A team from the Danish European Mission has been in Sri Lanka to visit some of the pastors who have received self-help assistance.
We were driving in beautiful and lush nature when we reached a small mountain village. Here the priest Jayaram met us with a gentle smile and a little wave of the hand telling us to follow him. He showed us the farm he started in 2022 thanks to contributions from Danish European Mission donors. We followed him up to the attic of his house, where his congregation gathered for worship every Sunday. Here we sat in a circle and listened to Jayaram tell us how he went from being a high priest in a Hindu temple to serving God full-time as a missionary.
The first answer to prayer in family history
This is my story, says Jayaram: "My family came from a high caste and until I was 24 years old, I was a priest in a nearby temple. In 1986, I heard the gospel for the first time. I was down by the water to bathe with a friend who told me about Jesus. He was a pastor in the Christian church and he invited me to come along. We were friends, but I asked him not to talk to me about it because the talk often led to arguments - once I even hit him.
But by this time my older sister was very ill, so I decided to go to the priest. I said: "If your God can heal my sister, I will come to faith." While the pastor and some elders from the church were praying for my sister, she collapsed and vomited blood. She was unconscious for 3 hours. We thought she had been taken over by a spirit, but after the three hours she came to and recovered. For the first time in my family's history, one of our prayers was answered - we had seen a miracle."
So he attended the youth service, as the pastor had encouraged him to do. He continues: "This was my first turning point. When I got home, I couldn't help but compare my experience in the church with all the years I had served in the temple. In all those years, I had never been cared for and treated with as much consideration as I was by priests in the church."
Chased out of the house by his own family
He looks around at us in the circle with a smile that confirms his joy at what followed him in the time after his sister was healed. He attended several church meetings, experienced visions and decided to leave his position as a Hindu priest. That choice had major consequences. He was chased out of the house by his own family. "Everything was taken away from me and they saw me as an enemy. I had nowhere else to go but the church," he says.
"Everything was taken from me and they saw me as an enemy. I had nowhere else to go but the church." - Jayaram
Over a period of three years, Jayaram accepted Jesus as Savior, was baptized, and began working full-time in the church for three meals a day. After three years in the church, Jayaram heard God's voice. "He called me to do full-time missions and share the gospel. It was only then that I fully gave my life to serving God," he says, adding with a twinkle in his eye that "the first few years I did it mostly for the free meals I got".
Following the call, Jayaram traveled to an area where not a single believer lived. He started by sitting next to a tea shop, talking to the locals and sharing the gospel with them. The first person he saw come to faith was a man who had been healed of a cyst in his stomach by a Christian pastor. The healing made him believe that Jesus existed. But it wasn't until Jayaram started visiting him and sharing the gospel that the man accepted Jesus as his savior. The man's family was the first of many. Over a period of 20 years, Jayaram's church grew to 350 members.
The church grew because of healings
He told us how the church was growing - an experience that seemed to resonate with all the Sri Lankan pastors our team met. What they found was that "many new people came to the church when they needed healing, and we saw God healing through prayer," says Jayaram. So God is calling many new believers in Sri Lanka by healing them from their sickness.
After 20 years, God called him to start a new church in a new area. He was again in a situation where he had nothing. He had to build everything from scratch. "The new church I started is the church we are sitting in now and we have grown to 70 members," Jayaram says.
When he built the church in 2022, he received help from Danish European Mission donors. "The help was a great blessing in my life, it helped me to cultivate my own land." When he showed us his fields, we asked him how he had time to farm and be a pastor at the same time. He said he gets up at 6 in the morning and works in the field until noon, while everyone else is also at work. The rest of the day is spent sharing the gospel with new people and serving his congregation, which is how his current church continues to grow.
