A Hindu convert who has built the world’s second-largest church in 52 days — a record paralleled only by the biblical figure Nehemiah — is drawing thousands of Hindus to Christ in India’s cyber-city of Hyderabad.

Satish Kumar, the soft-spoken pastor of Calvary Temple, grew up as a rowdy lad in a poor Hindu family who were despairing of his ways. One day, Kumar heard a street preacher say that Jesus could change people. If Jesus could change him that would indeed be a miracle and it would prove Jesus to be true, thought Kumar.

The teenage brat responded to the preacher’s “altar call” and committed his life to Jesus Christ. Kumar began doing odd jobs as a manual laborer for conferences hosted by the indigenous Indian Evangelical Mission, and at the age of 21 started a youth fellowship group — the Calvary Youth Mission.

In 2005, Kumar started Calvary Temple with 25 members. By 2015, the church grew to 130,000 believers. In 2018, the nondenominational evangelical church could boast 195,000 members on its rolls. By 2024, it had evangelised and reaped a harvest of over 400,000 souls.

Loving the Least

India’s largest megachurch hosts five two-hour services every Sunday — the first at 6 a.m. and the last at 8.00 p.m. Kumar does not preach a prosperity gospel, there are no spectacular displays of healings or exorcisms, and Kumar himself stresses that he does not resort to “signs and wonders” to attract converts to his church.

Instead: “…. he does not mince words, calling out sin, calling for repentance, and pointing to the cross. His goal in all his messages is that Jesus be exalted,” writes syndicated columnist and biblical scholar Dr. Michael Brown.

The Hindu-convert preacher seems to have an almost simplistic formula for evangelizing India: He claims to preach the “pure Word of God” and “show the love of Christ in deeds.”

In a rigidly stratified caste plagued society where even Christians in many churches are seated according to their caste status, Calvary Temple offers seating in its air-conditioned sanctuary to all worshippers on an equal footing. All members are given digital swipe cards which they use to check in — and if they miss a service, a member of the church’s pastoral team phones them to ask after their well-being.

In a society where many people can only dream of having a birthday cake, the church’s volunteers hand deliver a cake to the doorstep of every member on their birthday — almost 4,000 cakes a day. At least 10,000 poorer members of the church are served a free meal each Sunday, and Kumar subsidizes 50 percent of all their medical bills.

Conversions Trigger Persecution

“It’s the largest church in India, and most likely, it’s the fastest growing church in the world,” writes author and media consultant Phil Cooke. Even the prestigious academic publisher E. J. Brill has a chapter on Calvary Temple in its Handbook of Megachurches.

“The exponential growth of indigenous churches which is attracting astronomical rates of Hindu converts is nothing short of miraculous,” Kshitija Gomes, former board member of the missionary organization Love Maharashtra, tells The Stream. “But this is also the main trigger for the persecution of Christians in India.”

Gomes, an expert on the life of Ramabai Saraswati, India’s most famous female convert from Brahmanical Hinduism, translated Pandita Ramabai’s America: Conditions of Life in the United States, a work published by Eerdmans. The former lecturer spent four years writing scripts for a radio program that received over a thousand letters each month, mostly from Hindus wanting to know more about Jesus.

“When I was growing up in India, if you had told me that my best Hindu friend would convert to Christianity, I would have laughed at you,” she says. “Of course, there were exceptions — like a pastor who visited us regularly who was a staunch Hindu but after encountering Jesus had not only become a Christian but had brought dozens of Hindus from his extended family to Christ. But this was uncommon. Everything suddenly changed in the last 20 to 30 years.

“Today, there are not only mass conversions, but we are no longer talking about foreign missionaries or even evangelists who were born in Christian families. We are talking about Hindus who convert to Christ and then plant churches and become pastor-evangelists, drawing thousands of Hindu converts from their own ethnic and language backgrounds to the faith.”

Gomes, who wrote the chapter on Indian religions in Biblical Christianity in the Indian Context, elaborates:

Christianity destabilises and subverts the Hindu hierarchy of caste, but also empowers the untouchables (Dalits) and women. It sets Hindus free from the clutches of witchdoctors and the Hindu priests who both lose their income when their followers turn to Christ. The oppressed are empowered because they learn how to read because they want to read the Bible. This threatens money-lenders who cheat the illiterate and high caste power-brokers who do not want the lower castes to learn how to read. All this leads to antagonism and persecution. It is not just religious; it is social.

Sikhs Become Christians in Droves

Pastor Bajinder Singh, who hails from a Hindu Haryanvi Jat family, is another example of a megachurch pastor drawing thousands of Sikhs and Hindus to Christ. This week Singh is mining biblical texts like Proverbs 31 to preach on a topic that is countercultural for many India, explaining, “Women are not just individuals but the very backbone of our societies, deserving of the highest respect and reverence.”

Singh’s ministry focuses on healing and deliverance. His congregation, based in the Mohali district of Punjab and Singh, vigorously shares his own testimony of how he came to faith in prison while facing a murder charge. Like several other pastors and Christian evangelists, Singh has been accused of forced conversions, fraudulent claims of healing, money laundering, and even rape.

Like Singh, Pastor Ankur Narula, who is from a Hindu Khatri business family, has a megachurch ministry in Punjab. Narula says Jesus saved him from drug addiction. According to his website, Narula “came to know about Lord Jesus Christ at suicide point frustrated from intoxications and sickness” and started his ministry with three people in 2008.

Narula now “preaches the good news of Jesus Christ to a congregation of more than 100,000 people every week in the Church of Signs and Wonders,” his website states.

In November 2020, the Legal Rights Observatory, a group affiliated with the Hitler-inspired Hindu supremacist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), claimed that it had lodged a complaint against Narula for alleged violations of the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act (FCRA). The group also alleged that Narula had “impregnated women with blessing (sic)” and “converted masses with thuggery.”

Even Sikhs, a normally peacefully community, are reacting to the phenomenon of their adherents converting in large numbers to Christianity. In Punjab’s border areas, like Gurdaspur, house churches are even mushrooming on rooftops. The unprecedented church growth has led the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee, an association of Sikhs which manages gurdwaras across Punjab and several other states, to launch a drive to “counter” Christian conversions.

Catholics Redefine Evangelism

Most of the Hindu converts are drawn to evangelical or Pentecostal denominations, as the Indian Roman Catholic hierarchy declared a “moratorium on mission” following the Second Vatican Council, redefining evangelism as “making a Hindu a better Hindu.” With rare exceptions, Catholic clergy have focused on inculturation (a move to reimagine and recast Christianity in a Hindu mold using Hindu scriptures, architecture, culture, music, and liturgical forms) and on social justice.

“Tragically, this hasn’t worked. Militant Hindus don’t distinguish between evangelicals and Catholics,” Gomes laments. “They see a priest in a cassock or a nun in her habit or a Catholic school and attack them, thinking they are using inculturation as a covert means of conversion. Ironically, this has backfired on the Catholic Church. It would have been better if they had simply preached the Gospel and converted Hindus as Catholic missionaries did in India since the time of St. Francis Xavier.”

Catholic priest and theologian Fr. Ishanand Vempeny argues that the objections of Hindu supremacists against Christians are not fair because most missionaries’ work is based on “compassion and love” and they are not “interested in making people change their religions.”

Only a small portion of evangelists from “fringe group churches” hold “outdated Christian doctrine” and engage in converting people, Vempeny writes in his book Conversion: National Debate or Dialogue?

But while priests like Vempeny regard the Great Commission as “outdated,” Kumar is continuing to attract 5,000 new visitors to his church every week. The vast majority of them are Hindus and many of them will hear the Gospel and find new life in Jesus Christ.

Despite facing considerable opposition from Hindu officials while building his first church, Kumar’s latest goal is to build a second megachurch — a stadium-sized edifice that will seat 60,000 people in another part of Andhra Pradesh, making it the largest church in the world.

Meanwhile, knowing the high cost of evangelism in the Indian-Hindu context, Kumar teaches: “Be prayerful, be peaceful, be patient, and be pure.”

 

Jason Jones is a contributor to The Stream. He is a film producer, activist, and human rights worker. He is also the author of three books, the latest of which is The Great Campaign Against the Great Reset.