Pastor E.A. Abraham faithfully preaches the gospel in Bihar, India, "the graveyard of missionaries."
E.A. Abraham heard a knock on his door. It was evening in the village of Siwan in Bihar state of India in 1999.
August 4, 2009
By John M. Lindner, D.Miss.
Pastor E.A. Abraham faithfully preaches the gospel in Bihar, India, "the graveyard of missionaries."
E.A. Abraham heard a knock on his door. It was evening in the village of Siwan in Bihar state of India in 1999.
He opened the door and found six young people. They began to ask him questions.
“Come into the house and we can talk,” Abraham said.
They came in, but refused to sit down. They kept firing questions at him, as though not expecting an answer.
“Please sit down and we can talk,” Abraham said.
Eventually they all sat down around a table. Then one of them pulled out a gun, stuck his finger in the trigger hole, and started twirling it slowly around and around on the table.
Abraham looked at his wife, Sarah.
“Take the children into the back room and pray.”
Sarah left with Prince and Princy, their son and daughter, ages 6 and 2.
The man continued to slide the gun around the table with his finger in the trigger hole. Everyone was tense. Suddenly three of the young men got up and said, “We don’t want to do anything,” and went outside.
The man hesitated, then picked up the gun and pointed it at Abraham.
Abraham thought, My ministry is over.
“Why do you want to shoot me?” he asked.
The man said nothing. Suddenly he, too, got up and left, with the remaining two following him out the door. When he got outside, he slapped hard those who had first left. Then all six disappeared from sight.
Abraham hoped that that was the last he would see of them, but the next day there was a strange reversal of circumstances.
Someone provided these girls' school fees, books and uniforms so they could go to school.
Abraham was taking a taxi and passed the scene of an accident. A man evidently had been riding his motorcycle, had an accident, and broke his leg. The bone was sticking out.
Abraham looked closely. It was the man who had pointed the gun at him.
“Stop the taxi!” Abraham ordered.
“No,” said the driver. “You don’t get involved with accidents here. It can cause you big trouble.”
“I insist. Stop the taxi. This man is my friend.”
The taxi stopped. Abraham got out and went over to the man. He helped him into the taxi and took him to the hospital, paying double fare for the privilege. As soon as they got out, the taxi driver sped away.
Abraham helped the injured man into the hospital. Since his wife worked there, all the nurses and doctors knew him and rushed immediately to the aid of his “friend.” Because of their excellent care, the man recovered.
Shortly the man’s brother showed up. “Why did you do this?” he asked. “I know my brother wanted to shoot you yesterday.”
“Jesus has showed us we should be kind to all men,” Abraham answered, “even to our enemies.”
The hoodlums who wanted to shoot him have not become believers, at least not yet, but they all respect Pastor Abraham.
E. A. Abraham was born in a Roman Catholic family near the eastern mountains of Kerala in 1961. Because they were poor, Abraham only went as far as 10th grade in school. This depressed him so much as a teenager he decided to commit suicide.
Picking up a Bible to get the paper under it to write a suicide note he heard a voice say, “Open it and read.” He opened the Bible and it fell open to Ecclesiastes 7:16-18, which said in part:
“…Why destroy yourself?
…Why die before your time?
…The man who fears God will avoid all extremes.”
He immediately responded, “Lord, if you love me, take care of my life.”
That was the beginning of a reluctant discipleship.
Pastor Abraham prays with those who came forward at one of his meetings.
First, Abraham got a job in the post office. After several months, the Lord spoke to him again. “I saved you, not to work in the post office, but to go to the place where people have never heard My name.”
He put off responding for three years. After the first year he became gravely sick with asthma. Once two friends carried him to the hospital, where the doctor gave him heavy injections of antibiotics usually reserved only for old people.
“Lord, speak to me,” he prayed.
And He did—this time from Isaiah 48:17-18:
“I am the Lord your God,
who teaches you what is best for you,
who directs you in the way you should go.
“If only you had paid attention to my commands,
your peace would have been like a river,
your righteousness like the waves of the sea.”
He immediately went to his pastor, who advised him to work with Operation Mobilization. After a year he joined the Bible institute of Friends Missionary Prayer Band.
One day someone told him about the spiritual barrenness of Bihar State, frequently called “the graveyard of missionaries.” He cringed when he felt God tell him, “Go there!” But he yielded to God’s will and went to Siwan in 1984.
His first attempts at evangelism were refuted or ignored. No one wanted to listen to him.
One day, being very thirsty, he knocked on the door of a house. When the man came to the door, Abraham asked, “Please, could you give me a drink of water?”
“What caste are you?” the man demanded.
“I am a Christian,” Abraham answered.
2009 graduates of the Native Missionary Training School.
The man was enraged. “What gave you the courage to touch my door?” he answered hotly. Hindus place Christians in the same category as untouchables.
“Well, am I not a human being?” Abraham responded.
With that the man jumped over the threshold toward him, and Abraham fled for his life.
He even fled Bihar, seeking refuge in Uttar Pradesh. A few months later the Lord spoke to him, again. “You are doing well, but you are not in the right place.”
“Lord, show me how,” Abraham responded.
The Lord revealed to him he should start a school, and gave him opportunity to work as an apprentice with another man starting a school in Bihar. After a year, Abraham thought he was ready—except for one thing.
“Lord, I’m a bachelor,” he cried out. “To begin a ministry like this I need to be married. So help me find a wife.”
His mentor suggested a young woman named Sarah, who worked as a nurse in the local hospital. But there were some tall obstacles to overcome.
Sarah was Presbyterian. He was Pentecostal—of Roman Catholic origin—and penniless. How could their parents ever agree?
Yet somehow his mentor got in touch with both sets of parents, who met together and agreed on the marriage—without ever seeing the partner their son or daughter would marry. Abraham didn’t know anything about their meeting. He just got a telegram that said, “Your marriage is fixed for October 13. Come to Kerala and get married.”
After their marriage Abraham and Sarah returned to Siwan. Sarah found a job in the local hospital and he started a school—but only one student showed up.
“Lord, if you don’t give me at least 100 children, how can I manage?” Abraham cried out to the Lord. Within a month he had 100.
But he still could not pay all the bills. He needed 40 more children. A month later he had another 49.
Converts took a bit longer. In fact, it was ten years before he realized his first convert.
The congregation in Siwan today.
In 1994 he prayed for a man who had leprosy. The man was healed, and he and two of his family members accepted Christ. Abraham and Sarah began holding Bible studies in the man’s home, and in October they began their first open worship services.
But all did not go smoothly. One day a gang of thugs stopped him, his wife and an associate at the railroad tracks on the way home from a Bible study and ordered him at knifepoint to stop his preaching.
Another time a mob came to lynch him, but he providentially left the office ten minutes early and went home by an alternate route.
One time when he was in the U.S. he received an e-mail saying, “We are going to kidnap and rape your daughter [then 13]. You will never see her again.” Abraham cut his U.S. visit short, rushed home, and put both his children in boarding schools, even though they could have obtained “free” education in his own school.
In 2007 his Jeep was stolen. It still has not been replaced.
The high school staff stand outside the ECFC high school building in Siwan.
He attended Billy Graham’s conference on evangelism in Amsterdam in 2000 and caught a whole new vision for his ministry. He came away from that meeting trusting God to have 300 house churches by 2005, and have 1,000 house churches and 100 churches with buildings by 2010.
Operating under the banner of Emmanuel Christian Fellowship Center, he moved his headquarters to Patna, Bihar’s capital, in 2007. He now has 450 house churches with 15 to 60 people in each, and two churches with buildings accommodating 150 to 200 people each, with two more church buildings expected to be completed this year.
To care for his growing number of churches, he began Native Missionary Training Center in 1996 with two students. Twenty students are currently in training, and 335 have completed the course. He also operates seven sewing training centers for women, a printing press, and two Christian bookstores.
Dr. John Lindner with Pastor E.A. Abraham. 
Can you match this perseverance, productive labor and fruit with any Western agency or missionary? There might be a few, but the vast majority of effective church-planting and evangelistic work today is being done by missionaries who don’t leave the borders of their own countries to do God’s work. They are effective because they speak the local language and know or adapt readily to the local culture of the people group they are attempting to reach. And they won’t be branded a foreigner.
Get behind a native mission group such as ECFC of India, if you are not already involved. Emmanuel Christian Fellowship Center is assisted by Christian Aid of Charlottesville, Va., whom I thank for offering me the opportunity to interview Pastor Abraham for this amazing story. Photos above the line are from the ECFC website.