One of the things we like to do at Resurgence is equip, encourage, and pray for pastors and leaders in various churches around the world. This week we are glad to introduce you to Pastor Arjuna Chiguluri and Madhurawada Church.

Baptism is something we can easily take for granted in the United States. Normally, it’s a fairly simple process without any roadblocks. But this isn’t always the case around the world.

At Madhurawada Church, in India, a woman came to faith in Jesus Christ. She wanted to follow Scripture and be baptized as a Christian, but her husband would not let her. The members of the church began to pray—fervently.

Every Friday they have prayer meetings, and when they pray, they fast. For weeks and months they prayed for her at these meetings that her husband would relent and allow her to be baptised. After two years, God answered that prayer.

“God is greatly at work in Madhurawada Church,” says their founder and lead pastor, Arjuna Chiguluri. “Right now, we have mostly women that are coming to Christ, and so we are praying hard for their men to be saved. And God is moving in their hearts. They are open to hearing about Jesus, but many of them have not yet made a commitment to follow him. But we have great assurance that they will.”

The story of Madhurawada Church

Madhurawada Church was one of the first churches planted through Vision Nationals, and Pastor Arjuna has been there since the very beginning. To understand the motivation behind Vision Nationals, we need to go back in time when Pastor Arjuna first encountered Jesus Christ.

Jesus saved Arjuna’s father out of Hinduism when he was a teenager. Insisting that there were still multiple gods as Hinduism teaches, Arjuna began angrily to search through the Bible in order to prove it. Instead, after months of study, he too converted from Hinduism to Christianity.

Reflecting upon this time, Arjuna says, “I looked out my bedroom window at the people walking by and thought, ‘Man, they need Jesus!’ And so it began that, from the moment he saved me, God burdened me to plant churches to reach people with the transforming gospel of Jesus Christ.”

Madhurawada Church was the very first church planted through Vision Nationals.

He eventually completed his Masters of Theology at Talbot Seminary, and in 1992, founded Vision Nationals to plant churches and train local pastors throughout Asia. In their work in India, they have partnered with 150 church planters, including Mars Hill Church. Since their beginning, Vision Nationals has planted over 500 churches in India alone.

Madhurawada Church is in the city of Visakhapatnam (often Vizag for short), a large, influential port on the eastern coast of India. Vizag is tropical, being about the same distance from the Equator as the Caribbean Sea is, and a hub for several industries. Although there is an ancient Buddhist heritage in the area, today the most practiced religion is Hinduism. Christianity is third most common, behind Islam. Most of the city’s inhabitants speak a language called Telugu, but a few other languages, including English, are often spoken too.

“I looked out my bedroom window at the people walking by and thought, ‘Man, they need Jesus!’”

Since Madhurawada Church was one of the first churches planted in Vizag, they have become in some sense the face of the Vision Nationals church-planting movement. Not only do they operate a Christian children’s school that educates many Muslim and Hindu children, but there is also a widows’ ministry, which provides medical care and fellowship to women who otherwise might not receive it. They also have a primary clinic that serves the women and the students, and mobile clinics that are available in poorer communities as well.

Due to the growth God has provided, the church is currently expanding their facility. “Once our new building is finished—hopefully by the end of March—we will have fasting prayers in the mornings and evenings,” says Pastor Arjuna. “God uses these times of corporate intercession in powerful ways. . . . Recently, we saw a very wealthy person come to Christ after losing everything he had. He is now a part of our church . . . We have two engineering students from Hindu backgrounds that became Christians and started attending our Church. Last November, we baptized both of them.”

Join us in prayer for Madhurawada Church

Please pray with us for Madhurawada Church. Here’s how they asked us to pray:

1. Space to worship. “Pray for us as we finish construction on our new 2,800-square-foot church building.”

2. New believers. “Pray for all the new believers that are coming to Madhurawada Church. Some of them suffer greatly because they are Christians and their family members are not; this is especially true for the wives whose husbands haven’t been born again. In some cases, the husbands will not allow their wives to go to church. Pray for the salvation of these men.”

3. Evangelism. “Pray for the evangelism groups that are sent out from Madhurawada Church every Saturday. Ask God to bless them and fill the church with the fruits of their labors.”

4. A new congregation. “With God’s help, we plan to start an English-speaking church this July. This is in addition to our Telegu-speaking church. Pray for God’s blessing on both congregations.”

5. Leaders. “Pray for our leadership team.”

6. Mission. “Pray for us as we prepare to conduct evangelistic meetings. Pray that many locals, especially non-Christians, will have an opportunity to hear the gospel and believe.”