Jens and Deborah desire to see movements of multiplying, contextualized fellowships of Christ followers among unreached Hindu and Buddhist people groups. To this end they are researching effective methods and approaches which enable followers of Christ to stay in their culture and community, and coaching field workers in these approaches.

Ninety-percent of the population among the 2,500 unreached Hindu and Buddhist people groups are in only 155 mega people groups (groups of 1 million+ people). There are fewer than 0.01% of believers among these 1.3 billion people, 200 years after William Carey started the modern day mission movement! If we continue on without any alteration as we have for the last 200 years we should not expect different results, so what did we miss? The answer is that Christ was never understood as incarnated into those people groups and today Jesus is perceived as the “Christian” God who has nothing to do with Hindus or Buddhists. They perceive they cannot follow Christ because they are not from a Christian people group; to follow Christ would mean to change people group identity. But Paul did not command the Greeks to become Jewish nor did Peter command the Samaritans to become Jewish in order to follow Christ. It is time to follow Paul’s and Peter’s example again. This is what is meant by contextualization.

Once there are contextualized fellowships, they can start to multiply among their own people. Jens and Deborah are working on fostering this process by engaging with people from Hindu and Buddhist traditions as well as coming along side field workers who are reaching out to them in a contextualized way. This coaching process goes hand in hand with researching effective methods and approaches as a lot of crucial details and dynamics are shockingly unknown.

For example, only in 2012 was the first New Testament in Hindi completed that is applicable and understandable by Hindu people. All other translations are made for “Church people” or sound overly Muslim. So far there are no known efforts to translate the New Testament into other Indian languages in order for Hindus to understand what is written about Jesus.

Our prayers are that God will move in a mighty way to bring a breakthrough to reach those who hunger for Him.