Seventy Ananda Rao took Ashley and I to several tribal villages and they are in what we would call in a jungle environment.
I will tell you a lot more later, but on Saturday and Sunday we went to a village by the name of Kudikima. There are about 70 members of the "Restored" Church and about 30 members of the CoC church. There is also a number of Catholics, Baptist, etc. There are about 150 people that live in this village.
The main three churches, Restored, CoC and Catholic have very, very loud speakers out in front of their churches and on top of the roof. This is a very small one road village, about, what we would call, 2 city blocks long. The three of them compete to play the loudest music. It becomes unbearable in the evenings and on Sunday morning.
Sunday morning the Restored church had 13 baptisms in a pond at the upper end of the village, then a confirmation service and then a communion service. I will tell you more about those services at another time.
During the communion service, the police came and notified us that the CoC had filed a complaint that there was a missionary from the US and because they, the CoC cannot get visas for missionaries to come to India that I must be here illegally. The police waited until after our service and then demanded that we follow them to the police station, about forty five minutes away.
We asked the Officer, Mr. Behera to ride in our car giving us a chance to have a very nice discussion with him. We arrived at the station and then things got serious as far as asking for my passport, where I was from, why I was here, etc. Serious but on a friendly level.
The officer then left the room and had a discussion with the local, Restoration pastor. We then were told we would have to wait unto the CoC official arrived. We waited for 2 hours without the CoC official arriving. In the mean time, we had a tour of the Police facilities, talked with the officer, found that he has a brother in South Dakota, etc.
He became more friendly and after awhile got a phone call from the CoC and they told him they were dropping the complaint and should let us go. After some more friendly chit chat, we left on very good terms with the officer, telling him that we would let him know any time we would be back in the area.
All of this caused a 3 hour delay for us getting back to Ananda's home and our driver to be delayed for his next appointment. We heard today that the pastors of several villages where we have church's both of the Restoration and CoC were very upset with these charges being brought against us and that they were going to give the CoC official a stern warning never to do this again.
All in all it was quite an experience and shows how evil the CoC has become in trying to stop us in preserving the church."
OUR PRAYERS ARE BEING HEARD! :-)
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