Mission Moments: Nepal

Remembering visits with joy

By Gary Fallesen, founding president, Climbing For Christ

The church at Korchabang in worship. (Photos by Megh Gurung)

I better understand now Paul’s letters to the young church of his day about longing to see them. In 1 Thessalonians 3:6, he wrote about Timothy’s return from the church at Thessalonica: “He reports that you always remember our visit with joy and that you want to see us as much as we want to see you.”

In July, our Nepali kingdom worker, Megh Gurung, went to see the body of believers God has used us to help build up in the Mid-West district of Rolpa – the churches at Korchabang, Dharmashala, and Ghapa. I sent a message to them through Megh.

“I convey your greetings,” Megh told me during his 12-day visit. “Everybody asked me, ‘When will Gary Ba [Gary Father] be back?’ I said, ‘Gary Ba will come next year in May.’ They are exciting here.”

I was excited as well from where I was, halfway around the world.

I look forward to Mission: Nepal 2020, Part 1, which will take us back to Rolpa and to the Humla district in the northwest corner of Nepal, where we have been blessed to witness an explosion of believers in recent years. (But before that, we have a trek to the unreached Tsum Valley scheduled in November for Mission: Nepal 2019, Part 2, and there are other trips planned to Turkey, Tanzania, Malawi, and Indonesia to spend time teaching and encouraging young churches and new believers.)

The church grows despite persecution in the hard places and complacency in the easy places. God does not slumber nor sleep.

Megh excited us with a praiseworthy report from his Rolpa visit: 18 baptisms, nine new believers, and many, many more taught and encouraged in their faith.

It began, when he arrived in Dharmashala, with a late-night prayer meeting. “We prayed for all the believers and for the nations and Climbing For Christ’s worldwide ministry,” Megh said.

Megh slept that night in the church we dedicated in 2017 and the following morning he taught a baptism class of nine believers. Outside, the rain was heavy. “We prayed for the rain to stop for the baptism and God heard our prayer and the rain stopped,” Megh said.

He led the group to be baptized to the nearby river we have used in the past.

Baptizing a believer from Dharmashala.

The following day, there was a time of fellowship and Megh provided a meal for the church. “There were some new people who came to church and I challenged them,” he said, reporting that four joined the body of Christ. “Thank God it was a fruitful ministry at the Dharmashala church.”

The next day, Megh moved to the village of Ghapa, situated between Dharmashala and Korchabang. Korchabang was where God used us to build our first church in Rolpa in 2012. Pastor Dulsar, a former Maoist, planted churches in Dharmashala and then Ghapa. Ghapa is a community of house churches now.

“There was a good fellowship and some of the non-Christian people invited were at the fellowship,” Megh said about his visit to Ghapa. “There were four people saved.”

Megh contributed another meal and “we prayed for the Ghapa-area people who came to the Lord and those who are not saved.”

Worship was held the next day in the church at Korchabang and Megh said “it was amazing. I preached the sermon and (by the grace of God) it was a wonderful time to me and all of them. One of the guys gave his life to the Lord.

“After the service I taught the baptism class and the next day nine of them were baptized at the Korchabang church. After the baptism, there was fellowship and the presence of God (was felt) and the believers were full of joy.”

Baptism at the church at Korchabang.

Megh made home visits in the days after the baptism. At one he prayed for a disabled boy named Samundra, asking for healing for his damaged hip. Megh said he appreciated his time in Rolpa. “I am blessed and enjoyed the excitement of this trip,” he declared.

Never mind the rock and landslides that closed the road out of the mountains of Rolpa, delaying his travel and forcing him to hike some distance to get a bus back to Kathmandu. Delays and obstacles are nothing new to Climbing For Christ. We GO to remote, hard-to-reach places where hearts have been hardened for generations. But Rolpa is a great example of how the Spirit moves in the mountains we have reached: where the first follower of Jesus was met in 2011, we now see church bodies of 150 in Korchabang, 137 in Dharmashala, and 50 in Ghapa. All glory to God!