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hen I was a 16-year-old back in India, my soccer coach led me to the Lord. From that time, I’ve been very passionate about sharing the gospel with anybody and everybody. I feel a great burden to do this because otherwise they will perish. I don’t want their blood to be on my head.
This passion continued as I became an engineering student in college and then moved to the United States to complete my education. My wife, Rachel, and I got plugged into an Indian church in the San Francisco area. I saw that the church was good, but I was not seeing an element of sharing the gospel to people who were outside the church. I started a group called EMT (Evangelism Ministry Team). We began to share the gospel with people who were recently released from prison, and we discipled them. But I still felt a pull to do something more when one of the men asked me to baptize him.
So, in summer 2007 I was crying out loud in my car driving on Highway 101 when I heard the Lord telling me, “Feed my sheep.” I said, “Lord, I don’t know how to feed sheep. I can share the gospel. I can lead people to the Lord, but I don’t know how to feed sheep.” But later I heard two messages on the radio by Chuck Swindoll and Chip Ingram. Both of them were talking about how men of God should be prepared in season and out of season to share the Word of God, to prepare people for God’s work. I loved it. I wanted to find out where these two pastors studied. Both studied at Dallas Theological Seminary. We prayed—my wife, my three kids, and I—and we left California and moved to Dallas to go to seminary.
I don’t think I’ll ever be tired of doing this. I don’t want to do anything else but this.
After enrolling at Dallas Seminary, I was struggling—no job, no finances—but God was still good. I went to a [church] nearby, ate food there because they gave free food … went to seminary, flunked Greek a couple of times, but those were good challenges. I did a church planting class with Aubrey Malphurs that God really used. I heard bikers give testimony of churches they started, of people who left [the profession of being] prostitutes. They started doing ministry among those women for their children, starting churches in San Francisco and other places. These testimonies enhanced my thinking: “You know what? Just evangelism won’t work. Church planting is the way to do discipleship.”
There were so many Asian Indians coming to Dallas around 2010 and 2011, and there were temples coming up everywhere. I used to go to every site and pray that God would never allow a temple to grow or be completed. But [later] I started thinking, “Why don’t I tap into all these Indians and start sharing the gospel?” In my church planting class, we wrote mission statements for a church plant. Mine was “Seek the lost, strengthen the weak, and send the strong.” With this mission statement, we registered our church, Church of the Way, on April 1, 2010. We still use that mission statement as we set priorities in our ministry.
Church of the Way planted its first church in Murphy two years later. That one didn’t last, and we’ve had a couple of other tries that didn’t stick. But we have congregations in Carrollton, Frisco, and Plano, along with two services in Tamil [a South Indian language] that meet each week. We have struggled sometimes to find places to meet, but now have a building we bought from an Armenian congregation and we just contracted to buy a second building from a Lutheran church.
I just love the Word of God and teaching people how to read the Word of God. I share this with everybody so they can understand. In 1 Timothy 4, Paul talks to Timothy and tells him to get into this habit of the public reading of Scriptures, exhorting people, and teaching people. That’s what I follow. It’s a joy. I don’t think I’ll ever be tired of doing this. I don’t want to do anything else but this.
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