First all-woman JESUS Film team in India learns trust

Thursday, July 26, 2012

Chikhli, India

Monika Natekar still gets goosebumps when she remembers the day that God answered her fervent prayer almost instantaneously.

“See? Still,” the 26-year-old said with a grin, pointing to the raised bumps on her arm.

One of the two members of India’s first all-female Nazarene JESUS Film ministry team, Natekar said her experience in this ministry cemented her trust in God’s desire and ability to provide for all her needs.

The experience that convinced her of God’s faithfulness occurred after she and her teammate, Angha Khandagale, trudged around a community all day, carrying a DVD player and a copy of the JESUS film. Unlike the other days they’d gone out to share, not a single home would open its doors to the young women.

“The whole day we spent like this,” Natekar said. “No one is ready to listen to us. We [were] desperate and we had prayer about what to do.”

As they continued to walk, they saw a new neighborhood they hadn’t tried yet. They decided to see if God wanted to do something there.

Right away, they saw a woman sitting outside her home. The woman thought the young ladies were going door to door selling something, so she asked them what they had.

They replied that they had nothing to sell, but they had a movie they would be willing to show her for free. She invited them inside and went to gather some neighbors while the women connected the DVD player to her TV and queued up the film. About 30 to 40 people crammed into the home to watch the film.

“It was a miracle in our life,” Natekar says. “On that day, no one had responded, and we prayed and God immediately responded.”

The hostess was eager to know more about Jesus, so Natekar and Khandagale returned to visit and pray for the family. Soon the woman began to believe in Jesus. However, one day the woman admitted she was troubled. She said she believed in Jesus and that he came to die for her sins, but she and her family belonged to another religion and she was afraid to make her new faith in Christ public.

Natekar told the woman not to be afraid; to simply give her concern to God in prayer. She advised the woman to ask God to reveal what he wanted her to do.

The woman said she did not know how to pray to this new God. Natekar pointed to the woman’s son, and said, “If your son wants something, to whom he will ask? To you. So, like that, we are the children of God. If we want anything, we just ask him directly. There is no need to use big words. You are asking him with a pure heart.”

This analogy made sense to the woman, so she began talking to God regularly. However, this angered her husband, who tried to beat her new belief out of her.

“Once we went there, in front of us he was quarreling with her,” Natekar said. “She was crying.”

Although the woman is too afraid to come to church, Natekar continues to visit and encourage her, and the woman clings to her faith in Christ.

Over the two and a half years that Natekar and Khandagale conducted JESUS Film ministry, they shared Christ with about 100 families, and out of these, four different families began attending the Chikhli, India, Nazarene church regularly. The church's pastor, Rajiv Yangad, said he is following up with each of them.

"Being a fresh graduate from seminary, [Natekar] was very persistent in her work and ministered with courage," Yangad said. "She demonstrated responsibility towards the gospel-sharing, as well as towards authority."

Sometimes, as Natekar urged people to trust in Christ for their needs, she realized she was talking to herself as much as to the people she was visiting. She has challenges of her own. Living with her parents in a tiny, two-room home, she watches her father struggle with alcohol addiction, and she prays for God to release him from this bondage.

Her parents, who are Christians, raised her and her two siblings as Christians. But for Natekar, being a Christian was just a label – she thought that she was a Christian simply by being born into a Christian family. It wasn’t until she attended a Bible college for her education that, through devotional meetings, she realized she still needed to repent of her sins and personally accept Christ as her Lord.

Having completed her JESUS Film ministry, Natekar now teaches children’s Sunday School in the Chikhli Church of the Nazarene, holds a district preacher's license, and is expanding her ministry involvement by joining the Central Maharashtra District’s new communications team.

"She is a very faithful and committed person to any job given to her," Yangad said. "Since she entered the seminary, she has never looked back."

This story appears courtesy of Engage magazine's Live from India series. Engage Magazine is the global mission magazine of the Church of the Nazarene. 

 

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