World Help launches an ambitious strategy for India.

India (MNN)–More than one billion Indian people are lost in spiritual darkness and idol worship and an estimated three billion people throughout the entire world are waiting to hear the Gospel.

World Help believes church-planting movements are the key to evangelizing the unreached peoples of the world. The agency envisions an ambitious goal of 100,000 organized churches and one million house churches where no churches currently exist in the next seven years.

World Help’s Eric Vess just returned from India’s Uttar Pradesh State, where he met with church leaders who were strategizing the ‘how’ of such an ambitious vision. “How can you accomplish our stated goal of planting 100-thousand churches–(that’s one for every village) in the state of Uttar Pradesh? And the answer to that is: village by village with church planting teams that have a very Indian strategy for reaching each of these villages.”

Vess says their mission strategy is simple: they ask for permission and invite friends and family to hear their message. “The goal of that is that whole extended families and whole villages will become part of a church planting movement , so that it’s not a single person here, a single person there being isolated and drawn out of their society, but rather, whole families and villages are coming to Christ.”

Teams are working on a variety of programs and projects including: effective evangelism, discipleship, church-planting, humanitarian aid, child sponsorship, leadership training and literature distribution.