By the grace of God, the past 12 years has seen the National Fellowship ministry grow spiritually, numerically, geographically as well as maintaining quality of life and creating definite impact on people. A measure of this impact can be seen in the increasing credibility National Fellowship has in the Church in India. My coworkers in National Fellowship have done an outstanding job in trusting God to make things happen. Hence it is therefore befitting for me to share with you the vision, overall growth and fruit of our ministry.   Rev. Susanta Patra

  Our Vision 

Does vision change? Yes, it does. It enlarges. The vision of NATIONAL FELLOWSHIP is primarily to present the Gospel in the power of the Holy Spirit with cultural relevance and sensitivity among the unreached people groups in Northern India and thereby plant Churches among them & create a Church Planting Movement in each one of them. This will remain our vision.

Let me state here what do I mean by the enlarging of our vision. NATIONAL FELLOWSHIP began in a Calcutta slum Church to work among the 16 million unreached in Calcutta. After two years of focused ministry in the city, NATIONAL FELLOWSHIP vision was enlarged to the neighboring districts called today the North & South 24 Parganas. God blessed our effort. The vision was further enlarged to reach out to the 82 million unreached in West Bengal particularly to the 67 million Bengali masses who are yet with out Christ. God saw our faithful efforts and blessed us and gave us a national recognition as a ministry which can make a difference among the unreached 90 million Bengali living in India. But we stuck on to our focused vision of reaching the 720 untouched & unreached of Northern India.

India today has over 1 billion people. It is primarily divided into three parts missiologically. The Christian population is about 4%. Southern India consists of states - Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Pondichery and Karnataka. The total population of southern India is about 240 Million and over 76% of Indian Christians live in these states. The other part is called North-East India with 7 states - Meghalaya, Manipur, Mizoram, Nagaland, Arunachal Pradesh, Tripura and Assam. Except Assam, the rest of these states are quite small in population. The whole of the Northeast has 40 Million people and 13% of Indian Christians live in this region. The rest of the country is identified as Northern India with bigger states - Maharastra, Gujrat, Madhya Pradesh, Haryana, Rajasthan, Punjab, Himachal Pradesh, Goa, Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Orissa, Jammu Kashmir and West Bengal. Over 720 Million people live in this region, and only 11% of Christians come from this area. This is the heart of the 10/40 window, where world's largest number of unreached people groups live.

While analysing the success of the NATIONAL FELLOWSHIP up till now it is obvious for us to look at it from different angles. I would like to draw your attentions to few such areas of our ministry.

Spiritual growth

One of the significant developments of NATIONAL FELLOWSHIP during last few years is in terms of quality life lifestyle and spiritual leadership through role model-ship. When I say this my minds goes out to 400+ coworkers who have led the people through their lifestyle. The people of the whole area have been impacted through their lives to the extent of honoring as spiritual leaders of the area. The most exciting thing for me is to state that our people have not just proved their leadership ability, but their lives' quality & integrity and love & sacrifice for the people in their area.

Numerical growth

I am very thankful to God for the growth He has granted us in terms of numbers. This is in fact in the area of No. Workers, No. of responses/new contacts and No. of new baptisms. In all of the areas we have grown rapidly. Let me just state one case of Sachi Kanta Mondal who was sent to Nagpur to work among the Bengalies there. He was able to introduce Jesus to 350 Bengali families within just three months. Up on the hills of Jammu & Kashmir, people are responding to Christ from Islam or in the remote areas of Bihar, the tribals are responding to Christ in big numbers in the same way. Souls saved - Baptism took place - Churches Planted: I certainly would like to thank our God for the fruits He has given us during the last 10 years. Although I am not in a position to give you the total number of souls saved. But today it would not be less than 2,000 per year. In fact every month we receive 4000 new inquiries and follow them up. Last several months, the baptism took place in different fields each month is around 200-400. God has used our co-workers and their team members greatly in touching lives through personal witnesses and miracles.

God enlarged courts of our tent to reach out from West Bengal to Assam, Orissa, Jammu & Kashmir, Punjab, Bihar, Tripura, Maharastra and Uttar Pradesh (even Bangladesh, Nepal and Bhutan) and helped us to reach out to new heights. Almost every year we come up with proposals of endeavoring new frontiers in the untouched Northern India. As a result of this efforts, it is estimated that we have over 450 geographical areas where our ministry continues on a daily basis. For example, the interior villages of J & K on the hills where we have to just trek on foot in order to reach our ministry points or several villages inside Bhutan where a low profile evangelism has to be practice or even in interior Bihar/Orissa.

We are involved in a four-fold ministry called PLANTING, TRAINING, MOBILIZING, AND ASSISTING

PLANTING - is to plant churches in & among the unreached people groups.

1. Pioneer Evangelism is the heart bit of our ministry. Pioneer Evangelism through Literature, Open Air/Street/Market, Personal and Film evangelism. Each team focuses on a people group and first saturate the group with the Gospel.

2. Follow-up is the strength of our ministry. Through evangelism we get hundreds & thousands of seekers. Then we follow them up systematically through useful literature, Bible correspondence courses, personal visits and Bible study cells. After an adequate amount of learning, we find most give their lives to Christ on their own and for the rest, we conduct Seekers Rally, where we give them an open opportunity to respond to Christ. This is really powerful. Ultimately we bring every seekers to give their lives to Christ.

3. Teaching is the skeleton of our ministry. We convert hundreds of Bible Study classes both for the seekers & also for the new converts. In this ministry, we conduct several Bible Camps, Discipleship Conferences and Spiritual Life Seminars. This is to equip & strengthen our believers in faith so that when sufferings & persecution come they will not be easily shaken but stand for the truth.

4. Church Planting is the ultimate goal of our ministry. It begins from the Bible Study cell and the next step is Fellowship groups, when we have adequate number of believers. We finally call it a Church when the believes are mature, able to take care of their own congregation and prove their vision for the lost in their community & beyond.

TRAINING - is to prepare the TASK FORCE for the field. We conduct four different kinds of training programmes.

1. This is called Effective Ministry. This is to prepare lay people (in fact every new convert) on the HOW of winning, building and training people for God. Hundreds of such training goes on different fields.

2. We call it Pioneer Church Planting. This training takes place in our training centers and we render to the trainees classroom & practical training on HOW to plant a Church in an unreached area. We have trained & commissioned over 6000 such Church planters. Most of them are volunteers.

3. This training is known as Advanced Ministry. We select the talented & visionary ones to give them theological training. Such people become leaders over a large geographical area as Pastor-at-large to teach & train people in those areas.

4. Through this training we prepare workers to go to our untouched villages where 70% of our population live and our trainees know what exactly do to evangelism & win the poor people for the Lord. This is indeed one of our powerful training programme. We have so far trained around 700 workers to work among our poor or village people.

5. We conduct several specialized training courses like reaching tribals or muslims. It is in this training program we teach to the tribals converts to reach tribals and muslim converts to reach muslims in the HOW of evangelism & Church Planting.

MOBILIZING - is to encourage the Christians - Churches - Missions to effectively win all of India for Christ together. We are extensively involved in RESEARCH work to identify the people groups; their deep spiritual needs and best possible way to win the entire group for Christ. Hence God has enabled us to have all the data of people groups new are presently working. We provide that information also to those who are interested in working among the unreached. After the research work is done, we take the information & produce STRATEGIES to reach out those unreached people groups. Our goal indeed is to win the whole group for Christ strategically. We realize that PRAYER is the most important aspect of reaching an unreached people group. In reality all our people live under the bondage of several demonic spirits. To us prayer is the key to breaking those bondages. Hence we are involved in seven different prayer movements, where thousands of people are involved in crying out to God for breakthrough to the unreached people group.

1. Focused Prayer Movement: We have 700+ prayer groups (in each one 20 to 30 people) who meet at least once in a week each month to focus their prayers on particular bondgaing issue. We supply them information each month. This prayer is like throwing missiles on the enemy's target points.

2. Whole night prayer vigil: We have 110 centers where people cry out to God whole night for the salvation of our people once in a week.

3. United Prayer: We have 91 centers where Pastors & Missionaries of all denominations & missions gather together to fast & pray for their people & districts.

4. Concert of Prayer: We have several concerts of prayers in different places where believers unite themselves to pray for God's intervention in changing our people.

5. Prayer Walks: We conduct various prayer walks to pray at the demonically oppressed geographical areas & ask God to give us those lands.

6. Intercession of sites: We form groups in various occasions to go to those sites and intercede to God for those people living there and for the opening of their eyes to the Truth.

7. Prayer Seminars & Conferences: These seminars & conferences are set apart for people to spend their weekend or holidays to spend time in prayers for three to four days. Through out the year this goes on in various geographical places.

We MOBILIZE Churches & Mission to adopt & reach to the untouched & unreached people groups and provide to them all our researched information & strategies for effective Church Planting efforts. We thereby encourage to avoid duplications and create Church Planting movements in every unreached people groups.

ASSISTING - is our holistic approach to our society in evangelism.

1. We are involved in a LITERACY program to educate the 47% of our people who still cannot read & write. Each year we focus on a target number of people and run a literacy school for them. At the end of one year, each of the participants is able to read & write. We give them the New Testament to read as a text book.

2. We run several HOMES FOR THE ORPHANS & DESTITUTE CHILDREN. We bring them to our homes, keep them in a Christian environment and provide everything for them like food, clothes, shelter, schooling, Christian education and medical treatments for their growth.

3. We help people by providing their necessities when a NATURAL CALAMITY strikes them. We provide food, medicine, housing, clothes & rehabilitation to victims of the calamity.

4. We supply medical help to the people who have no doctors & hospitals around them. We provide a doctor & medicine to those poor people who are in need of them. We long to have a few Clinics in various places to provide medical helps to our poor people. We give AIDS awareness programme as this is becoming a big threat to our nation these days.

  How You Can Help 

1. We need 100 new Pioneer Village Church Planters. The support needed for them is $50 per month. This will enable a family to go to the remotest part of India sharing the good news & planting Churches in the village. 70% of Indians live in the villages.

2. We need 30 new Pioneer Urban Church Planters. The support needed for them is $120 per month. This will enable a family to live in urban areas of India sharing the good news & planting Churches in the city. There are 313 cities with over 100,000 people and 30% of Indian live in those cities.

3. We need various different kinds of literature for our evangelism, follow up materials for the seekers and for new believers & pioneer Church Planters. 5 people often read each piece of literature. It is usually a one-time gift.

4. We need 10 motorcycles for the urban church planters, each one will cost $900.

5. We need 35 Church buildings and as it is going to be in different places, the cost will vary from $1,000 to $2,000.

We value your prayers for each one of us, our families, our ministries and the salvation of our people. Please pray for God's protection on our lives, effectiveness in ministry and supply of appropriate resources for our ministry.

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