Taking the Good News to Pakistan

By: Brian Hampshire with Jeanette Windle

Brian and Sarah Hampshire have served as BCM missionaries since 1989 through Bible Clubs, teacher training, music ministry, and other avenues. When physical challenges in more recent years necessitated slowing down, Brian searched for other ways to reach out with the Good News. For more than fifteen years, he had developed numerous video and PowerPoint series, which he made available through a YouTube channel and Facebook. These included Attributes of God, Jesus’s “I Am” statements, the Armor of God, a basic Bible knowledge series, and sketch-board-style evangelistic presentations. He has also produced numerous sermon videos, Bible songs he’d written, and gospel “magic” presentations that illustrate principles of God’s Word.

These various online series have been used by God in several countries. Then just this past year as Brian was praying for more doors of ministry to open, he was contacted by Pastor Daud Younas of Lahore, a city of over eleven million residents in the Punjabi region of Pakistan. Less than two percent of Pakistan is Christian, including Protestant, Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Anglican. While they often face persecution, they also have more freedom to worship and preach God’s Word publicly than in many other Muslim nations.

Along with a small team he has trained, Pastor Daud ministers to the poorest of the poor in and around Lahore. At least forty percent of the population live in slums or low-income housing developments where running water, electricity, sanitation, medical care, and schooling are extremely limited. Over half of Pakistan’s population live on less than two dollars a day. A large percentage of Pakistani Christians are from the Dalit class, descendants of lower-caste Hindus who came to Christ during the British colonial era. Under Pakistan’s fundamentalist Muslim administration, discrimination in both employment and education has kept them largely deprived of economic opportunities and often doing jobs Muslims and higher-caste Hindus will not touch such as cleaning sewers, garbage removal, street sweeping, and other sanitation jobs.

Because these believers have no church building, Pastor Daud and his team hold worship services in the streets as well as in some homes. The team travels two hours each week to minister to one particular group of people identified as “people of the brickyard.” Many of these are employed at a nearby brickyard, and initially their employer permitted Pastor Daud to hold services there. But the brickyard owner is Muslim and soon forbade the group to meet on his property, so the services were moved into a back alley in a slum where many of these believers live.

Pastor Daud has a theological degree and a deep passion to reach his country for Christ. But finding good biblical teaching material hasn’t been easy, especially when a majority of the believers he is reaching are illiterate and those who aren’t have no Bibles in their main language of Urdu. So he was excited to discover Brian Hampshire’s YouTube videos and other online teaching material. Reaching out through Facebook and Skype, he asked Brian about using his PowerPoint presentations and translating the various series into Urdu.