Gospel for Asia missionaries first on the ground&Mac226; with tsunami relief

CARROLLTON, Texas — While the world was looking to governments and UN agencies for answers to the overwhelming relief challenges in the wake of last Sunday's tsunami, Gospel for Asia, a mission agency that supports native missionaries in 10 Asian countries, has quietly placed more than 500 workers to bring emergency relief and express God's love to the terrified survivors.

GFA President K.P. Yohannan was returning from India when the killer waves struck. As soon as he landed, he began receiving live reports from GFA leaders across southern India, Sri Lanka, and the Andaman Islands. He will return to the devastated areas next week.

While in the U.S., Dr. Yohannan, better known as Brother K.P., is coordinating a $6 million effort to bring clean water, food, clothing, medicine–and eventually housing–to some of the estimated five million people now made homeless throughout the region.

One GFA leader reported from Tamil Nadu, the hardest-hit state in India, that government refugee camps there are already overflowing with people who have lost all their possessions and almost all of their family members.

“When we visited the villages, we could see only heaps of broken walls where there were houses only a few days ago,” the pastor told Yohannan. “Then we saw rotting bodies lying unattended. There are too many corpses and too few volunteers. Even after three days, most of the dead had not been buried.”

In response, GFA leaders have created a Tsunami Relief Fund and are shifting some of their 14,000 native missionaries to help in the relief effort. GFA has previously been involved in relief efforts following the Orissa cyclone in 2000 and the Gujurat earthquake 2001.

“Because our workers are already in place, we do not have to wait to fly people in from Europe or America,” Yohannan noted. “And because we work at the grass roots, we do not have to rely as much on hi-tech solutions for distribution. We have an infrastructure already in place supported by 1.5 million believers in South Asia, and they are able to minister effectively to the shattered survivors of such tragedies.”

Amid the death and destruction, Brother K.P. also told of how God’s hand protected one Believer’s Church congregation.

“In one of our churches in Sri Lanka, our believers were spared even though their entire village was washed away,” Yohannan explained. “At the time the wave hit, they were all in church, and their church building is located up in the mountains.”

But Christians have suffered alongside their countrymen throughout South Asia’s devastated coastal regions. One pastor in Sri Lanka lost his wife, son, and mother when the waves crashed in on them. The leader of GFA work in Sri Lanka has called for prayer for the pastor and his coworkers as they try to minister to others in the midst of their own grief.

In India, the death toll continues to rise, with thousands still listed as missing. It may be weeks before a final number is known, as thousands of men, women, and children were swept out to sea as the killer waves retreated. Some were out for a Sunday morning stroll on the beach when the tsunami hit. More than 5,000 fishermen are missing, their small boats swamped and crushed by the awesome power of the rushing water.

Thousands more lost their lives in the Indian coastal states of Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, and Kerala, where GFA has its Asian headquarters. Most of the victims knew nothing of the earthquake or the tsunami until the huge waves began rising up from the ocean in front of them.

In the Andaman Islands, where a reported 6,000 people were killed, all 26 GFA missionaries serving on the low-lying island chain are reported safe.

“We thank God for these miracles,” Yohannan said, “and pray that He will use these believers to share His love and compassion with the millions who are suffering so terribly.”

In the wake of this disaster, the GFA-affiliated Believers Church in India is rallying support and deploying its leadership and members to minister to those suffering so horribly–both physically and spiritually.

“In times like these, we know that God opens the hearts of those who suffer, and we pray that as our workers demonstrate God's love to them, many of them will come to know for the first time that real security comes only through Him,” Yohannan said. “We ask that our brothers and sisters in the West take the time today to pray for these millions of victims, that they will feel God's presence and grace in a special way. And please pray for our workers, that they will be given strength to serve in these horribly difficult circumstances.”

“This is the most widespread disaster to hit Asia in over a century,” added Yohannan, “and it is our prayer that in the face of such massive suffering, with your help we can become a shining beacon of God’s love and compassion.”

To visit GFA’s special “Tsunami Relief” web page, go to www.gfa.org/urgent.

Published by Keener Communications Group, January 2005

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