From The President: CCI's Journey to the India Subcontinent
The India Subcontinent How CCI expanded to an area where we had no plans to go
In 2007, I led a Teacher Training Workshop in Tampa, FL, with 30 pastors and workers present. One of the attendees, a missionary, shared his CCI training experience with the pastor of his home church, The Bridge Bible Fellowship, in Reseda, CA. A few months later, his pastor contacted me and asked me to come to Reseda to lead the workshop with the church's pastors.
In February 2009, Mindy and I traveled to Los Angeles, where we led the Teacher Training Workshop for the pastors of The Bridge Bible Fellowship. I learned then that they had also started Shepherding the Nations (STN), which was operating in India at the time. They had been training two groups of pastors, one in Hyderabad and one in Lucknow.
After the workshop, they invited me to go and train these pastors in India. I turned them down three times – in the spring of 2009, the fall of 2009, and the spring of 2010. In the fall of 2010, Mindy and I planned to travel to the Philippines, Malaysia, and Indonesia. The director of Shepherding the Nations India, Ryder Kumar, invited us to join him and his wife in India for Book 4, Preaching Biblical Messages and Pastoral Ministry. I had no more excuses. We were in Asia, near India, so we accepted the invitation.