I’ve always wanted to visit Nepal. Mountains, fresh air, stars at night…what could be better? At the start of Feb 2020 I finally made it there. I didn’t see a single mountain or night star and the word I now most associate with the country is ‘dusty’. But I’m fine with that.

I was in Kathmandu with a member of  the PT teaching staff and Mark, a maths teacher and fellow Cornhill student. Each morning after breakfast we would don our face masks and brave the thick dust to pick our way through the street vendors and stray dogs as we headed away from the tourist track and into the side streets near our guest house. Our destination was the unmarked gate of a local Bible College.

Each year, for one week, students and pastors from across Nepal gather together and, with the help of a wonderful Indian guy and a couple of hapless Cornhill students like ourselves, the Bible is opened and the miracle of praying and working hard at the text of the Bible to hear God speak to us is demonstrated and taught. Mark and I were there to attempt to give a couple of ‘model’ talks and to interact with the attendees throughout the training as best we could across the language barrier.

It seemed like exposition was a completely foreign concept for lots of the attendees at the training but, as I chatted to the men and women gathered together, I was struck again and again by the labour and suffering many Nepali Christians are going through to reach their country with the gospel.

Over veggie curry one lunch-time I chatted to a young guy from a poor people group in the mountains who was the first in his family to gain higher education. I asked why he had come to Bible college and if he was going to be a pastor when he finished and how he was going to find money to live after finishing his studies. He explained that he probably wouldn’t be a pastor and that he didn’t know how he was going to live but that he had come to study at Bible college because his people needed to be taught about what the Bible says. Simple.

Another afternoon, over a cup of sweet Nepali tea, I talked to S, a guy from a Hindu family who had become a Christian a few years ago after hearing that Jesus offers life forever. He now works as an evangelist in the mountains where he walks back and forth between the 2 churches that support him. The walk takes 3 hours each way and the terrain is so rough that as we spoke he was still nursing injuries from a recent fall. I asked him why he keeps going given it’s so tough. “Because Jesus gives life,” he replied.

Many of the men and women we met are zealous disciples of the Lord Jesus but as Mark and I chatted and opened the Bible with them throughout the week, we were both were struck by the incredible need they have for training and equipping in Bible handling. There is real sacrifice and service amongst these men and women but little to no training in how to read the Bible and teach it. I don’t mean that they need to be taught how to give a western-style 3-point sermon (though there’s still benefit in that), but that their ministries would be served by being taught Biblical convictions about how God speaks today in the Bible and by being equipped to read in a careful way that helps us pay attention to what God says and why. This is exactly the work this PT staff member is doing internationally.

The further we got through the week, Mark and I remarked more and more on how thankful we were for this ministry in Nepal and other ministries like it in various countries around the world. We were so impressed by the way that the tools for Bible handling that we are taught at Cornhill were also being taught here clearly and simply across language and cultural barriers, and also how all the time this teaching modelled these tools by transparently showing what the Bible says. Alongside the main body of the training students were taken through a Bible overview in four days and it was so exciting to hear students talking afterwards about how they had never seen the Bible as one big story before.

I’ve come back from these few days encouraged and challenged by the zeal for proclamation of the gospel that many of the attendees at the training modelled to us. I have lots to learn from their obedience to Jesus’ command to take up our cross and follow him.

I’ve also come back more convicted than when I left that what the world most needs is proclamation of the Word. The world needs workers who rightly handle the word of truth and who will entrust the gospel to faithful men, who will be able to teach others also.

We need to be praying for this work and those doing it. In our short time, we saw how this work is often frustrating, disappointing and difficult.

We also need to be praying for our brothers and sisters in who attended this training in Kathmandu. We need to pray that they hold firm to the convictions formed over those few days of training. We need to pray that they would believe it is worth doing the hard work of listening carefully to God’s voice in the Bible and teaching what he says. And we need to pray for fruit in their ministry that God’s church might be built up in Nepal to His praise and glory.

by Nathan Sherwood