Logbook of India
By Apostle André Pelser
The first sign
We landed on 26th January 2010 in Chennai. India is the 60th nation I go to before I turn 60 to preach the Gospel. It was India's 60th celebration of their Independence on that same day! There were flags waving everywhere and the news broadcasts celebrated the event on almost every channel. It was a sign to both Yve and myself that we were stepping into the perfect will of God for our lives, walking in the footsteps prepared for us before the foundation of the world, as Paul describes divine destiny in Ephesians 2:10-12.
Pastor's Seminars
By ministering to 470 pastors over a period of eight days in the South of India we effectively reached as many congregations of thousands!
My book God's Genius about the apostolic reformation has gone to many pastors and Nola's Praise and Worship CD and manuals, Aje & Chantal's reformational songs have been sown in churches. Several pastors have asked me to return to India and promised to organize greater seminars and even crusades. The doors to Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia have been opened as a result of this mission to India!
Pastor James Raj of the Church of Pentecost in Ghana was our host. He oversees 72 COP churches in India and gets a salary from the HQ in Ghana.
Yve the missionary
It was a great privilege to take my daughter Yve with me on this trip. She was a tremendous team player and a great 2-IC (Second in Charge, as they say in the army). She took 14 hours of footage on hand held camera and over 500 photos. Apostle Aje and Yve are currently busy editing the footage on our new editing suite! There will be six to eight DVD's all together and one short one to summarise the adventure! Editing is probably the most painstaking process of film making and maybe also the most expensive. The fact that we have our own editing suite now is a tremendous advantage to boost our media division.
We have given all our DVD's to Brother Wilson to show on cable TV for 700 000 viewers over the next few months in India. Can you imagine what it would cost to pay for such an opportunity anywhere else? It would be a small fortune!
On TV with 60 million viewers
On the first of February (my late father's birthday) I coached cricket at Laidlaw College, a private school in Ketti, high up in the Nilgiris Mountains. When I finished coaching about 60 boys, there were two TV reporters who interviewed me and put my interview on the news broadcast of two local channels with a viewership of 60 million people! Amazing! Yve and I watched me on the TV that night.
They asked me what my own cricket highlight was and I could tell them that I took 6 wickets in 7 balls as an off-spin bowler! Imagine teaching Indian boys how to spin a cricket ball! Mr. Gardener, the headmaster, a wonderful old gentleman, received us in his office and pleaded that we should come back and coach other schools as well. I told him Aje, my son, was a professional coach and that he would love to come to India.
"It is a feather in the cap of India that we have Gary Kirsten from Cape Town, South Africa coaching our National team and now we have Andre Pelser from Cape Town as well to coach our schools!" They said on the news broadcast on both channels.
Our travels in India
Chennai used to be Madras. Many of the names of cities in India have reverted back to their original names before colonisation. From Chennai we went to Coimbatore. The following day we ministered in Pollachi for an entire day. The following morning we drove to Tirupur for a seminar and then travelled by train for 8 hours to Chennai where we ministered in two churches over the weekend. The early morning service was at 5.30 am to avoid the city traffic! We returned to Tirupur by train again.
The train journey in India was something to experience. It is jam-packed full of overnight commuters and curtains separate the compartments. Joshua a young boy that accompanied Pastor James Raj was Yve's constant helper and companion. He helped to carry all the bags of camera equipment.
Finally back in Tirupur we drove for four hours up the Blue Mountains to Coonnoor, where Pastor James Raj lives. He is actually an apostle and accepts the fact after our visit. From Coonnoor we drove through the breathtaking tea plantations on the slopes of the great mountains to Devarshola, a little village high up in the mountains to speak to another group of pastors.
We visited Ooty the next day and also drove all the way to Glenmorgan Hydro-Electric Scheme. It is not open for public viewing, so special permission was requested and granted for us to visit it. It is situated in a quiet valley between several mountain ranges and there are three power stations. From the top of the mountain it looks as if there is nothing happening down there. But there is a 50 mile tunnel that the British dug through a mountain of solid rock to bring the water from another lake to the power station.
What impressed me was the peacefulness of the whole scene – and yet it supplies the power to 60 million people! That is more people than we have in South Africa! I think with all the trouble we have in our electricity supply from Eskom we could go and learn something from the way things are done in the South of India!
We drove back down the mountain to Coimbatore and flew to Chennai, to Dubai and back to Cape Town.
The journey there took 33 hours with all the delays and the stopovers at airports and our return journey was only 22 hours!
Incredible India
Incredible India! It is a wonderful experience just to be there. The poverty is shocking, the vast crowds are stunning, the traffic is frightening and the hot humid weather is stifling – but the food, ah, the food is exquisite and the teas are an education to the western palate.
The thing that impressed me the most was the friendliness of the people. They are not friendly to get a tip from you in the hotels, in fact, they don't want a tip. They are friendly because they like being friendly!
I thought about that for a long time. Then I realised that most of them believe in Reincarnation. They are friendly and they love to serve because they believe they will come back on a higher level in their next life! Their concept of eternal rewards makes them wonderful people to be amongst.
Shouldn't the concept of Eternal Life have the same effect on Christians? Maybe we don't really believe in an afterlife as we should. Maybe we need to preach about it more often.
Pastor James Raj
Pastor James Raj was amazing. He was always talkative, always friendly, always a good PRO and translated all my sermons into Tamil or Hindi. He can speak four Indian dialects. There are over 700 and 130 official languages. Yet the country is not divided. It is not language that bonds them together but culture.
Pastor James Raj survived the Dehli bomb blast 13th September 2008 in which 30 people were killed and more than 200 seriously injured. He was 12 feet away from the suicide bomber in a busy market place. The people who were serving him on the other side of the tables were all killed. He and the two people with him had burns and cuts on their backs and on the back of their legs. They were the first to be dismissed from hospital. Hundreds of people died that day. His testimony was on the front page of the daily newspaper