If you lived in a country where Christians were a tiny minority, despised and rejected by many, amongst more than a billion people, and you thought part of God’s vision for the country was to have a million churches planted in the country, what would you do? That is the question addressed by Bobby Gupta and Sherwood Lingenfelter in their book Breaking Tradition to Accomplish Vision: Training Leaders for a Church-Planting Movement.
Gupta’s father founded the Hindustan Bible Institute in 1952 with the purpose of giving every person in India an opportunity to see, hear and respond to the gospel. In 1967, HBI became affiliated with Serampore University so that its degrees could be accredited, and by the mid 1980s when Bobby Gupta inherited responsibility for HBI, most of the students were coming to get degrees, not to train for mission.
The book describes the re-purposing of HBI to focus on training church planters, rather than conferring degrees, and the efforts of Gupta and others to convince the church in India to embrace the church-planting vision. Over a period of five years, the number of churches in India increased three-fold, resulting in enormous leadership training needs. It is an inspiring story, and challenges readers to think about how we should be responding to God’s church planting vision.