The president of the Seventh-day Adventist Church in Nepal teamed up with the president of the Iowa-Missouri Conference in the United States for a 12-day trip to eastern Nepal to share Jesus and much-needed supplies with villagers still struggling after a massive earthquake rocked the country 10 months ago.
The evangelism meetings in the mountainous Udaipur region marked the culmination of months of Bible studies by local Bible workers and resulted in 59 baptisms, a significant increase for a remote area with about 500 members worshipping in nine Adventist churches.
“Jesus is coming soon, but these people do not want to go to heaven alone. They want to take their relatives and neighbors with them,” said Bhaju Ram Shrestha, a local church leader who accompanied Nepal Section president Umesh Pokharel; Iowa-Missouri Conference president Dean Coridan; and A.M. Puri, chaplain of the Adventist-operated Scheer Memorial Hospital, on the March 1-12 trip.
Nepal is still recovering after a 7.8-magnitude quake killed more than 8,500 people and left hundreds of thousands of others homeless on April 25, 2015. The Seventh-day Adventist Church and ADRA have been at the forefront of humanitarian aid efforts, and Pokharel personally led a relief team to a number of rural villages after the quake.
