A team from the Danish European Mission has been to Sri Lanka to visit some of the pastors who have received help for self-help. Here, Pastor 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 the Danish European Mission's improvers and donors.
We followed him to the first floor of his house, where his congregation gathers for worship every Sunday. Here we sat in a circle and listened to Jayaram tell us how he went from being a priest in a Hindu temple to serving God full-time as a Christian pastor.
Jayaram's sister became very ill and the first answer to prayer in the family's history
This is my story, says Jayaram: "My family comes 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 bathing with a friend who told me about Jesus. He was a pastor in the Christian church and he invited me to come to the service. We were friends, but I asked him not to talk to me about the Christian faith because the conversations often led to arguments - once I even hit him."
I said, 'If your God can heal my sister, I will come to faith.
"But at one point my older sister became very sick, so I decided to go to the pastor. 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 fell down and vomited blood. She was unconscious for 3 hours. We thought she had been taken over by an evil 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."
Jayaram attended several church meetings 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 away from me and they saw me as an enemy. I had nowhere to go but the church," - Jayaram [Quote page 15]
Getting paid with meals as a priest
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 call. "He called me to share the gospel full-time. 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 because of the free meals I got".
Jayaram says he spent the next 20 years pastoring a church that grew to 350 members. Then 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," says Jayaram.
When he built the church in 2022, he received help from Danish European Mission's intercessors and donors, facilitated by the Evangelical Alliance in Sri Lanka. "The help was a great blessing in my life, it helped me to cultivate my own land."
Jayaram gets up at six in the morning and works in the field until noon, while everyone else is also at work. He spends the rest of the day sharing the gospel with new people and serving his church, which is how his current church continues to grow.
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