The fire in Nagpur

When the invitation came from Reverends Sanjay and Kathy Thorat, national directors of Rhema India in Nagpur, I did not hesitate, I didn’t analyze or negotiate. I prayed!! Because when a divine door opens, your spirit knows it. They had asked me to go and teach, “Supportive Ministry, Leadership, and Ministerial Ethics”, at the Rhema Bible Training Center Ngapur campus in India. With the full blessing of our Rhema national directors, Pastors Walker and Haley Schurz, my husband and I booked our tickets and set out to India. My heart was burning with a singular desire to serve and be a blessing.

Nagpur, India.

Even the name felt sacred, mysterious, weighty, unfamiliar. I didn’t know what lay ahead. I only knew God was sending us. After hours of travel, planes, airports, time zones, sleepless anticipation, we arrived. It was the rainy season, and the first thing that struck us was how green everything was. The land was bursting with life. But beneath the canopy of vibrant earth, I sensed a spiritual drought. A dryness in the atmosphere that no monsoon could touch.

The very next morning, I joined the students on campus for their church service. That is when everything changed. I watched as young men and women, many of whom had come out of generations of idol worship, lifted their hands in reckless abandon. Their worship wasn’t rehearsed; it wasn’t religious formality. It was a cry from the depths of hearts. It pierced the heavens and certainly pierced us.

You must understand what this means in the Indian context. Christianity here is not a cultural given. It is not common or convenient. It is a risk. A declaration. A sacrifice. In a nation where most bow to idols of stone, wood, and creation itself, to stand and say “I follow Jesus” is to walk into fire and do it willingly.

Back home in Zambia, many of us met Jesus before we could even spell His name. I grew up with children’s church songs, lunchtime prayers, and Bibles in every room. But in India, faith is not inherited; it is chosen. And because it is chosen, it is alive. It is holy fire.

When I stood to teach, yes, there was a language barrier. But no barrier could stop the hunger in that room. With the help of an interpreter, I navigated deep truths from God’s Word. And every time a new revelation landed, you could see it in their eyes, something ignited. When we prayed, we prayed with passion. When we worshipped, we worshipped with tears. This wasn’t a classroom; this was an altar.

And somewhere in the middle of it all, God did a work in us. We found ourselves weeping, not just for the students in front of us but for the nation they represented. Our hearts broken with one overwhelming thought:

If only they knew.
If only the people in these cities and villages knew how deeply, how endlessly, how unfailingly God loves them.
That they don’t have to live under the weight of ancestral pain. That Jesus already carried it to the cross and paid it all.

What began as a teaching assignment became a divine encounter, a personal and collective awakening. I came face to face with the reality that what we carry as Rhema alumni is not for comfort; it is for commission. We have been entrusted with truth. But truth that is hoarded becomes religion. Truth that is given away becomes revival.

So I speak now to every alumnus reading this:
Remember your calling.
Remember the vow you made on your graduation day, to be His hands and feet, His voice everytime you speak, To run to the ones in need in his name !! To go wherever He sends?

This is not the time to grow passive or distracted. This is the hour to rise. Zambia needs us. India needs us. The world is waiting.

And if we wonder whether one life, one step of obedience, one “yes” to God can make a difference, look at the story of Reverend N.Y. Thorat. After more than 30 years in the Baptist church, He and his wife followed the Lord’s leading to attend Rhema Bible Training Center in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma. In 1991, they graduated. In 1992, they started teaching in Nagpur in the home of a widow, with nine people present. Yes, 9!

From that humble beginning, the Great Commission Bible Training Center was born. Their first class had 40 students. Today, it is Rhema Bible Training Center Nagpur, and over the years they have graduated over 3,800 men and women, now serving across all 29 Indian states, and in Nepal, Bhutan, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Nigeria, the USA, and the UK.

In 1999, Rhema Nagpur became an internationally affiliated campus of Rhema USA. The vision has not changed: Win souls. Teach the Word. Equip believers. Send them out.

And allow me to tell you this: the graduates I met are not ordinary. They are revivalists. They have renounced the gods of their ancestors. They have counted the cost. And they have said yes to Jesus, fully, fiercely, and forever. They are ready to lay down their lives for the Gospel.

But they can not do it alone.
They need our prayers.
They need our encouragement.
They need our partnership.

This is why RAAZ exists, not for mere reunions or memories, but to become a living, breathing, global force of alumni, moving in sync with the wind of the Holy Spirit. Yes, we are still growing. But the call on our lives is no less real.

I left India with my heart marked, stired up, wrecked, and awakened. I pray that the same fire stirs in you even now.

Let us not be satisfied to know Jesus and keep Him to ourselves. Let us arise together, arm in arm, nation by nation. From the streets of Lusaka to the villages of the Northern Province, to the slums and skyscrapers of Mumbai, to the farthest corners of this earth, marching for Jesus Christ.

The Spirit of God is moving.
The harvest is ready.
The question is, will we move with Him? Will you be the Feet that Go? Go means go!!

¹⁸And Jesus came and spoke to them, saying, “All authority has been given to Me in heaven and on earth. ¹⁹Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, ²⁰teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” Amen.

— Matthew 28:18-20