The Small Christian Community (SCC) in India

This morning I watched a program on EWTN called, “Where God Weeps,” which focuses each week on a different part of the world where God is working to grow the church. Where God Weeps – A weekly catholic TV programm  I’m not sure when the program I watched today was recorded, but it was an interview of Sister Christin Joseph of India. 

She described traveling into the interior mountainous jungle to reach a group of Christians who had been attacked and dispossessed of their homes and churches in 2008, and also more recently. A Hindu politician had been assassinated, and the Christians were blamed, so their neighbors (all Hindus) had turned against them and stood by as the followers of that leader destroyed their homes. These people were already of the lowest caste, yet as Christians, there is no caste system for them.  Each one is equal.

She described terrible deprivation such as several thousand people using 10 toilets, and the horrible sanitation in the camp.  Also, her religious order/church had contributed a tent which was housing 23 families with hardly room to sit down. But she found her own faith strengthened by their faith and refusal to reject Christ as demanded by the Hindus.  They didn't ask her for anything like food or clothing, only that she go back and tell other Christians about the importance of taking care of their own neighborhood churches and to pray from them.  “Stand by us,” and “Pray for us,” is what she heard.

She then went on to describe for the host the SCC, Small Christian Community movement (now world wide having been started about 40 years ago).  These are house churches which care for the neighborhood and use a leadership style called “servant leaders.”  The foundational unit is called BEC, Basic Ecclesial Community, and that begins in the home.  I found a YouTube channel that Sr. Christin Joseph uses to do training sessions for the leaders of these small communities. It sounds very much like our UALC SALT groups, Sharing and Learning Together (or Serving and Living Together) Ours (10 people, 9 in the Columbus area and one in Florida) is currently meeting on Zoom, but from her videos listed here (both of which deal with being church in the time of Covid) her groups are meeting in person and using video material for instruction.

Here are two of her training videos.  The sound isn’t the best quality, and sometimes they are English with Hindi subtitles, and sometime Hindi with English subtitles. She finds YouTube film to use.

https://youtu.be/EdBTeVWKN_w  Life after the pandemic; the neighborhood church

https://youtu.be/lPbPCPVarjA  Church on the move.  What is a BEC? How do these communities work during the pandemic?

A few years ago, our SALT group used Rod Dreher’s "Benedict Option" on intentional communities for the post-modern church, and he has a new book "Live not by Lies" which addresses a culture that actually attacks the Christian.  Might be useful for understanding what the lowest caste in India is going through.

What we can learn from the plight of Pakistan’s Hindus

Will Obama be honoring them on one of their holy days?

Hugh’s comments on Jihad Watch

The percentage of Pakistan's population that is Hindu has gone from 15% at partition to 1.5% today. The percentage of Bangladesh's population that is Hindu has gone since partition from 35% to 8%. Meanwhile, the percentage of Muslims in the population of India has gone steadily up. The same kind of thing can be seen everywhere where significant non-Muslim minorities have existed. The percentage of Christians -- Copts, Maronites, Assyrians and Chaldenas, in the total population of Egypt, Lebanon, Iraq -- has gone steadily down. The same is true in North Africa, where after the French left, the screws were turned on the Christians who remained. As for the Jews, they were subject to so many attacks that the Arab lands emptied out of them, and in Iran, when the Shah fell, and under Khomeini Islam returned with a vengeance and legal (and informal) protections for Jews as for Baha'is and Christians ended, the Jewish population went way down It is the same everywhere in the Muslim-ruled lands.

Meanwhile, in Western Europe, every European country opened itself to Muslim immigrants, offered them every conceivable benefit generous welfare states could offer, and whose non-Muslim taxpayers funded. Free medical care at the Western level, free education, free or heavily subsidized housing, family allowances (and Muslims have large families), and so on, and by now there may be 20 million Muslims in Western Europe, the historic victim of Muslim attacks (in East and in West, from Poitiers to Vienna), either by armies, or by ships with Muslim raiders who for many centuries ravaged the coasts of the non-Muslim lands, even going so far as Ireland and, once, Iceland. About 1.25 million non-Muslims were kidnapped by Muslims from Western Europe. In the East, among the Circassians and Georgians, and the Slavs, there were similar Muslim raids, and seizure and then enslavement of men, women, children.

Is there nothing to be learned from this? Does the Western world, or those in it who presume to protect us, not have a duty to know this history, both in the distant and in the recent past, and to draw some conclusions from it?