Why am I in Mexico? I get this question often at missions conferences. My answer is simple: to train and send Mexican Christians into the nations. I firmly believe that the Mexican church, long seen as a "receiving" church (meaning that they are the recipient of foreign missions work), is now ready to be a "sending" one (menaing that they are now able to take the gospel into the nations). The Great Commission call to go into all the nations is the trumpet call I am sounding over Mexico. In particular, I believe one target nation for Mexican Christians is the nation of India.
Dr. Ralph Winter, the founder of the influential U.S. Center for World Mission and who passed away almost two years ago, said the following about the importance of India in world evangelization:
"India by far presents the greatest missionary challenge. Indians worship over 330 million gods, goddesses and demons. It is a complex, multi-ethnic nation, consisting of more than 3,000 ethnic groups and over 500 languages. It is the birthplace of Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Transcendental Meditation, Eastern mysticism, and Yoga, which are all elements of the New Age Movement in the West. India's Muslim population is the world's third largest and India has the world's largest Muslim-minority. Less than 2% of the Indian population are Bible-believing Christians and approximately 70% of the more than one billion Indians are children. All this and it is predicted that India is poised to soon overtake China as the world's most populated nation."
Indeed the challenge looms large. But I believe Mexico is uniquely positioned to have a huge influence in India - and vice versa. Mexico, like India, is also a very complex nation with many languages and ethnicities. For example, linguists have classified Mexico's ninety individual languages into twelve distinct indigenous linguistic families and with more than forty subgroups. Another interesting development is that Mexico and India have increased trade by over 600% in the last six years. Trade between the two nations as of March of this year total $530 million USD. Exciting things are happening!
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