Dear Saints,
We are thankful to the Lord for the past 25 years through which He led us without fail and has blessed the ministry of Operation Barnabas to be a blessing to thousands of our commended workers and assemblies. All glory to Him.
We would like to acknowledge the tremendous amount of help and prayer support we have received from many of you, without which we would not have reached here.
As we celebrate 25 years of God’s faithfulness, my memories go back to the humble beginnings of a successful story. It was while my wife and I were waiting for a flight back to our home in Regina, Canada after a successful job interview that the call of the Lord came to us through Jeremiah 42: 15-16. It did not surprise us as it was the “Rhema” that we were seeking and praying for the past seven years. So right there we prayed and committed our lives to serve Him in India. But the great dilemma was: how can a man with “stammering tongue and few words” be of any use to God in India? So we prayed about the Lord’s mind and He revealed to us the ministry that He wants us to shoulder. It took almost a year of planning, seeking and knowing His mind before we finally arrived in India during March 1994.
The vision God gave me was to be a source of encouragement to God’s servants in India. Prayerfully we named our ministry “Operation Barnabas” and started visiting the commended workers in India. Our first visit was to the North East. Our medium of communication was the magazine “Insight India” through which we introduced lesser-known commended workers to the general body of believers. The first issue of Insight India came out in October 1994. Another giant step in introducing the workers was the “Prayer Handbook” published in 2002.
We did not want to restrict our ministry and service to the Lord’s servants to any one particular area and sought other areas of ministry, but were very reluctant in launching into something in a hurry. As we saw the Lord is leading us into diversified areas, we decided to register the organization. Thus “Operation Barabbas” became a registered religious charitable trust in 1996 with four trustees. The original trustees were Bro. V. S. Mathews, A. D Rethnakara, Roy T. Daniel and Bizy Elan Daniel. After dropping one of the original members, Bizy Elan Daniel in 2017, we increased the numbers of trustees to seven in 2017 and later to nine in 2019.
As the Lord pleased to give us more responsibilities, some institutions outside India approached us and asked to facilitate distribution of funds to the workers in India. This led us to seek a FCRA permit which was granted in 2002. Later on, this became an important aspect of our ministry and still continues to be. This was not something we desired, or sought after but it came to us as an added responsibility by the commission of the Lord. Due to several changes in government regulations our finance distribution had to be streamlined into specific need-oriented one. This was a major change and many of the donors still find difficult to understand and come to terms with.
