Hope for the hopeless and a father to the fatherless.

India (MNN) — Hope for the hopeless. A father to the fatherless. In India, one ministry is showing the love of Christ to society’s outcasts and God is doing great things. There are over 80-million orphans in India alone. Many of those orphans are children of the 60-million prostitutes throughout India.

Bishop MA Thomas, founder of Hopegivers International, says: “My friends, those who are listening, can you imagine these children and these ladies have no hope at all. These children have no hope that they can go to school, that they can learn some trade and they will have a hope one day. And they will be ending up their lives in the streets, either smugglers or robbers or victims of murder, sickness and die even in the early days, pickpocketers ending up in the prisons, they have no hope at all.

So Hopegivers decided to reach out in the love of Christ to those children of the brothels. When they opened a Hope Center for some children of prostitutes, God had more in mind, says Bishop Thomas: “Now recently in one village, we have already, children from here and there from the prostitutes, but we started one Hope Center and took in 36 children. By hearing that the city mayor came to us, requesting, please take at least 122 more children. So he has given us two acres of land, government land, and given the deed papers and everything.”

Bishop Thomas is overjoyed at the opportunity to introduce these children to the Heavenly Father: “But these children have no one to call as a father. He does not know what is the name of his father. Even his mother cannot even understand who is the father. And they have no father. God is the father of these children. I’m so happy to take them. And these are only two places we got. Now I believe that even within this year, we may get another several places where we can give Hope Centers.”

Bible college students and pastors are over the Hope Centers, and they give them regular education and also spiritual instruction, teaching them to sing and praise God and learn the Bible.

And now, Hopegivers is faced with an urgent need to build a building to house those 158 children. And they need the help of God’s people. Bishop Thomas expresses the vision of Hopegivers, saying, “My dream is this: to take one million children taught – either they are children of prostitutes, street children, children of lepers, unwanted children, and real orphans, orphaned and all these things, and make an army for God and for people and for themselves. That is our dream.”

And they are impacting the next generation for Christ. It’s a great opening for the Gospel, says President Dr Samuel Thomas, because “Nobody wants these children – who wants them? They’re the rejects, outcasts of the society. But that’s what Jesus of Nazareth is an expert of. He takes the outcast, He takes the fragments and makes them His very best.”

If you’d like to help support the work of Hopegivers, click on the highlighted link above for their contact information and to go to their website.