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What If?: The Indian Taxi Fund

Sorry it’s taken so long. I’m busy as usual. So I guess a background story first . . .

The guy to the left of the really cool soldier guy is Amit. We were joined in this picture by his good friend Vashal while visiting the Pakistan and India border. Amit is my age and lives in Delhi, although he is originally from Amritsar in the Punjab province. Amit just got married a little over a year ago and he also just recently found out that his wife is pregnant (about the same time Anna and I did). Amit is a church planter. If you know anything about India’s history, you know that it was a colony of Great Britian for a very long time. As it relates to churches, this means that almost all of the churches in India are “state-run” remnants from the colonial period. This is my really nice way of saying that they do things the way the white people did them. You could walk in one of these churches and you wouldn’t know that you were half way across the world. You would think you were in First Baptist enter name of city here. The architecture, the clothing, the music, the message, the structure of the service, the language . . . it is all essentially a parallel copy of what the white man used to do. The way the people of India were taught to do church.

Naturally Amit (and Veshal for that matter) don’t buy into that model. Amit is an indigenous church planter. Meaning that he believes that the church in India should look like and represent the people of India. Not some colonial empire from year’s past. So Amit plants churches amongst the local people of India. We would call these house churches in America. He helped start a community in one of the biggest slums of Dehli, where they had nothing more than a concrete building the size of my living room with a roof over it’s head and some color on the walls, in the middle of make shift tents as far as the eye could see. Amit gets it. He doesn’t want to plant big churches with big buildings and big budgets. He wants to gather people together in homes and houses and teach them the way of Jesus. At any given time he is biking or taxing all over Dehli “leading” one of many of these “plants”. He helps get them to the point of “sustainability” and then hands over leadership and moves off to kick-start another community. Below are a couple of pictures from one of these communities . . .

In order to “pay the bills” Amit was working at a local college as a professor teaching other pastors about church planting and the bible. Recently, the college temporarily closed but at this point the time table for it’s re-opening is unknown. So Amit, expecting a baby and recently married, did what any self-respecting man would do . . . he went out and got a job driving a 3-wheeler. Which is basically one of these puppies. A glorified rickshaw. The only problem with this is that Amit has to rent the 3-wheeler from a big thug-like owner who demands over 25% of his income for rent of the 3-wheeler.

Amit and I have emailed back and forth since I visited 3 years ago. But about a month ago we started talking about his latest financial troubles. He reluctantly and shyly asked if there was any way that I could help him cover the cost of rent for a few months until the college opened back up. He wanted me to try and raise the money via “my church”. We began a whole conversation, via a series of emails, where I explained that I don’t like just giving money away. Especially for something that may very well be a reoccurring thing if the college doesn’t open back up. I said I was especially nervous considering the colonial history and relationship between the “church” and India over the past 200 years. I told him I didn’t want him to be in a position under me or dependent on me. I asked him was there some business or something that he wanted to do that I could help loan him money for, at which point he would be self-sustaining and able to do for the long-haul.

He told me all he wanted to do was plant churches (I almost cried at this point) but he would like to be in the taxi business (a step up from the 3-wheeled rickshaw business) because he would then have enough money to fund his church planting habit. Plus he’d have transportation that would allow him to go further and cover more ground in starting these communities.

So long story short . . . his emails came to life . . . he started sending me all kinds of ideas . . . asked a thousand questions . . . and his creativity and ingenuity that was probably laying dormant, sprung to life.

Amit is just one person. One story. There are countless others like him all over the world. In our backyard.

I want to help these people. And I want them to help me.

I’m going to break here . . . because I didn’t intend to write this much of his story. I’ll come back this afternoon and write my proposal/idea. I swear it this time. I won’t put it off another day.

© 2008 IAmJoshBrown.