Just last month, Rev. Phil Koelpin, chairman of the WELS Board for World Missions, and I had the privilege of visiting two of our WELS world mission fields. At the invitation of the WELS Board for World Missions, we were able to spend a week in India with our friendly counselors and with members of the national churches. (We also stopped to visit Asia Lutheran Seminary in Hong Kong on the way home.) This was my first visit to a world mission field, and I can say that it is something that I wish every WELS member could experience.

During my brief time in India, I was a part of two very happy occasions. Guntur is a city of a million people located in the east central part of the country. In Guntur, WELS operates a seminary in conjunction with Christ Evangelical Lutheran Ministries, the confessional Lutheran church body in fellowship with our synod. While I was there, the seminary held a service in which 11 men received their diplomas. Those 11 will soon be ordained as fully trained pastors and will serve congregations in the towns and villages where they live. We also drove an hour to a remote village to attend the very first worship service in a new church building. The building was not yet complete (no floors, windows, or paint), but the members of the congregation were thrilled to worship in their new church home.

Christ Evangelical Lutheran Ministries (CELM) consists of 134 congregations and 28 preaching stations. The recent class of graduates will bring the total of national pastors to 21. CELM also operates nine children’s homes serving almost 300 children. These are not orphanages; rather, they are homes that provide full-time care for children whose parents cannot keep them due to poverty or illness. Children cared for in these homes attend school during the day and are instructed in God’s Word in the evenings. Through our WELS Board for World Missions, members of WELS provide a modest subsidy for the congregations and financial support for the children’s homes.

Many powerful images of India are etched in my mind. India’s population is now more than 1 billion people, three times the population of the United States. Eighty-three percent of those people are Hindu, and the Hindu religion saturates every aspect of Indian life and culture. Another 13 percent, mostly in the north, are Muslim. Christians comprise only 2.6 percent of the population of this vast land, and the vast majority of those are either nominal Catholics or Pentecostal. It is a country where the gospel is desperately needed and where the opportunities to share the gospel are almost endless.

Another powerful image is the oppressive poverty, the kind of poverty that an American cannot comprehend until you see and experience it. But even more disturbing is the spiritual poverty of the millions in India who do not know Christ and the riches of his grace. That is why we are there. It is that poverty that our brothers and sisters in the CELM are working to overcome by the proclamation of Christ crucified.

The most powerful image of this trip is the power of the gospel itself. You can see the power of the gospel in the joyful faces of those gathered for Christian worship. You can hear the joy of the gospel when it is preached—even in a language you can’t understand. You marvel at the power of the gospel in the way that it has changed the lives of people—from hopelessness and despair to a confident trust in a crucified and risen Savior.

I was told that this trip would help me to understand and appreciate more fully the challenges and the joys of one of our world mission fields. It did that—and more. It illustrated in an unforgettable way why our synod exists: to walk together in order to take the saving gospel of Jesus Christ to places we will never see and to people we will never meet. I thank God that he has enabled us to do this, and I pray that he would help every member of our synod to rejoice in the souls being brought into God’s family by the work we do together.

Serving in Christ,
Mark Schroeder
President

Note: Look for a complete wrap up of President Schroeder’s trip to India and our mission work there in the October edition of WELS Connection.