Reaching People in India with Our Daily Bread

What Our Daily Bread devotions are your favorite to read? You may have a specific author whose meditations you often find incredibly illuminating. Or maybe you look forward to seeing what reflections have been written for specific holidays.

In the United States, we have more than 20 authors who contribute to our beloved daily devotional. However, Our Daily Bread isn’t just read by Americans; our resources are distributed in at least 150 countries.

One of these countries is India. With a population of more than 1.4 billion people, India is the second most-populated nation on earth. However, only about 2.4% of people there identify as “Christian.”

“The west is very individualistic, but we in India are very communal, which means that your family’s religion is yours even if you don’t really believe it,” said Rebekah Vijayan, who serves as the Director of Content Development for Our Daily Bread Ministries (ODBM) India. “I’m the wife of a pastor and probably 80% of our congregation isn’t baptized. Not because they don’t believe in Jesus but because it would mean technically leaving their family’s religion, and family is the most important thing here.”

With Christianity being a minority religion in India, ODBM’s India team has long brainstormed ways to minister to their region. One of these ideas became a reality in 2019, when they began contextualizing the Our Daily Bread devotional for various Indian languages.

Although they don’t have any in-house translators, ODBM India collaborates with more than 60 translators, editors, proofreaders, and writers to curate language-specific content that more directly speaks to the Indian reader. They have a distribution in more than 9 languages, which includes English, Bengali, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, and Mizo.

“We take the Our Daily Bread devotionals from our US office and read through it to see if there are any parts that won’t resonate with our readers,” said Rebekah. “It might be as simple as changing one word or swapping out an entire devotion with one written by an Indian author. For example, if there’s a devotion written about the American Civil War, this may not resonate with our audience, so we might switch it with something that is familiar to an Indian reader.”

This feat doesn’t come without its challenges. In a country where Christians are the minority, spreading the Word of God can be difficult.

“My coworker lives in Northern India, and I asked her to print out a few pages of our literature once to read through, and she told me that she was uncomfortable to use a public service to print them out,” said Rebekah.

However, these obstacles don’t stop our India team from ministering to their nation. Through their homegrown Regional Edition called the “Indian Edition,” digital articles on topics specific to India, their youth initiative called Our Daily Masala, and their bimonthly kids magazine called the Kidlet, the India team uses every avenue possible to help people grow in their faith.

“My avowed hope and prayer is that the Word of God will become the center of every Indian Christian household,” said Rebekah. “For it is in these quiet moments with Him that lives are transformed and change agents are raised. Like ripples in a pond, when witnesses rise up, the impact spreads from the family into the community and before long into the whole nation as well.”

If you’d like to support us in making the Bible understandable and accessible to all in places like India, donate today .

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