesh to do?

One day, he was reading the Bible with a group of believers. They were doing the same thing as they had taught the villagers to do; simply read the Bible together and obey what it said. The passage that day was from the book of Matthew in which Jesus said that whatever we have done for the least of these, we have done it to him. Mahesh decided to obey this simple command by going to one of the villages that had persecuted him and try to serve them, practically.

At first, no one would talk to him, then he noticed a little boy playing nearby.

“Shouldn’t you be in school?” he said.

“No sir,” replied the boy. “We don’t have a school here.”

Once Mahesh had convinced some people to listen to him, he asked them how he could establish a school in the village. The villagers agreed, but they were suspicious.

“We don’t want any of your church-money!” They said, “You might pay our people to convert!”

“Okay,” said Mahesh. “Then I won’t use any money from outside this village!”

Th people laughed at him. This was a small farming village; there wasn’t any money for something like that! But Mahesh knew the people were smart. So, he showed them a simple way to create savings groups, where people would pitch in their money to help a member of the group start a business. When the business made money they would repay the loan back to the group. Mahesh also told others about government benefits they were entitled to, and helped them fill out the paperwork needed and begin receiving subsidies from the government. After a little while, the entire economy of the village was transforming, and the people all pooled their money to build a small school and hire a few teachers.

On opening day, they held a big ceremony and the village priest stood to give a speech. To Mahesh’s surprise, he quoted the Bible!

“The word of God says to train up a child in the way he should go,” said the priest. “And he will not turn away from it.

That’s when Mahesh realized… Almost the entire village had become disciples of Jesus and started meeting in house churches! Over the months, as Mahesh worked to transform the village, he would share with anyone who would listen, and started a few small groups in peoples’ homes to read the Bible. He hadn’t thought much of it, but over time, the people in those groups became disciples of Jesus and shared with the other people in their village, who also started house churches among their friends and family.

The village priest asked Mahesh if he could come back the following day for another ceremony: A day of feasting and baptisms! When Mahesh returned, he was astounded to see so many people lining up to be baptized. It turned out that loving and serving the people of the village had revealed Jesus in a more meaningful way, and because of Mahesh’s simple obedience, nearly the entire village came to faith!