Gospel Gap: Uttar Pradesh

Uttar Pradesh

Uttar Pradesh, the most populous state in India, sits on the northern border next to Nepal. It is home to well over 200 million people. If it were a country, it would be the fifth most population—larger than Brazil and nearly as populous as Pakistan. What happens here shapes not only India but the future of Christianity across South Asia. A majority-Christian UP would transform India’s religious landscape and send tremors through global geopolitics.

Uttar Pradesh is the ‘core’ of Hinduism. The Ganges river flows through it, to the holy city of Varanasi. The biggest Hindu pilgrimages in the world are here, and they are the largest spiritual festivals in the world. But it’s not a monolithic state. Varanasi hums with priests, pilgrims, boats on the Ganges, cows and fires. Lucknow has Mughal history and Muslim culture. Kanpur is industrial, while cities like Terai near Nepal are a frontier of migration. Every district has its own mix of languages, cultures, and markets.

But while Uttar Pradesh was once the ‘graveyard of missions,’ there is plenty of evidence of a turnaround. Major disciple-making movements have been spreading here—one, the very well known Bhojpuri movement, with tens of millions of believers, is probably the largest such movement in history. Articles and a book or two have been publicly written about it. And beyond DMMs, there are other fast-spreading works. So, is UP still a gap?

Even accounting for this field-reported progress, Christianity as a whole probably remains around the 8% threshold—rapidly growing, but a minority. This might make Uttar Pradesh ‘above’ the line many would consider to be ‘reached.’ But at the same time, ‘the future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed’—8% unevenly across 200 million people means there are many ‘gospel gaps’ within the state.

The state of Uttar Pradesh is divided into 75 districts. Many of these are home to millions of people (Sitapur district, for example, had ~5 million in 2011). Think of UP as two-thirds the population of the USA packed into one state. Each of its 75 districts averages 3+ million people—more than half the population of many U.S. states. Its tehsils average half a million people, about the size of a U.S. congressional district. And a great many of UP’s districts and subdistricts are <1% Christian (of any kind).

These districts and tehsils have a significant amount of variety. They have different languages and peoples. In one simple mapping exercise, we suggested workers consider five kinds of languages: (1) the official language, (2) the one spoken in the home, (3) the one spoken in the market and in business, (4) the one spoken in the schools, (5) the one used for worship. In a given district, those could be five different languages! Moreover, India still grapples with the caste issue, and has a variety of ethnic groups with strong barriers between them. So even within a district or a tehsil, moving across these barriers can require some effort.

One can see where so many ‘Gospel gaps’ might hide. In one district, there could be a significant movement amongst a particular language and a particular caste in a particular tehsil, while very little is happening amongst another caste, language, or an adjoining tehsil. It would therefore seem obvious that research which enables the ‘mapping’ of these gaps would also enable sending teams to them. And this would lead you to think a major research effort should be conducted. Now you’re thinking about money, and teams, and apps. But before we get too far down that road, there’s another challenge to be considered.

India as a whole, and Uttar Pradesh (and neighboring province Bihar, together) in particular, have been feeling the heat of rising persecution. Several states have passed anti-conversion laws. People have been charged and arrested under these laws. Some of the anti-conversion laws have been targeting Muslims (Rajasthan’s anti-‘love jihad’ laws are an example), but they have also been focused on Christians. Allegations of ‘forced conversions’ or ‘conversions purchased with money’ have led to jail time or worse, mobs. In fact, the social hostility and mob factor is even more significant. Throughout South Asia, allegations of forced conversion (India) or blasphemy (Pakistan, Bangladesh) can rile up mobs who can kill. Police either get there too late, or turn a blind eye.

In India in particular, the rising levels of Hindu nationalism and threat of persecution make it difficult for people to ask questions about church planting or the spread of Christianity. And gathering the data in a single app, in particular, can be fraught with a lot of questions and uncertainties. Centralized data efforts have value, and some Indian networks are courageously pursuing them. But in today’s climate, a decentralized, planter-level mapping approach may be safer and more scalable.

In this kind of climate, a better solution—regardless of whether apps are involved or not—is probably not a comprehensive, highly detailed, state-wide mapping initiative. Instead, it seems much more effective to train individual church planters to ‘map the gaps’ immediately around them. For their tehsil, and the immediately adjoining ones, what gaps are readily obvious? Blocks? Villages? Languages? Castes? Peoples?

Training people to see the gaps around them, mobilize workers into those gaps, and then train these new believers to see the gaps beyond them, multiplies gap filling rather than trying for a centralized gap map. We should pray for and support this work.