Calvary Road Baptist Church
“A MAJOR SHIFT IN SAMUEL RAI’S MINISTRY”
Romans 15.20
As the pastor of this wonderful Church, I have been privileged to attend gatherings of pastors from time to time, to visit foreign mission fields on occasion, and to participate in one-off events of some significance. I have visited missionaries in Mexico, Mali, South Korea, Hong Kong, The Philippines, Thailand, Nepal, India, the United Kingdom, Ukraine, Romania, Greece, Lebanon, and Israel. They have been life-changing experiences.
I have also attended and been privileged to host gatherings of pastors and scholars here in California, Oregon, Washington, Texas, Oklahoma, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, South Korea, Belgium, and London.
I also had the privilege of serving with our friend, the late Gary Long,[1] the organizer and chairman of the Baptist History Celebration Steering Committee, which organized the Tercentenary Anniversary Tribute to the founding of the Philadelphia Baptist Association in 1707, held at the First Baptist Church of Charleston, South Carolina on August 1-3, 2007.[2] Every Baptist congregation in the Western hemisphere has directly sprung from that small association of Particular Baptist Churches.[3]
While not claiming expertise about worldwide missions (I gladly reserve the label expert for our friend Dr. M. Jack Baskin), I will insist that I am somewhat more familiar with worldwide missions over my forty-eight years of Gospel ministry involvement and observation than most pastors and many missionaries (whose experience is limited to their particular field).
I recall that it was while I was attending the School of Theology at the Metropolitan Tabernacle in London that the pastor, Dr Peter Masters, approached me in the auditorium and asked me to come with him to his office. Once there, he introduced me to Samuel Rai and his wife, Mangali. It was later that I learned that Samuel Rai was among the first foreign nationals mentored by Peter Masters and returned to their countries to faithfully serve our Savior.
At the time, I gave little thought to the significance of the encounter. Two months later, in September of 2013, when I received a call from Samuel Rai inviting me to preach for him in Nepal, I realized what Peter Masters had accomplished. With our Church’s and the deacons’ support, I flew to Kathmandu, Nepal, stopping in Bangkok, Thailand for a few days to visit my brother, Greg. And so our Church’s involvement with Samuel Rai began.
Our Church has been mission-minded since I was called to pastor in November 1985. But we were by 2013 fully (if not yet formally) committed to securing partnerships with foreign national Church planters rather than American missionaries (who needed to learn a new language, learn a new culture, and who would possibly return to the USA after their children were raised, their parents needed personal care, or they grew homesick).
Samuel Rai was by that time an extremely successful Church planter, day school founder, orphanage founder, Christian book translator and publisher, ministry training schools founder, United Nations accredited journalist, radio broadcaster, and international influencer. Rendezvousing with him in Kathmandu, then flying with him to Pokhara, spending several days with him, preaching for him, and observing him interact with Nepali Baptist pastors he had brought to Christ and trained for the Gospel ministry was eye-opening.
This morning, under three headings, is my summary of his just short of sixty years biography.
First, SAMUEL RAI’S EARLY LIFE, CONVERSION, AND TRAINING
Samuel Rai’s grandfather was a Gurkha fighter during World War One, wearing the uniform (if I understand correctly, of the British Army). Samuel’s father was a Gurkha fighter during World War Two, also wearing the uniform of the British Army.[4] Nepal being the only formally Hindu country in the world then, Samuel was born into one of the lower castes of Hinduism.
When he was seven years old, sitting at the back of the school classroom with others of his caste, his curiosity compelled him to walk to the front of the classroom to look around. Once there, the higher caste teacher slapped his face, and he was sent to the back of the class where he ‘belonged.’ From that moment, he told me he hated religion. That set the stage for him to be kidnapped by Maoist revolutionaries when he was fourteen. He joined the fight to overthrow the royal household of Nepal.[5]
Samuel seemed a natural fit to be a fighter like his father, grandfather, and other Nepali warriors of worldwide fame. He quickly rose through the ranks among the revolutionaries, becoming not only the commander of fourteen thousand fighters by the time he was twenty-one but also a specially trained propagandist. He also had in his employ bomb makers for his terrorist activities.
His goal as a communist, specifically a Maoist, was to liberate his people and fight for them rather than fight for a foreign power as his father and grandfather had. But God had other plans. Involved in a firefight with 800 of his men against government troops, Samuel was seriously wounded and went into hiding to recover and escape execution by his immediate superior. It was during that recovery period, the lowest time in his life when he had seemingly lost everything of value to him, that an impoverished couple he had met befriended the notorious fugitive killer and introduced him to the Savior.
So frightening a man as he attended Church for six months before the congregation overcame their fear of him and agreed to baptize him. Aren’t you glad they didn’t bar him from attending their Church? And even when he was baptized, the pastor noticed two pistols in his pants pockets coming up out of the water. After a brief exchange, Samuel threw his hardware into the lake,[6] where he was baptized.
At some point he was introduced to an Australian Baptist who recommended him to Peter Masters. Convinced God wanted him in the Gospel ministry, he made his way to London, improved his English, was trained for the ministry at the Metropolitan Tabernacle. Once he was trained, he headed back home to embark on the next chapter of his life, to reach as many of his people for Christ as he could.
Next, SAMUEL RAI’S PIONEERING MISSIONARY WORK
If my chronology is correct, Samuel and Mangali were married after Samuel returned from London to Pokhara. For five years, he preached the Gospel to whoever would listen, without any discernible results. From time to time, he was approached by different types of Christians who ignored or minimized the doctrines of grace he so loved and pleaded with him to compromise his convictions and join with them in an anemic and diluted form of Christianity. But Samuel was firm in his convictions, continued to plead with God for fruit, and preached the unsearchable riches of Christ without compromise. In retrospect, it was a time of testing for him.
Samuel’s commitment seems to have reflected the Apostle Paul’s, who wrote to the Romans in Romans 15.20,
“Yea, so have I strived to preach the gospel, not where Christ was named, lest I should build upon another man’s foundation.”
Samuel’s commitment seems also to have reflected his mentor, Peter Masters, whose entire 45 plus years at the Metropolitan Tabernacle has been built on the infallible Word of God, the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ, commitment to local Church ministry, and a firm embracing of the doctrines of grace:
The five solas of the Christian faith, concisely stated in the Protestant Reformation, which distinguished both the Reformers and the Particular Baptists from the teachings of Rome, include sola scriptura (Scripture alone), solus Christus (Christ alone), sola fide (faith alone), sola gratia (grace alone), and soli Deo gloria (glory to God alone).
When I met Samuel Rai, it was beyond dispute that God had anointed him to engage in an astonishingly fruitful ministry without compromise or manipulation. Over thirty years, he has averaged founding, establishing, and planting six Baptist Churches a year! During that time, he has also managed to train more than a thousand men for the Gospel ministry in his congregational discipleship and ministry training schools!
At the same time, he travels abroad, arranges for classical Christian books to be translated and printed in his language, runs a radio ministry, and who knows what else. In 2018, I arranged for him to travel with me to Washington, DC, to meet with Ambassador Sam Brownback, President Trump’s ambassador for worldwide religious affairs.
For all those years, Samuel’s Church planting work, beginning in Nepal’s cities, spreading to Nepal’s towns and villages, and for the last few years reaching into the extremely remote Himalayan high mountain valleys, has been pioneering missionary work, preaching the Gospel where the Gospel had not previously been declared.
Now, SAMUEL RAI’S INFLUENCE HAS BROADENED
From 2013 to last year, my annual trips to Nepal (when not prohibited by the COVID lockdown restrictions) were to preach at gatherings of pastors who were the fruit of Samuel’s evangelistic and church-planting ministry. They were almost exclusively gatherings of men he had discipled, had then trained specifically for the pastorate, and then engaged in a continuing education program. Samuel is committed to the proposition that if you do not read, you do not lead. And many of those who are now pastors were illiterate when they came to Christ.
This year, however, was a whole other kind of event. True, it was a gathering in Bharatpur, Nepal. But the main difference with this year’s conference was not new geography. Instead, it was new that for the first time in my experience, most Baptist pastors in attendance were not men brought to Christ by Samuel. Neither were the men disciplined and then trained for the ministry by Samuel. They were Baptist pastors who had observed Samuel Rai’s ministry over the years and concluded that they wanted Samuel Rai to mentor them and influence their Churches and ministries.
Do you know how unusual such a thing is in our day and age? On the one hand, the humility of a large group of established and seasoned Baptist pastors to seek the tutelage of someone not a part of their group, fellowship, or region is incredible. I am unsure if I have ever witnessed or read of such a thing. Such occurrences usually occur individually, but rarely has a group of Christian leaders made such an en-mass move as that. Yet it happened, and they as a group gave every evidence of being open and receptive to Samuel’s influence and to the American pastors he brought to the meeting to preach to them.
On the other hand, this meeting in early December 2023 marked the first time, to my knowledge, that Samuel has taken the step of doing what the Apostle Paul was not known to do. Paul never ran out of Roman Empire that was virgin territory to preach the Gospel, but Samuel seems to have done so. He has covered just about every region where the unsearchable riches of Christ were not previously declared and is now ministering where the Gospel has been preached. But those he is now ministering to were not diligently discipled as new converts in the way that has always been an earmark of his Gospel enterprise. We found, while preaching to those good men in Bharatpur, that they had not been doctrinally grounded in the faith as thoroughly as those who fell under Samuel’s influence in different regions.
What I observed there while I was in the country reminded me so much of my ministry here in the USA. Attempting to instill in people a devotion to discipleship that is without question prescribed in the New Testament, but at the same time is all but ignored in almost every Church in America. I failed to install and instill discipleship in my ministry in Brawley. I tried to install discipleship in my ministry here in Monrovia two times previously. It has only been over the last few years that our folks have gradually embraced what is clearly shown in the New Testament and what has been an integral part of Samuel Rai’s ministry for thirty years!
The problem, of course, is that the command is to make disciples in the Great Commission. Sadly, that directive is so universally ignored that persuading new converts they need to be discipled after their conversion is profoundly challenging. When new believers look around and do not see others who claim to be Christians being discipled, it undermines the thrust of Christ’s directive. Churchgoing people seem more willing to bow to what they see others doing than they are to do what the Bible obviously teaches.
Humanly speaking, Samuel’s success in disciplining converts during the first thirty years of his ministry was because his new converts did not learn bad habits from unsaved professing Christians because there were no professing Christians where he conducted ministry. There were no bad examples in his field of ministry to mess things up for new converts. This new chapter in his spiritual leadership mission will involve Christians in this new region attempting to unlearn from the bad examples set by those who were not taught well and by those who professed Christ but were not truly born again.
And that is not all. Samuel has been working in a province in India where his language is spoken; area census figures indicate more than 90% of the population professes to be Christians and to be Baptists! It results from Baptist evangelistic work in the 1870s and a revival in the 1950s. He asked me to go to that region with him in August 2024. I have not given him an answer.
Here is now Samuel describes the region at present. He calls them cultural Baptists. I asked him, “Samuel, what is a cultural Baptist?” He answered, “A cultural Baptist is not a real Christian but someone who attends Church services because it is the thing to do. But they do not witness to anyone, do not study their Bibles, or attend prayer meetings. They are Baptists in culture only.”
First Corinthians 3.6-7 speaks to an issue that might have already arisen in your mind. We support sixteen missionary ministries. A dozen of them are actively involved in Church planting, and the others serve as evangelists and Church planting support ministers. Some are producing astonishing results, with others engaged in grinding and profoundly challenging efforts. But notice what the Apostle Paul wrote:
6 I have planted, Apollos watered; but God gave the increase.
7 So then neither is he that planteth any thing, neither he that watereth; but God that giveth the increase.
What does the Savior want from servants like Samuel Rai, and others? In a word, He wants faithfulness, First Corinthians 4.1-2:
1 Let a man so account of us, as of the ministers of Christ, and stewards of the mysteries of God.
2 Moreover it is required in stewards, that a man be found faithful.
I am persuaded each of our missionaries is a faithful minister of Christ and faithful steward of the mysteries of God. To that end, I hope you will faithfully support with your prayers and gifts our Church’s missionary ministry, and that you will avoid like the plague anything that will suggest to those who know you that you are a cultural Baptist and not a genuine Christian.
Let me conclude this heavy-on-application message from God’s Word with what I admit is an opinion. But it is the studied opinion of almost a half-century of walking with the Lord as a believer and that same amount of time devoted to not only studying God’s Word but also being a committed cultural observer after the fashion of the children of Issachar, “that had understanding of the times, to know what Israel ought to do.”[7]
I am not suggesting that I am infallible by any means. But I am more likely to be discerning than someone who does not value wisdom, than someone who does not study God’s Word, than someone who does not sit at the feet of godly Christians by reading their thoughtful and provocative books, than someone who does not subject his analysis of trends and cultural movements to the scrutiny of others.
I work at paying attention. I ask questions. I am not always right, but I do pay attention. Paying attention for a long time, being a student for a long time, reading respected authors for a long time, and studying the Bible for a long time counts (I would suggest) for something.
Since leaving Nepal this last time and taking in what I have observed in different mission fields over the years, I am persuaded that spiritual opposition to the Christian faith tends to differ in different regions. I think the Indian subcontinent faces a spiritual onslaught from a hundred million false gods used by a horde of demons. Thus, in India, Nepal, and surrounding countries that are steeped in Hinduism, Buddhism, and animism, the Christian faith is opposed on clearly doctrinal grounds advanced by demons.
In places like Italy and Greece, including other Orthodox faith and Roman Catholic countries in Europe, I suspect the primary spiritual challenge to the advance of the Gospel is not doctrine but pride. Greek pride is related to the New Testament being theirs, and if you ain’t Orthodox, you ain’t Greek.
In the United States, Canada, Western Europe, Australia, and New Zealand, the spiritual assault against the faith is much like it was in the third chapter of Genesis. It is an assault against the divine order of the family unit, the institution of marriage, male spiritual leadership, and female commitment to being a fit helper to a husband.
If you are not going to provide spiritual leadership for that woman, you have no business cursing her with marriage to the likes of someone like you. If you are not going to submit to his spiritual leadership in your life, you have no business cursing him with a union to someone of the likes of you. That may sound harsh, but the totality of God’s Word supports the unvarnished truth, understood and applied.
So many men imagine they lead their wives because they are the boss. But a man who is not a believer, or a student and a doer of the Bible, who does not display humility and a willingness to forgive others as he has been forgiven, is not providing spiritual leadership at all.
In like manner, women imagine that they are good Christians while providing unrelenting challenges to their husband’s leadership and crushing opposition to his spirit arising from their willingness to fight and resist and scheme and connive against a man who hasn’t the heart for that, all the while bragging about it, is acting out demonic influence. Yet many professing Christian women not only do that but are influenced by feminism and imagine that they are entitled to do that.
I so wish I had encouraged more of our Church members to travel to foreign countries, especially non-western European countries that are not woke or as committed to the hyper-destructive feminism that is destroying our marriage, families, and Churches. Then you would see how women who are not feminists behave around their men and how men who are not married to man-crushing women behave around their women.
This problem is discernible in the families of so many pastors, the families of so many Church leaders, and the families of so many who are thought to be successful models of marriage and family. And if it is not men who kowtow to their wives, they end up kowtowing to their kids. Men, for one reason or another, or at one time or another, seem to be abandoning their God-given role as spiritual leaders.
God calls men to lead. Not fight. Not bicker. Not bullying. But certainly not capitulate. Certainly not succumb to those God has called them to lead. Indeed, do not give up, give in, and wimp out. And do not worry about who follows. Who follows a spiritual leader is God’s business, not any man’s.
We are a congregation of believers who have ingested a steady diet of God’s Word and the doctrines of grace over the years. Where we are vulnerable because of where we live, because of the type of spiritual opposition we most frequently face, is related to the willingness of Christian men to lead in their marriages and the determination of Christian women to submit to their Christian husbands in their marriages.
Men who will not lead and women who will not follow are the product of seducing spirits influencing people with the doctrines of demons. By God’s grace, we have been given victory over that evil course of life.
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[1] Gary W. Long (1940-2021) was founding pastor of Sovereign Grace Baptist Church, Springfield, Missouri and Particular Baptist Press, Springfield, Missouri
[2] Baptist History Celebration 2007: A Symposium on Our History, Theology, and Hymnody, published in August 2008 for the Baptist History Celebration 2007 Committee, (Springfield, MO: Particular Baptist Press), 590 pages, ISBN 1-888514-30-2
[3] The only exceptions are Swedish Baptists.
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gurkha
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nepalese_royal_massacre
[6] Phewa Lake, Pokhara, Nepal
[7] 1 Chronicles 12.32
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Pastor@CalvaryRoadBaptist.Church