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KATMANDU — When Chuda Bastakoti became a Christian 12 years ago, the people in his remote village used to taunt him, shouting “Christian” as an insult.
“But that has changed now. People do not look at me any longer with disdain when I go home,” said Bastakoti from the Gorkha district of southwestern Nepal, who works as a high school teacher in Katmandu. The 32-year-old teacher spoke to Ecumenical News International after a church service at a flat in Katmandu.
He said he married Kopila, a Hindu woman, four years ago after informing her family that he was a Christian convert. “They had no problem,” said Bastakoti. Within a year of their marriage, Kopila also became a Christian. In fact, Bastakoti said, entire villages especially in remote areas like his have embraced Christianity.
Pastor Simon Gurung, president of the Valley Christian Council, told ENI, “The number of Christians here is increasing steadily.” Gurung heads the Immanuel Baptist church in the Katmandu Valley and said the number of conversions started rising rapidly after Nepal adopted a new constitution in 1990 which introduced multi-party democracy.
The new constitution reiterated an earlier ban on conversions, vigorously enforced by royal officials until 1990.
But, Gurung noted that “police and other officials were not keen on enforcing this ban” after the introduction of democracy with the 1990 constitution despite Nepal retaining its identity as a Hindu kingdom. “I don’t think there were 50,000 Christians before 1990,” said Gurung who had twice been arrested for “preaching” the gospel and put behind bars for months until the multi-party system was ushered in.
Nepal is now thought to have more than 7,000,000 Christians scattered in 1,500 independent church congregations among its population of 28 million people.
The Rev. Anthony Sharma, head of the Roman Catholic Church in Nepal since 1984, also had to spend Easter day in 1986 in a police station for preaching to non-Christians who were relatives of some of the faithful attending the service.
“People are looking for change as they are fed up with the feudal system in the villages here,” said Roman Catholic priest the Rev. Pius Perumana who founded St Joseph’s school in the mountainous Gorkha region 140 kilometers southwest of Katmandu. He told ENI that more than half of the 20,000 population of the villages around the Catholic school are Christians.
Editor’s note: Two Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) missionaries — Ellen Collins and Beverly E. Booth — serve with the ecumenical United Mission to Nepal (UMN). To learn more about their work and to read their correspondence, visit the Mission Connections Web site. — Jerry L. Van Marter
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