In the Summer of 1999 I spent 3 weeks in India on a short-term trip and we stayed in 3 different cities (Chenai, Bangalore, and Hyderabad).  This was a trip organized through the Bible institute I had attended that year and was really designed to foster discipleship amongst the teens who were on the trip as we served on the field.  As such I was very limited to expose of the different kinds of ministry present in each of these cities.  Essentially, what we did was music and word-less drama, followed up by a proclamation of the gospel in what usually amounted to a 45-minute presentation.   We did this is a number of contexts, including schools, churches, hospitals, and remote villages.  Yup, that’s right, even remote, impoverished villages.  Talk about out of place.  Would begin by singing a few classic hymns like “Old Rugged Cross”, “Power in the Blood”, and “How Great Thou Art”, one of us whould share a testimony, we would perform two different dramas, and then our leader whould preach a 10-minute sermon that seemed was right out of “Gospel Revival Hour”.

Needless to say, I learned that God can use anything he wants to accomplish his purposes, even if in retrospect they are so cheesy and out of place they make you cringe.  I think there was a number floating around of like 5,000 people that made visible commitments to Christ in our short 3-week trip.  There is surely no way to verify that at all.  But beyond that, I think one interesting thing I took away from that experience is that the groups we worked with there had no real inroad to many of the places we were able to go before the trip.  Because we were from the US and had a “program”, we “reached” more people in a few days then they could in a few years.  I thought that was pretty cool.