Ten Ways To Spread The Good News Among Hindus

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Jesus said to go out and spread the good news everywhere, but later, Saul (St Paul) guided by the Holy Spirit, said except in Asia. Here are some ways developed by some to spread the good news among Hindus in Asia and elsewhere.

http://bluelegends.sulekha.com/blog/pos ... -in-to.htm (http://bluelegends.sulekha.com/blog/post/2007/06/ten-ways-to-convert-a-hindu-shocking-insight-in-to.htm)

Ten ways to convert a Hindu: Shocking insight into a Christian missionary's agenda.

Through friendship Evangelism is usually easy to initiate with Hindus. Most Hindus esteem religion in general and are free and open to speak about it. A sincere, nonjudgmental interest in all aspects of Indian life will provide a good basis for friendship. Personal interaction with Hindus will lead to a more certain grasp of the essence of Hinduism than reading many books. A consistently Christ-like life is the most important factor in sharing the Gospel with Hindus. The suggestions that follow should help to break down misunderstandings and help to build a positive witness for Christ. But learning and applying these points can never substitute for a transparent life of peace and joy in disciple-ship to Jesus Christ.

1. Do not criticize or condemn Hinduism. There is much that is good and much that is bad in the practice of both Christianity and Hinduism. Pointing out the worst aspects of Hinduism is hardly the way to win friends or show love. Criticizing Hinduism can make us feel we have won an argument; it will not win Hindus to Jesus Christ.

2. Avoid everything that hints of triumphalism and pride. We are not the greatest people with the greatest religion, but some Hindus are taught that we think of ourselves in this way. We do not have all knowledge of all truth; in fact we know very little to become “Christian.” (Think of what that means to a Hindu—India like America or Europe!) But we do desire all India to find peace and joy and true spirituality.

3. Never allow a suggestion that separation from family and/or culture is necessary in becoming a disciple of Christ. To insist or even subtly encourage a Hindu to leave his home and way of life to join the “Christian” way of life in terms of diet and culture, etc., is a denial of Biblical teaching.

4. Do not speak quickly on hell, or on the fact that Jesus is the only way for salvation. Hindus hear these things as triumphalism and are offended unnecessarily. Speak of hell only with tears of compassion. Point to Jesus so that it is obvious He is the only way, but leave the Hindu to see for himself, rather than trying to force it on him.

5. Never hurry. Any pushing for a decision or conversion will do great harm. God must work, and the Holy Spirit should be given freedom to move at his own pace. Even after a profession of Christ is made, do not force quick changes regarding pictures of gods, charms, etc. Be patient and let a person come to fuller understanding and conviction in his own mind before taking action.

6. Work traditional Hindu (and Biblical) values into your life, like simplicity, renunciation, spirituality and humility, against which there is no law. A life reflecting the reality of “a still and quiet soul” (Psalm 131) will never be despised by Hindus.

7. Know Hinduism, and each individual Hindu. It will take some study to get a broad grasp of Hinduism and patient listening will be required to understand where in the spectrum each Hindu stands. Both philosophical and devotional Hinduism should be studied with the aim of understanding what appeals to the Hindu heart. Those who move seriously into work among Hindus need to become more knowledge-able in Hinduism than Hindus themselves are. Some study of the Sanskrit language will prove invaluable. Remember the Biblical pattern from Acts 17 of introducing truth to the Hindu from his own tradition, and only secondarily from the Bible. For example, the Biblical teaching on sin is repulsive to many modern Hindus, but their own scriptures give an abundance of similar testimony. Bridge from Hindu scripture to the Bible and Christ.

8. Be quick to acknowledge failure. Defending wrong practices in the church and Western Christianity only indicates we are more concerned for our religion than we are for truth.

9. Share your testimony, describing your personal experience of being lost and God’s gracious forgiveness and peace. Don’t claim to know God in His majesty and fullness, but share what you know in your life and experience. This is the supreme approach in presenting Christ to the Hindu, but care must be taken that our sharing is appropriate. To shout on a street corner, or share at every seeming opportunity is offensive. What God does in our lives is holy and private, only to be shared in intimacy to those who will respect the things of God and his work in our lives.

10.Center on Christ. He alone can win their hearts’ total loyalty to Himself. In your life and speech so center on him that all see in your life that God alone is worth living for. Hinduism is often called “God-intoxicated,” and the Hindu who lives at all in this frame of mind is put off by Christian emphases on so many details to the neglect of the “one thing that is needed” (Lk. 10:42). A Hindu who professes faith in Christ must be helped as far as possible to work out the meaning of that commitment in his own cultural context. Often a new follower of Christ is ready to adopt any and every practice of Western Christians, and needs to be taught what is essential and what is secondary in Christian life and worship. For example, it can be shown that the Eastern practice of removing shoes in a place of worship has strong Biblical precedence despite the fact that shoes are worn in Western churches. A new believer should be warned against making an abrupt announcement to his or her family, since that inflicts great pain and inevitably produces deep misunderstanding. Ideally, a Hindu will share each step of the pilgrimage to Christ with his or her family, so that there is no surprise at the end. An early stage of the communication, to be reaffirmed continually, would be the honest esteem for Indian/Hindu traditions in general that the disciple of Christ can and does maintain. Approaching Hindus on these lines does not result in quick conversions and impressive statistics. But a hearing will be gained from some who have refused to listen to traditional Christian approaches. And new Disciples of Christ can be taught to deal more sensitively with their contexts, allowing them to maintain an ongoing witness to their family and society. As the leaven of the Gospel is allowed to work in Hindu minds and society, a harvest is sure to follow in God’s own time.

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Television magnet, Oprah Winfrey, shares her views about the one way doctrine to salvation and openly endorses other ways that may contradict the way of the proselytizer.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFDKwvBx ... re=related (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFDKwvBxv4Q&feature=related)

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A summary of the possible intent of the ten ways presented and shared by an observer.

- Mask your real intentions until the time is right
- Slowly reel them in like a fisherman
- Try to befriend your victim first
- Be as much like them in every other respect
- Choose surroundings that undermine their confidence
- Use outnumbering your victim as a method
- Attack core beliefs
- Try to create uncertainty and fear
- Make physical contact

[Falcon]

- Keep them poor
- keep them starving
- enrich yourself and further your self-realisation to get closer to God without giving a second thought to your suffering neighbour
-complain like hell if someone else helps your suffering neighbour
- call them hindu even though they dont know what they are
- threaten them with violence if their free choice is not your choice
- threaten them with expulsion from india and replacement by wannabe indians from trinidad if they convert
- parrot the lines that all roads lead tot he same God but kill them if they choose another road
- fast from meat but drink rum :)

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Ha! Ha! That looks like a summary of a thread in your mind that fears a loss of religious colonialism that is now taking over from economic colonialism of the Europeans and Americans.

Through religious proselytiging by any means, and particularly by the sword, like Christianity and Islam did for years with also the inquistition, and are still doing today by division of families, the goal remains the same.

Falcon, you will do well to remind yourself of the what Jesus said to the rich man about getting into Heaven and about the lillies of the fields and the birds of the air.

How did you justify colonial governments almost fifteen hundred years n India that faied to provide Indian/Hindus with universal primary education. No, it is is the promotion of the same old slavery still in the scriptures of Islam and now removed from Christianity

Your post looks like another of your contrived argument and red herring to confuse the issue?

[Falcon]

it's only a red herring when you choose to classify it as that rather than address the points...you have a habit of doing that. :)

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You get the point. I know the difference, because this is not the first time i reminded you of it. It is a pattern I watch for a while now as it generally shows up in your posts.

[Falcon]

still shirking from addressing the points I see......even hamelia call you out and you taking about me and fish......by the way, what is the hindu perspective on xenografts and would a bramhin accept an untouchable's heart or give an untouchable his dead son's heart? I'm interested to know.......really. :roll:

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Same old story. I told you before to start your own thread about new subjects.

[Falcon]

but this is the only(est) way I could get your attention...you does duck the hard questions on this thread self, dont talk about how yuh does hide from them more challenging threads...........yuh wudden even set foot in dey, shoes an all...........

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I have a history of not shying away from controversy, and you know it very well, because I have had many with you, and also because you are here probably longer than most forumites.

I take full responsibility for deciding when it is wise to end a confrontation, and I expect the other side to do the same. But I must admit, however, that I do like to have the last word, something I must have inherited from my mother. I know I have ro fix that, and I am working on it.

Some matters are not worth a response, because they are knee jerk responses. Some posts are not answered because the answer can be found in a previous post. Some comments demonstrate lack of thought of the content of threads. Some people want to be spoon fed.

You may not be aware of it, but you do a little of all of the above. You often take a word or a sentence out of a whole thread and lead the discussion with it in another direction. That is a common practice I notice in some of your discussions.

I pointed out before that I may be vulnerable to red herrings, because I am a simple person, not looking for misleading questions. But I am catching on, I must admit.

But worst of all, is that some of you, including one or two other moderaters, believe you are running classrooms and you have some kind of right to demand performance.

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Falcon, to make scathing statements about the Indian people is to show a simple lack of knowledge of the sub continent itself and other countries with a history of colonialism, and it is inexcusable.

The following information will assist in understanding with a little more depth the conditions in the Indian sub continent.

India, where most Hindus live, is a little smaller in size than a third of the size of the United States of America, yet it supports somewhat more than four times the US population.

Indians, mostly Hindus, changed from being the wealthiest to the third wealthiest ethnic minority in the US, after Colombians and Russians. India was once the richest country in the world before the barbarians invaded it more than fifteen hundred years ago.

The one point two (1.2) billion strong population of India, mostly Hindus, is almost evenly divided into four social and economic groups, the wealthy, the middle class, lower middle class and the less privileged.

Current Hindu social and economic progress was made in less than the sixty years of India's independence.

The Hindus of India, through their great patience, single-handedly and nonviolently freed themselves from almost fifteen hundred years of domination by foreign opportunists who almost drained the life blood of their country and left it severely economically impoverished.

Foreign invaders spent the life span of organized Christianity, or almost fifteen hundred years, trying to strip the Indian people, mostly Hindus, of their great wealth, religion, heritage, language and esteem.

Preserving the territorial integrity of India, as well as managing its population growth including Muslim polygamy that supports four wives and six children per wife is not an easy problem.

With the many complexities of competing interests in culture, language, dialect, politics, class stratification, etc., they often minimize all the economic gains the country makes in almost all areas of continuing development.

Hinduism and the Hindu culture are the oldest, continuous and unbroken practices in the world of which most Hindus are proud. No one can even begin to speak of their ages or even origins.

India's sixty years of love with an inherited socialist government policy has been a major factor in its reluctance to move forward more progressively, and remove the debilitating conditions of which Indians complain.

It is a marvel that should not go unnoticed that, in spite of the following, India has been referenced by other nations as an emerging superpower:

India lacked universal primary education for more that fifteen hundred years under foreigh rule until this year, sixty yeas after gaining its independence.

India lacks universal secondary education even today.

India has an illiteracy rate of a little less than forty percent.

India completely missed the industrial revolution.

The road and highway infrastructure of India leaves much to be desired in the context of the efficiency and ease needed for the full distribution of goods and services for a billion plus people and an expanding world economy.

Christianity can never be the cure for poverty, otherwise in the two thousand years since the inception of Christianity, all Christian nations would have completely eradicated poverty by now.

To complain about Hinduism as the cause for economic poverty in India remains a falsehood. The problem is not Hinduism, but the slow recovery from the ravages, poor distribution of the national wealth, and the pillages and rape of a people of unsuspecting, peace-loving and nonviolent dispositions.

In addition, the deliberate distortion of historical facts about the deep, rich, spiritual and cultural heritage of the country by greedy foreign invaders and European Christian adventurers dominated the political scene and debilitated the self-esteem of a people for about fifteen hundred continuous years before India secured its independence. The intent of these distortions by the foreign invaders was for the purpose of divide and rule, and the elimination of Hinduism that was mistakenly understood as a religion of idol worship. It is well know in India and elsewhere that what the foreign invaders could not understand, they tried to destroy.

On the matter of Hindu poverty of which many complain, it is widely known that some Hindus emphasize the spiritual over the material, and many Hindus are often generally content with their abundance of spiritual wealth in a manner similar to the teachings of Jesus. Other Hindus give equal importance to spiritual and material wealth, as their lifestyles would suggest.

Jesus taught that it is easier for a poor man to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. Besides, Jesus said many will be called, but few will be chosen. One has to wonder about the urgency of getting to Heaven, for which Christians whip up so much frenzy in their pursuit of new converts, as well as the issue of free will that Christians preach, when prophets see into the future and predict how many will be chosen or how people would evolve.

Can it be that the emphasis on new converts is for increasing the economic wealth of the Christian church through the spirit of free giving that Indians always show?

The same orders of Christians who stripped Native and African Americans of their self-dignity on earth, with whips on their backs, now extend to all Hindus around the world a paradise, not on earth, but in a Heaven somewhere in the blue skies.

Native Americans and people of African descent in the US and elsewhere will have no difficulty identifying with the issues of Hindu subjugation by foreigners from their own experiences with Christians who offered them freedom and love in Heaven, while keeping them in bondage as slaves on earth.

Is anyone truly serious about increasing the happiness and economic wealth of Hindus through conversion? Can anyone really point to any significant abundance of economic wealth and happiness enjoyed by Christians above that which Hindus enjoy today?

One quarter of the entire population of India is as economically wealthy as the entire population of the US. Besides, India has the largest middle class population in the world. Even with a quarter of the country comprising the less privileged or underprivileged, one would be hard-pressed to find Christians in the US as happy as any one of the Hindus in this group. Christians in India for the first time themselves will readily testify to this fact.

It is well known that happiness is a concept that is personal to each individual, and what may be happiness for one may be misery for another. One individual may measure happiness by only giving, while another by only receiving.

With all the great wealth and advances of the Christian West, people generally remain starved for love. Where, in the West, is the abundance of love of which Christians speak? Elderly parents are often put away in communal homes to linger and die with an occasional visit or two from their own children. I can testify to this as I was a friendly visitor on Saturdays for fifteen years.

Children are often physically and sexually abused in countless numbers by their own parents, and removed from parental homes to the homes of strangers. The divorce rate in the US and elsewhere in the West has grown to about fifty percent.

The economic wealth of some Christian organizations is about to evaporate with the current prosecution of child sexual abuse in the Church. Almost everywhere, today, unscrupulous Church officials are swindling congregations with gimmicks designed to increase the coffers of the Church and provide the Church hierarchy with a life-style common to the rich.

Today the emphasis of the Christian church appears to be on who can draw the largest crowd and gain the most converts.

Balgrim Ragoonanan

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For centuries Hindus, Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians (Parsees) and Baha'I's lived side by side in India as peacemakers when Hindus provided shelter for non Hindus fleeing from religious persecution in their own homelands.

Syrian Christians were perhaps the first to seek shelter and make new homes in South India. They lived in peace and harmony with their new Indian brothers and sisters for ages and lived in security, peace and comfort from their persecutors.

With a new and desperate breed of Christian aggressors around the world, new Christians are now persecuting Hindus in large numbers in their very own homeland where Christians become a majority in towns and villages and where they are now intent on destroying Hindu practices they call Devil worship.

These new Christians say they are mandated to create conflict in the name of Jesus as can be seen in the Iraq video, in order to save souls. But the bigger picture is that Church membership in Europe and America is dwindling, and Church coffers are drying up at such a rate that fear and desperation appear to be a motive. India is presented as the new hope and new fertile ground for harvesting souls and replenishing empty Church coffers under the guise of saving souls.

The family unit is dear to most Hindus, and the kinds of divisions caused by systematic Christian proselytizing impose another form of colonial religious violence and exploitation that is as equally violent as earlier colonial political and social violence everywhere in India.

This kind of violence seems more like a return to the old practice of colonial divide and rule, experienced by Indians under European rule. Now families, parents, children, villages, local governments, etc., are placed in conflict situations with the goal of the Christian eventual rule of India.

The Youtube video presentations in the links below provide an overview of the kinds of new violence perpetrated on Indians/Hindus and the people of Iraq by foreign Christian proselytizing. But the Iraq video may be the tip of the iceberg and a view of how wars are profitable for Christian expansionism in collaboration with foreign governments. It is consistent with the teachings of Jesus for creating conflict within families.

Indian video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D__wFF8D2Pk&NR=1

Iraq video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=NL&hl=nl&v=2-jLUlG_lRc