Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse those who have leprosy, drive out demons. Freely you have received, freely give. Mat 10:8
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Into the ghettos
Pakistan had many surprises. The first was the friendliness of the people. After the bureaucratic logjam of Kathmandu, the smiling faces and efficiency at Karachi and Lahore airports were a blessing. I was scooped into a brand new 8-seater, and we sped the two hours up the smooth toll to Faisalabad. The Indus & Chenab plains are vast and laser flat, the only ‘hills’ being bridges over the die-straight irrigation channels, & the off-ramps. Skinny trees sprinkled the patchwork of green as far as the eye can see.
8-million strong, Faisalabad sprawls across the northern wheat-plains, low, crowded and dirty. My contact lived along with 40,000 others in the Christian quarter, or should I say, ghetto. Down ever narrowing side streets, we squelched through 6 inches of black mud, inching past donkey carts, auto-rickshaws, street vendors, and general small-shop overflow. Parking in the mud, I was given a royal welcome. Poverty seems to be an inevitable consequence of Hinduism, but here, among the Pakistani Christians, it is contrived. Every believer should spend a few days here, seeing how their brothers and sisters in Christ are forced to live, and their astonishing resilience. I was both awed and angered at the same time.
The School of Healing was not due to begin for another day, so my first was spent visiting homes and villages. Out of town, buffaloes gazed from putrid streams, green fields of wheat, sugar cane and lucerne were dotted with white-clad groups of unemployed men playing cards, and brick-factories – soot-black chimneys, squat and belching, beside acres of clay moulded into grey rows by Christians for a dollar a day. Needing the income from both parents, their children are left in the streets for the day, no education, few clothes, and no hope. It is here that our host plans to build a school beside a tiny, white-painted church among the forlorn, dung-rendered walls.
Behind rude wooden doors in the nearby town, thin courtyards house a buffalo or cow, a pair of goats, or a few fat-tailed sheep, supplementing the tiny income of the slightly better off. Lucerne was being chopped by chaff-cutters for the stock – do they have their own land, I asked. ‘Oh no!’ I was told, Christians couldn’t afford land.’ Many of these so called Christians have, over generations of persecution, become nominal or like Joseph of Aramathea, ‘secret’. But still their welcome was humbling.
School brings new light
Finally the School came and we made a good start with over 200 delegates being given the Manual in Urdu (which goes backwards, like Arabic), and people were healed from the first moment. God led me to call forward two gentlemen both of whom had suffered from arthritis for three years. I prayed for one, while a ‘beginner’ prayed for the other, and within a few minutes both were healed, all their pain gone! God is so good!
On the final day we sent them into the streets, and were touched to see our delegates going from door to door throughout the neighbourhood. They had really got the ‘bug’, and returned rejoicing, having seen many healed, and at least 5 decisions for Christ. This is what the School is all about! One lady testified to having seen a lady with arthritis healed in the street, while another man watched a blind girl receive her sight!
This was a breakthrough for the churches of Pakistan. No one had ever taught them that the ‘ordinary’ believer can heal the sick. They took to it like ducks to water, and will never be the same. This message badly needs to spread throughout the churches here,
The tiny church in the village of the brickmakers - their only hope
Below Christian quarter in Faisalabad
