We still carry our memories of tearful joy, from being in India with BCM during some of the vital pastor conferences held there in recent years. Those experiences have indelibly printed in our hearts the reality of the hardships, steadfastness and rewards those pastors find every day, as they risk everything to plant churches in unreached villages.

Joining together with them in those gatherings has been like…. reading something wonderful long ago in a book, and then finding yourself suddenly conveyed into those very passages.

BCM holds pastor seminars at various times throughout the year, and one main gathering of pastors at the Training Center in the Spring. The meetings vary; some are as small as a dozen or more, and some conferences draw several thousand disciples. The main annual conference each spring is held at a time when the pastors may have the option of bringing their families along, for the much-needed time of rest and rejuvination. At other times, BCM organizes the conferences in various regional locations, up to a thousand miles away from Rameswaram, to make it easier for the pastors to travel to one place, and also to have a greater impact on their local churches and trainees.

Sometimes, BCM has been able to coordinate these conferences with the arrival of various American church teams, which provides an enduring connection between churches on opposite sides of the world, as well as personal fellowship and bonding between the pastors, and those who are sponsoring them from the West.

The American churches involved with the BCM work have, time and again, witnessed a deep and enduring increase in zealous discipleship among those who return from such mission trips to India, and among the families and friends who are impacted by their personal testimonies, gleaned from the field.

The BCM disciples face much sacrifice in bringing together these conferences, from long days of wearying travel, and the considerable expense and labor of all the accommodations. They do all this because such gatherings of the saints are so important to the churches there. Nearly all the pastors and their families labor throughout the year in serious isolation, for the sake of planting churches in those remote regions where none have yet gone in Jesus’ Name. They endure heat, cold, deprivations, sickness, separation from loved ones, as well as the ever present threat of withering oppositions from enemies of the Gospel, who can and do employ stones and slander, bonds and blades, flames and curses, always trying to drive the lone missionary families into giving up.

The hope and remembrance they have of meeting together with many other dedicated Gospel workers, even if it is only for a few days each year, has proven to be an absolute necessity for the enduring health of the individuals, families and the ministry as a whole.