By Apostle André Pelser 

The first sign

We landed on 26^th January 2010 in Chennai. India is the 60^th nation I go to before I turn 60 to preach the Gospel. It was India's 60^th celebration of their Independence on that same day! There were flags waving everywhere and the news broadcasts celebrated the event on almost every channel. It was a sign to both Yve and myself that we were stepping into the perfect will of God for our lives, walking in the footsteps prepared for us before the foundation of the world, as Paul describes divine destiny in Ephesians 2:10-12.

Pastor's Seminars

By ministering to 470 pastors over a period of eight days in the South of India we effectively reached as many congregations of thousands!

My book God's Genius about the apostolic reformation has gone to many pastors and Nola's Praise and Worship CD and manuals, Aje & Chantal's reformational songs have been sown in churches. Several pastors have asked me to return to India and promised to organize greater seminars and even crusades. The doors to Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia have been opened as a result of this mission to India!

Pastor James Raj of the Church of Pentecost in Ghana was our host. He oversees 72 COP churches in India and gets a salary from the HQ in Ghana.

Yve the missionary

It was a great privilege to take my daughter Yve with me on this trip. She was a tremendous team player and a great 2-IC (Second in Charge, as they say in the army). She took 14 hours of footage on hand held camera and over 500 photos. Apostle Aje and Yve are currently busy editing the footage on our new editing suite! There will be six to eight DVD's all together and one short one to summarise the adventure! Editing is probably the most painstaking process of film making and maybe also the most expensive. The fact that we have our own editing suite now is a tremendous advantage to boost our media division.

We have given all our DVD's to Brother Wilson to show on cable TV for 700 000 viewers over the next few months in India. Can you imagine what it would cost to pay for such an opportunity anywhere else? It would be a small fortune!

On TV with 60 million viewers

On the first of February (my late father's birthday) I coached cricket at Laidlaw College, a private school in Ketti, high up in the Nilgiris Mountains. When I finished coaching about 60 boys, there were two TV reporters who interviewed me and put my interview on the news broadcast of two local channels with a viewership of 60 million people! Amazing! Yve and I watched me on the TV that night.

They asked me what my own cricket highlight was and I could tell them that I took 6 wickets in 7 balls as an off-spin bowler! Imagine teaching Indian boys how to spin a cricket ball! Mr. Gardener, the headmaster, a wonderful old gentleman, received us in his office and pleaded that we should come back and coach other schools as well. I told him Aje, my son, was a professional coach and that he would love to come to India.

"It is a feather in the cap of India that we have Gary Kirsten from Cape Town, South Africa coaching our National team and now we have Andre Pelser from Cape Town as well to coach our schools!" They said on the news broadcast on both channels.

Our travels in India

Chennai used to be Madras. Many of the names of cities in India have reverted back to their original names before colonisation. From Chennai we went to Coimbatore. The following day we ministered in Pollachi for an entire day. The following morning we drove to Tirupur for a seminar and then travelled by train for 8 hours to Chennai where we ministered in two churches over the weekend. The early morning service was at 5.30 am to avoid the city traffic! We returned to Tirupur by train again.

The train journey in India was something to experience. It is jam-packed full of overnight commuters and curtains separate the compartments. Joshua a young boy that accompanied Pastor James Raj was Yve's constant helper and companion. He helped to carry all the bags of camera equipment.

Finally back in Tirupur we drove for four hours up the Blue Mountains to Coonnoor, where Pastor James Raj lives. He is actually an apostle and accepts the fact after our visit. From Coonnoor we drove through the breathtaking tea plantations on the slopes of the great mountains to Devarshola, a little village high up in the mountains to speak to another group of pastors. 

We visited Ooty the next day and also drove all the way to Glenmorgan Hydro-Electric Scheme. It is not open for public viewing, so special permission was requested and granted for us to visit it. It is situated in a quiet valley between several mountain ranges and there are three power stations. From the top of the mountain it looks as if there is nothing happening down there. But there is a 50 mile tunnel that the British dug through a mountain of solid rock to bring the water from another lake to the power station.

What impressed me was the peacefulness of the whole scene - and yet it supplies the power to 60 million people! That is more people than we have in South Africa! I think with all the trouble we have in our electricity supply from Eskom we could go and learn something from the way things are done in the South of India!

We drove back down the mountain to Coimbatore and flew to Chennai, to Dubai and back to Cape Town.

The journey there took 33 hours with all the delays and the stopovers at airports and our return journey was only 22 hours!

Incredible India

Incredible India! It is a wonderful experience just to be there. The poverty is shocking, the vast crowds are stunning, the traffic is frightening and the hot humid weather is stifling - but the food, ah, the food is exquisite and the teas are an education to the western palate.

The thing that impressed me the most was the friendliness of the people. They are not friendly to get a tip from you in the hotels, in fact, they don't want a tip. They are friendly because they like being friendly!

I thought about that for a long time. Then I realised that most of them believe in Reincarnation. They are friendly and they love to serve because they believe they will come back on a higher level in their next life! Their concept of eternal rewards makes them wonderful people to be amongst.

Shouldn't the concept of Eternal Life have the same effect on Christians? Maybe we don't really believe in an afterlife as we should. Maybe we need to preach about it more often.

Pastor James Raj

Pastor James Raj was amazing. He was always talkative, always friendly, always a good PRO and translated all my sermons into Tamil or Hindi. He can speak four Indian dialects. There are over 700 and 130 official languages. Yet the country is not divided. It is not language that bonds them together but culture.

Pastor James Raj survived the Dehli bomb blast 13^th September 2008 in which 30 people were killed and more than 200 seriously injured. He was 12 feet away from the suicide bomber in a busy market place. The people who were serving him on the other side of the tables were all killed. He and the two people with him had burns and cuts on their backs and on the back of their legs. They were the first to be dismissed from hospital. Hundreds of people died that day. His testimony was on the front page of the daily newspaper the next day. The headlines read something to this effect, Death came but God did not allow it for this pastor!

Apostle Thomas

There are only 2% Christians in India - and most of them are Catholics. The idolatry of the Catholics fits the mind-sets of the Hindu's and the Buddhists.

The Catholics have made a shrine of St. Thomas Mountain in Chennai, where Apostle Thomas was murdered by the Brahmins. He went to India in 40 AD and died in 70 AD. He gave his life to sow the seeds of the Gospel in India.

The church leaders still call him, ‘Doubting Thomas', but wherever we went I vindicated the apostle by explaining that the moment of doubt lead to the revelation of who Jesus really was: he was the first apostle to make the confession: ‘My Lord and my God!' He was the first apostle to believe that Jesus is God, not only the Son of God! So whenever anyone referred to him as doubting Thomas I corrected them immediately and said, He had great faith.

It was wonderful to walk in Thomas's footsteps - but it was disgusting to see how the Catholics have commercialised the scene of his murder. Religion has a way of messing up something very precious because it wants to stamp its own imprint on an event instead of letting it speak for itself. They even have a giant poster with an image of what Apostle Thomas might have looked like, with the inscription: ‘Come I will take you to Your Lord!'

The need in India

There is a great need for upgraded bible school material in India and also a need for a training centre to train incumbents from 700 000 villages in India.

There is also a great need for discernment of spirits because people cannot discern what is demonic and what is from the Holy Spirit.

The level of dedication among pastors is also very low. They do not live the kind of life you expect from a minister and they all have the excuse that they have to do ‘other things' in order to survive.

There are many young men who want to go into the ministry but they cannot afford to go to a theological seminary. The need for a proper apostolic training centre is great and the need for new dimension churches even greater.

Christianity needs an enormous boost of finances to support the ministry as well as spiritual refreshment or reform in order to push back the forces of darkness in this great country.

There is also a great need to teach new believers to leave their old Hindu and Buddhist ways as well as those converted from the idolatry of Catholicism. They tend to add Christianity as another collection to their many gods instead of forsaking their old lifestyle of idolatry and demon worship.

Lying signs and wonders

In Tirupatti in Andraprodesh there is a temple where healings and miracles and signs and wonders take place on a regular basis. People pay millions of Rupees and sell their houses and give it to the miracle working priest at the shrine. They bring diamonds, gold and bank certificates and hand over entire bank accounts in order to be healed from their diseases. And they do get healed! The demon spirits make men successful in their businesses and makes people rich and famous, besides healing them. The cash rolls in all the time!

Many pastors go to these shrines to obtain spiritual power to make their ministries powerful and to make them wealthy...many come from overseas as well...

In Sabari Malai (only for men) there is another such a shrine in Herala State where similar things happen. They fast 40 days and wear black Dhoti's (linen cloth wraps around their waists) instead of pants and keep from women for 40 days and walk barefoot.

In Bangalore, Sai Baba was announced as ‘god'. People give their properties to him. He vanishes and appears somewhere else. He can be transported by evil spirits. He called an evangelist to preach Sai Baba as Jesus and promised to make him very rich and famous.

‘If I show you Jesus will you preach me?'

Then he spoke some mantras and Jesus appeared on the cross in front of the evangelist - alive!

The voice of the Holy Spirit told the evangelist; ‘Look at Jesus, he's blinking. Look at his hands, they are not pierced!' Then the evangelist rebuked Sai Baba: ‘You devil this is not the real Jesus!' Then Sai Baba disappeared. People then came to fall at the feet of the evangelist to worship him. He tried to stop them but they made sacrifices to him, but he kept yelling, ‘Don't worship me, I am just a man!'

These kinds of things happen all over India. The healings are temporal. The diseases lift for a while and then come back with vehemence. You fall under the spell of an evil spirit if you go to get your healing in those places. The demonic spirit in the healing priest controls you now. He can use you for whatever he wants to do with you.

They contact you in the spirit realm, in dreams and by other forms of spiritual communication, even by appearing to you, and command you to do certain things for them. If you don't, you will be punished.

The difference between Hinduism and Christianity

The Hindu gods make people suffer. The people live in fear. Jesus suffered for us. Christianity is too simple for Hindu's. They find it hard to believe that someone else will pay the price for their salvation.

The people go on long pilgrimages, barefoot, and carry heavy idols, so that their feet bleed and their bodies collapse along the way. They get robbed and mugged and even killed before they get to the shrine. Yet the number of pilgrims is on the increase every year. They want to earn their healing or their blessing.

Apparently these shrines and temples belong to the government and most of the money goes to the government. The priest gets a salary from the government!

There is so much to learn in India

Travelling in India is an education in itself. We have learned so much about so many things; it would take a book to write it all down! For instance, Biriyani is derived from the Persian word, ‘Birian' which means, ‘fried before cooking'. Pastor James Raj's wife cooked the best Biriyani we had in India!

India is the land of spices...and the spices are not just there to satisfy our taste buds, they have medicinal use and healing qualities. When Yve had a bit of a head cold because of the cold air con in the one hotel room, the cook in the restaurant prescribed Masala tea four times a day. You cook the tea leaves in the milk mixed with water and it has an amazing effect - almost immediately!

The British have done so much for India in education, organization, infra-structure and legislation that you feel the effect of the British everywhere you go. Like Pastor James says, ‘if they had stayed longer, they could have done more!'

Sponsors make missions possible

The mission to India was made possible by the generous giving of sponsors. We only received one offering in India which we gave back to Pastor James for petrol money. The entire trip cost a small fortune, but think of the riches invested in the saints and then everything was worth it all. Who could calculate the value of a soul? Who could calculate the work that the Holy Spirit did on this trip in the hearts of 470 pastors who came to attend our seminars and in the churches where we ministered? Who would know just how big a harvest the seeds of reform would produce in years to come? How many hundreds of thousands of viewers will be reached in the next 5 months on cable TV? How many lives have been touched as a result of this single venture?

Yve and the Indian women

Yve was a hit with all the Indian women. They just loved her and loved to touch her skin and her hair. Even though they could not communicate in language they had many heart to heart talks. One such old lady could only say five words in English: ‘sorry, sister, brother, mother, father!' So she kept on talking to Yve mentioning those five words and Yve would talk back to her. Yve decided to talk to her with an Indian accent and bobbing her head along with the old woman. In the end they were screaming with laughter and everyone else joined in.

Yve spoke to the young women in India where she was asked to address a congregation. They simply adored her.

If hearts can meet, language is almost superfluous...

We touched hearts in India and India touched our hearts.

We returned on the 5^th of February 2010 to Cape Town. The first time I ventured out overseas, I returned on the 5^th of February 1972. Now on my 60^th mission I return on the same date.

Yve met an actress friend of hers on our Emirates flight. She had become an air hostess. When she saw Yve she screamed with delight and lost her air hostess pose completely! It was a sign to Yve that we had to be on that flight that night. There were a few complications at the airport because our agent had booked us for the next night. So we had to pay a penalty and eventually after a big struggle we got onto that particular flight at 3.30 am in the morning in Chennai. If we had not been on that flight Yve and her friend would not have met. The friend bestowed all the goods on us that she could. She treated us like royalty in economy class!

If you want to support our mission to reach the world for Christ

You can write to us at P O Box 276 Milnerton, 7435, South Africa

Email:  pelser [at] harvesterchurch [dot] org [dot] za

Phone: +2721 552 6593

Or deposit into our account and send a fax to +2721 552 6598 to confirm the deposit:

Dr. A. J. Pelser, Absa cheque account, Montague Gardens, Account Number 1057210776

Check our websites at:

www.harvesterchurch.net

www.pelsermedia.com

www.householdoffaith.co.za

You can also read my blogs at  http://apostlesnotebook.blogspot.com/

If you have any prayer requests

If you want us to agree with you in prayer let us know and we will certainly help to carry that load to the Lord Jesus Christ who gave His life for all of us so that we might have life and have it more abundantly.