We call our newsletter The Global Villager because most people in developing nations actually live in villages. Over 600 million of India's one billion people live in villages. During the course of over 28 years of ministry in India, my love and respect for the villagers has greatly grown.

Many of the folks in these villages never travel more than a few miles from the place of their birth or their home. They may not know much about world history and politics, may never have heard of things like the Berlin Wall. They may not be able to read, but they have enormous intelligence, and an immense capacity to know God.

In fact, their spiritual hunger is immense, and I could easily say that India is the most religious nation on earth. Everywhere you go in India - in each room of a house, in shops, hospitals, offices -- there are symbols of religious devotion and visual representations of the millions of gods they worship.

Imagine how startled these people are when they realize that although their devotion to spiritual ideas is good, they have been channeled in the wrong direction, to false idols. As they see Jesus in our Life of Christ film, their minds and hearts are filled with new and glorious images of the one true God and His redeeming love for them.

These are folks who have been taught that they must go through endless cycles of suffering, death and reincarnation in order to attain perfection. When they realize that Jesus has already gone to the cross and suffered punishment and death in their place, they are astonished and joyful! There are no greater symbols in humanity and no greater motivating forces than Calvary's cross and the empty tomb.

They are also reminders of the price that our Savior paid to redeem humanity, to provide a way for lost souls like us to come to Him and escape eternal separation from God. But can you imagine what the value of each individual human soul must be? Christ Himself set aside His equality with God, took on the form of a man, and died a horrible death here on earth -just to save us?

One individual soul - whether yours, mine, or that of a villager in India half a world away - must have been worth more to Jesus than all the gold, silver, diamonds and precious stones in the world. It was worth more than all the wealth yet to be mined, more than all the temples and cathedrals ever built, more than the total wealth of all the nations and principalities of all time ... Jesus' sacrifice shows that one soul is worth more than all that.

Nothing else explains how Jesus and His disciples launched the mightiest spiritual revolution of all time. Nothing else explains the millions down through the centuries who have chosen to die as martyrs rather than deny Jesus. Nothing else explains the multiplied millions alive today who believe they are witness to the glory of this Crucified One.

And nothing else explains why after more than 50 generations since Jesus' earthly life, Dayspring is proclaiming His power to save in India, and why we have formed alliances with other ministries to fulfill the Great Commission. We have done it all for the value of each and every soul.

In the past 28 years, over 232,000 villages have been presented with our powerful motion picture. Thousands of churches have been planted.

That is the main thing. It is why Jesus came. It is all that matters. The greatest event in human history attests to that fact.


President and Founder