Twenty-eight South Indian third-graders stared at me with gleeful delight and dreadful expectation as I read from a copy of their crumbling English textbook.  Suddenly gushing from the children was a jumbled chorus of native tongues, their dark and smoothly talc-powdered faces engulfing my peripheral vision.  “Miss, sappadingala?”  “Enna sappidu, Miss?”  “Ennaku thanni vendum!”  I sat frozen, bewildered.  I can’t do this, my heart moaned for the twentieth time as we churned through the first ten minutes of the class period.  I managed to hush the swirling chatter long enough to get them back into their respective places – girls on the left, boys on the right – and left them to mull over their vocabulary words while I fled the school classroom and clutched the porch railing, forcing myself to breathe deeply.

 The foundation of Body of Christ Ministries (BCM) began in December of 1979, with the obscure arrival of Moses Paulose and his young family on the island of Rameswaram, on the Tamil coast of South India. They had no friends there, and no funds or support from home. His wife, Sarojam was eight months pregnant with their third child. They had abandoned their home in Kerela, sold their possessions, and used all their money to stage Gospel crusades, saving just enough for train tickets to Rameswaram. They did not yet know the Tamil language.

What they did possess were the unshakeable call and promises of God, by sure and proven prophesy, and a dauntless determination to be faithful, even unto death. The island to which they were sent is one of Hinduism's main centers of pilgrimage and temple ritual, and it is very hostile to the Gospel. No church had ever been planted there, and another evangelist who had stopped there a few months earlier had been beheaded by the Hindu priests.