Donald and Helen McKinneys’ outreach to South Asians started in North America. They first got to know a South Asian people group in their church’s backyard in New York state before becoming Christian workers on the other side of the world.
Helen McKinney and her Sunday School teacher from Trinity Baptist Church, Niskayuna, New York, began visiting the homes of the church’s neighbors, several of whom were from South Asia. Each Thursday over tea, they formed friendships with the families, who showed them photos of family members in South Asia.
“The ladies would so welcome us, they were so lonely for their family,” Helen McKinney recalled. The Thursday home visits turned into a weekly Bible study where they also swapped recipes and played with the children. Over the next 10 years, the Thursday class drew about 50 women each week.
“That really started in my heart a love for these people,” Helen McKinney said of the South Asian people group she has served among. “They’re so precious, so open to hearing the truth of God’s Word.”
Leadership development
Donald McKinney was invited on a missions trip to South Asia while he was a professor and dean at Mid-America Baptist Theological Seminary’s Northeast Campus in Albany, New York. Year after year the McKinneys spent their summers in South Asia, where Donald McKinney taught theology, outreach and leadership development to pastors who had started house churches in South Asia but had little access to pastoral training.
Most of the pastors were raised Hindu, which purports that “gods are in everything.”
After deciding to devote his time to church leader development there, Donald McKinney said, “I was initially overwhelmed by this ocean of idolatry.”
He visited Hindu temples to see how people worshipped, observing people offering food, flowers and incense to statues and praying to them.
Also overwhelming to Donald McKinney was the sheer number of people in the area.
There are 1.6 billion people living in this part of the world, and it has “the greatest concentration of lostness,” he said. There are more unengaged, unreached people groups in South Asia than in the rest of the world combined.
One of the most rewarding yet humbling aspects of sharing the gospel in an unreached area is being the first one to tell someone about it, he said. When looking at someone absorbing the words of the gospel for the first time, Donald McKinney can see the person “listening to the power” of God’s Word, curious to know more.
By the look on a man’s face “I know this guy’s never heard this in his life. … He has no idea how the story ends.”
Donald McKinney said the leaders are hungry “to grow and to know and to learn,” despite what it has cost them.
“I see my brothers (in Christ) who are faithfully, steadily witnessing; seeing people saved; baptizing them; and starting new churches,” he said.
“I’m encouraged by the work of the Lord in the churches, by the work of the Holy Spirit to raise up young leaders, and I see many of them coming forward to do the work of the ministry.”
(BP)
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