Victor Choudhrie is one of my beloved “fathers in the Lord.” In 1992, even while a renowned cancer surgeon in India, the Lord told Victor to stop medicine and start planting churches. The results in the past few years have been extraordinary. One of the most outstanding disciple making movements of our day is going on in India under his loving oversight. This church planting movement has seen more than 1 million baptisms in the last decade.
Some years ago, Victor wrote a book called Greet the Ekklesia, which I had the privilege of editing. (It was a privilege because it meant that I studied every sentence very carefully to make sure it made sense, and therefore I had to understand at a gut level the principles he was enumerating. Anything I didn’t understand, I emailed Victor until we both knew that I had the meaning right. ) Victor has since updated the book, and it has been made available for the Kindle. I was asked to write the foreword.
Greet the church in your house
Here are two of the endorsements for the book by David Garrison and Floyd McClung:
Dr. Choudhrie’s “Greet the Church in Your House” ruffled more than a few feathers when it first appeared in 1999. Defenders of traditional church planting and mission models found the book’s ideas iconoclastic and deeply troubling. I first met Dr. Victor Choudhrie in 2002, while serving as a missionary in India. Even before that, though, I seemed to hear his name from everyone who was seeing multiplying movements of new churches in India. All roads to movements seemed to pass through Dr. Choudhrie’s influence. Victor and Bindu’s passion for the unreached and deep insights into Scriptural models for the Christian life, made them natural gurus for generations of young missionaries and local church planters who wanted to see fidelity to New Testament patterns and the dynamism that accompanied it in their own ministries. The Choudhrie’s did not disappoint.
Despite whatever grumblings accompanied Dr. Choudhrie’s “Greet the Church in Your House” many readers also found his ideas strangely familiar. Weren’t these the same images of church that emerged from the pages of the New Testament? Wasn’t this the vibrant life of faith promised by Christ and His apostles?
Though exegetical in nature, Choudhrie’s writings have never been limited to biblical exegesis. A Bible expositor, Dr. Choudhrie is also a pioneer church planter and mentor of church-planting movements. This on-the-ground experience keeps his ideas fresh and relevant to missionaries and church planters who need real-life applications to the biblical lessons they’ve learned all their life.
Choudhrie describes his training as a medical school model. Just as medical students are rigorously steeped in the doctrines of their profession, so too must today’s church planter master the faith handed down to the saints once for all. However, no medical student’s training is complete without practical skill development and mentoring by seasoned elders.
It is small wonder that Dr. Choudhrie’s writings have inspired a new generation of pioneer missionaries and church planters to press on to the fulfillment of our Lord’s Great Commission. I personally would not consider the pursuit of an indigenous movement of multiplying churches in South Asia without first consulting this wonderful mentor and friend.
David Garrison, PhD–missionary, author Church Planting Movements
Greet the Church in Your House is a radical, hard hitting plea to examine how we do church in order to change how we do church – for the sake of reaching the lost. Victor Choudhrie is a prophet crying in the wilderness – a voice from India that pleads with us to heed the call of Jesus to a new covenant and a new way of being God’s people.
Floyd McClung – author You See Bones, I See an Army: changing the way we do church
One reply on “Greet the Church in Your House”
Hope it comes out in paper.