Never having been one to turn down the opportunity to travel, it has been great these last six days to be in Chennai (Formerly Madras), India.
Being picked up at 4am by my good friend Paul Gnanarajan, it didn't take long to realise this was going to be an experience and a half !!
We drove out of the airport and the car and bike horns started from there....
I was traveling with John Powell, the Pastor of Church on the Move (Neath, Wales, UK), he's not always the way you see him in the photo, sometimes he lays down !!
Paul's church, Church on the Rock is a branch church of Church on the Move, and Paul having spent a year in the UK working with An Open Door into Your Heart, used to attend COTM each Sunday.
John and I spoke in Paul's first ever Pastors conference and then I spoke in a Church on the edge of the biggest rubbish tip I've ever seen in my life, and John spoke in COTR later on that Sunday morning.
The slum church, was the highlight of the trip for me, as the smallest blessing was a huge improvement in the lives of the people there. I spoke on the story of Rizpah, II Samuel 21, and how even when the King tried to fix things, it was a poor widow, who had lost everything that brought healing to the land.
We also visited the new piece of land, An Open Door is building a 'Kingdom Academy' on, and a their development director, it was about time, I visited India to assess the project, even though we've just started building. You'll see below just how big this piece of land is.
You can just about see the white fence posts either side of the land which is 5.5 acres. The plan is to build a school of excellence here, which will serve around 3,000 hindu children. English language being a focal point and an attraction for the families of the children. It's a brilliant way of introducing faith to the children through their education. We've already started the first class rooms at the top and over the next three years will develop the site completely.
I must say, I loved India, the friendly people, the food and the tensions held within the society. To have an IT corridor being built in the centre of Chennai that backs onto abject poverty, to see so much traffic, you could se the road, and then have everyone weaving in and out of each other, and then throw in people walking through the middle of that, it was incredible. Even more amazing was the only accident we saw was a large sack of tomatoes being knocked off the back of a bike. John and myself were musing that, there were less accidents, traffic jams and road works in India, than in the 'more developed' UK.
The trip was over when about 2am on Monday morning we made our way back to the airport for the 10 hour flight back to London and then on by car to Wales.
I can't wait to get back to Chennai and will be planning a return trip in February, hopefully taking some friends along to help them catch the missions bug, that I've circum to these last eleven years.
To find out more information about the Kingdom Academy Project, just visit the website of An Open Door.
Nite, Nite John.
