New Testament tapes in Telugu lead ‘untouchable’ women to Christ

Morgan Jackson, International Director of Hosanna,
tells a story of FCBH in India

INDIA — The woman was what you call an ‘untouchable’. About five per cent of Indians are in this class and, according to the local custom, if they walk through your section of the village they tie a piece of cloth or even a branch behind them to wipe out their very footprints.

If they’re paid by a landowner for doing work in the fields, they need to make sure their shadow does not fall on him; and he will never touch them. In the villages there are two wells, one for the ‘higher’ castes – who are still desperately poor – while the untouchables have to go to the other.

Sewers

From the age of three or four this girl had helped her mother clean out the sewer pits of the higher classes. So she would go down into the faeces and pick up buckets of the stuff – or cups of it to put it in buckets – and then she and her mother would carry it on their heads outside the village area and dump it into the fields. And for that she might make five or six rupees a day – just a few cents.

But then her father would take the money and buy some local grain alcohol – really rotten stuff – and get drunk to try to forget his misery.

They had just a small hut and they slept in there on the ground. They had nothing – just the clothes on their body. But despite their poverty they still gave 15 or 20 per cent of their income to try to appease the gods and goddesses who, according to their beliefs, live in those areas and try to oppress them.

When a girl like this reaches 12 or 13, she marries another untouchable. Her father has to pay a dowry so he goes to a landowner to borrow the money, often at an interest rate of 25 or 30 per cent which he can never pay back. So he becomes a slave of that landowner and his daughter is given to a man who is in the same situation as him: he’s an untouchable, without opportunities or hope. And in this situation, even though she and her husband were giving money to try to appease these gods, she was demon-possessed. The demons would just torment her night and day and the villagers were well aware of it.

One day a church in the village received a New Testament cassette and started the Faith Comes By Hearing (FCBH) program. In India when a church starts the program they almost always put a loudspeaker outside the church for the whole village to hear.

So the untouchables began to hear the Scriptures in their language – Telugu. They were hearing about Jesus Christ saying he’s the only God and about him touching untouchable people.

Questions

And they were saying, “How can that be true?” and “How can there be only one God when we have three million gods?” They couldn’t believe it! So they began to go the pastor and ask him questions.

To their amazement, he invited them to come to the church and listen. About 20 of them began to go the church and the young woman was one of them. But each time, as she listened to the Scriptures, the demons would grab her and throw her to the ground and she would lie there thrashing until the pastor came and laid hands on her, rebuked the spirits and bound them. And then she would listen, lying there, torn by these demons. But as these words were heard something inside her was being touched.

And they talked and argued about it. When they were washing their clothes down by the river, they were saying things like, “How can he do this?.. That’s amazing that he did that… That teaching is so wise!”

Hindus do not normally come to Christ quickly and after months of listening and discussing it, all 20 untouchables made a decision that Jesus was the real God and that they wanted to accept him as their own Saviour. And so they came into the church, the Scriptures were played, the young woman was subjected to the same violent experience again, the pastor prayed for her, and she experienced it for the last time and then she came forward with the rest and she received Jesus Christ. And then those spirits left her and she was free.

Healed

When I visited the village they were telling how she was delivered. They were telling how they had been healed, how God had answered prayer, how they now had hope. They were telling me they had jobs as rat-catchers and field workers. Now that doesn’t seem like much of an improvement to you and me, but to them it was huge. And now they were training their kids. Previously, they’d just let them run, because they had no hope, they didn’t believe their children had any future; they didn’t care.
And they were talking about how the men had beaten the women all the time and now that had stopped. They’d received some persecution from the others but they said now, eight more were coming to be baptised and others were listening. And so more of the untouchables were coming to Jesus Christ.

Hearing the Word of God in Telugu when you are illiterate and you have no hope, brought hope, brought peace to people who had none.