Pastor Amit Paul had a train to catch. It was 5:35 in the morning in West Bengal, and in seventy minutes he would board the 6:45 for the Durgapur region, in the central-western part of the state near the border of Jharkhand. Roughly a hundred to a hundred and ten church leaders were expected to gather there for a day of focused training on the sanctity of human life — a program organized by a pastor recently added to his team, a capable communicator from an Assemblies of God congregation whom Amit intended to teach alongside, and to teach.

At that same moment, half a world away, some three hundred people were seated in a banquet hall outside Atlanta, watching him on a screen. PassionLife had gathered them for a fundraising dinner featuring John Piper, whose long-standing passion for world missions and for the sanctity of life made him a natural voice for the evening. The program had been carefully timed. If the Atlanta event ran long, the live interview with Amit would be missed entirely — his train would not wait.

The interview held. And by broad agreement afterward, the few minutes with the pastor from West Bengal proved to be the high point of the night. What almost nobody in that room understood, as they reached toward the screen and prayed for him, was what would happen to him after the train pulled out.

Where the Need Is Greatest

PassionLife’s strategy is unsentimental about arithmetic. The United States accounts for roughly three percent of the abortions that occur worldwide each year, which leaves ninety-seven percent of the crisis standing before the church as a world missions challenge. The ministry therefore works where abortion is most concentrated, and it identifies its next field by the same logic every time: it goes after the country ranked number one.

For years that country was Cuba. As PassionLife worked alongside Cuban churches, Cuba fell from first in the world to fourth — good news, but news that necessarily produced a new number one. That country is India. By the estimate the ministry cites, something on the order of sixteen million unborn children are killed there each year. A nation of that size, with the largest population on earth, does not lend itself to gradualism.

PassionLife first met Amit Paul in 2018, introduced by a mutual friend who described him as a pastor with a genuinely pro-life mind. He proved to be far more than that. Over the following years and thirteen trips to India, he became the ministry’s most important national partner there, and something closer than a colleague to the American teammate who has traveled with him longest — a friendship the two men describe in terms usually reserved for family.

The work itself is unglamorous and repetitive by design. PassionLife’s core equipping material, the Four Questions training curriculum, was translated into several Indian languages, along with a series of videos presenting the science of prenatal development. Amit began teaching the material in Bengali — Bangla, as it is called locally — and then began teaching pastors to teach it. That second step is the whole strategy in miniature. It is the pattern the Apostle Paul described to Timothy: what has been heard is entrusted to reliable people who will be able to teach others also. Making disciples who make disciples who make disciples is how a training program becomes a movement.

One of the simplest tools has proven among the most effective. PassionLife developed a tiny fetal model — a medically accurate representation of a child at nine and a half weeks after conception, small enough to rest in a palm, detailed enough that the humanity of the child is not an argument but an observation. Handed to a room of pastors, or to a group of teenage girls, it tends to end debate and begin something else. What follows in these trainings is not a policy discussion but a reckoning: tears of repentance, weeping for grief over lives already lost, weeping for joy over forgiveness found. From there, Amit introduces practical models of pregnancy help that churches can actually operate.

Sarah

One of those models is called NEST — Neighborhood Empathy in Special Time — a mother’s home where a woman in crisis can stay temporarily. Since it opened, two children have been saved through it. The first case was the hardest.

The mother was about twenty-one. She had become pregnant through a relationship with her husband’s friend, and she fled her home in fear. The man involved was in no position to help her. She had passed the point where hospitals were willing to perform an abortion; the pregnancy was too far along, and each one turned her away. Out of options, she went looking for legal help and found her way to an advocate.

The advocate was not a Christian. He was, however, a friend of one of the pastors in Amit’s network, and he had attended a four-questions training and come away affected by it. Unsure at first what to tell the young woman, he promised her only that he would try to find a way through that left neither her nor her child in danger. Then he called Amit.

Amit and his wife went and counseled her. She changed her mind and chose to carry the baby. That decision solved one problem and created another, and the question of what to do next cost Amit three or four sleepless nights: whether to hand the child to government authorities or to place her with a family. Elsewhere — unknown to anyone involved — a couple had spent four years praying for a child and going from office to office seeking to adopt, without success. The timing was not arranged by anyone in the room.

They named her Sarah. Her birth mother cared for her for about a month, and then placed her herself into the arms of the adoptive family. It was, for everyone who had worked and prayed and lost sleep over the case, an overwhelming moment. The young woman had said that if she could not obtain an abortion she would take her own life. Instead there were two lives preserved and a family finally made. Sarah is now, in the plainest sense of the phrase, enjoying real life.

The reports keep coming. Even in the minutes after the Atlanta interview ended, Amit remembered one more thing he wanted to say: through the leadership of one of his disciples, two more babies had been saved in the Dinajpur and Siliguri regions. He had learned of it during a ninety-minute conversation on his way to Nepal.

The Mob at Durgapur

Then came the training in Durgapur, and the reason this account exists.

India is a majority-Hindu nation, and there is not a great deal of affection there for the gospel. Opposition is a normal operating condition, not an exception. PassionLife’s team is candid about this: two years ago, a church where Amit and his American colleague had taught was invaded by a Hindu mob roughly three months after their visit. People were physically beaten and the church’s offering box was stolen. That was not a metaphor. It was a mob.

At Durgapur, a crowd began to gather outside while the training was underway. Part of what provoked it appears to have been a misunderstanding amplified by a microphone. The word hallelujah was being repeated inside, and the Hindus gathering outside took the repetition as a deliberate substitute for one of their own chants — a Christian chant being installed in place of a Hindu one. The longer they listened, the more agitated they became.

Amit, teaching, was unaware. When word first reached him he judged it minor. Then his hosts told him he would have to leave, and they moved him out through the back of the building. There they were met by an angry mob, shouting accusations and demanding they go. In that part of the world such a confrontation typically ends in one of two ways: a beating, or a delivery to the police. Those present were hoping for the police.

Neither happened. What happened instead is the reason this story is being told rather than mourned.

Amit began to talk. He explained, calmly, why they were there: to save the lives of unborn children. And then something came to him that he had not planned to say — a reminder that in the Hindu scriptures themselves, the protection of the unborn is honored as a value. It was the right sentence at the only moment it could have worked. The crowd, which by every ordinary expectation was not going to listen to him, listened. The mob dispersed without violence. And the encounter ended not merely in escape but in an invitation: Amit was given an opportunity to return and speak with the community’s leaders at a later date.

A shared conviction about the worth of an unborn child had opened a door that argument could not have opened — and behind that door stands the gospel these men came to bring. It is difficult to read the sequence as anything other than grace: the right words placed in a man’s mouth, at the right moment, before the wrong kind of crowd.

The Curry and Spice Initiative

That episode is the honest backdrop to what PassionLife announced in Atlanta. The ministry is committing to a three-year effort in India it calls the Curry and Spice Initiative, increasing its annual investment there roughly tenfold — from about $25,000 a year, most of it consumed by airfare, to approximately $250,000 a year for each of the next three years. If India is number one, the reasoning goes, then a beachhead, a few relationships, some translated material, and a foot in the door are genuinely good — and genuinely not enough.

The money funds personnel and trainings across a widening map of regional leaders, many of them men Amit has personally discipled, each taking responsibility for a section of the country, their territories deliberately overlapping. One, a Nepali, has assumed responsibility for the northern Nepali-speaking areas and into Nepal itself. The strategy did not originate in Atlanta. It emerged from Kolkata, from Amit, and the American ministry regards itself as following his lead rather than directing it. India’s first PassionLife-connected pregnancy center and mother’s home are now operating. Production of the tiny fetal models is being moved to India, with several million anticipated over the next few years.

About half the three-year funding is in place. The rest depends on partners willing to commit for the full three years — five dollars a month, fifty dollars a month, whatever a family can sustain — because the plan is not for next year but for the year after that and the year after that.

At the close of the Atlanta interview, before the train, the room prayed for Pastor Amit and for the hundred leaders he was going to teach. They prayed that God would raise up many more leaders, that those leaders would work well together and share well with each other, and that the help and rescue Christ offers through his church would become known throughout India. They prayed that minds and hearts would be transformed that very day.

What they did not know was how literally that prayer was about to be tested, or how it would be answered — not in the meeting hall, but in the alley behind it, in front of a mob.

This article is adapted from the episode transcript.