Celebrating Christian Worship with Lament in Nepal
Nepali Reformed Churches pastor Arbin Pokharel often describes worship as helping worshipers reenact their identity as God’s people. Doing so honestly means including hospitality, healing, prayer, celebration, and lament.
The land-locked country of Nepal is bordered on three sides by India and shares its northern border with China in a line that runs through Mount Everest. The majority-Hindu country is also the birthplace of the Buddha. Yet Hinduism, Buddhism, and animism have coexisted peacefully for more than two thousand years there. In 1952, the first Protestant church was founded in Nepal with twenty-five members. Since then, Christianity has become one of Nepal’s fastest-growing religions, though it still accounts for only slightly more than 3.5 percent of the population.
Arbin Pokharel was born Hindu, grew up in a Christian orphanage, studied in the United States, taught in a seminary in India, and with his wife, Bimala Shrestha Pokharel, founded Cross-Way Church in Kathmandu. He often shares a story that illustrates how Cross-Way, the mother church of the fledgling Nepali Reformed Churches, continues to grow.
A bank employee who worked near Higher Ground Nepal (HGN) asked whether his wife could get a job at HGN, the café, bakery, and crafts business that Bimala founded. “The wife felt oppressed by the complexity of pressures from her family, village, and other issues,” Arbin Pokharel said. “Villagers told her that the gods were angry with her for leaving her village and for who she married. Her husband had been in training to become a lama, a Buddhist priest, but he didn’t continue that track.”
The woman once had an attack of evil spirits while working at HGN. People there began praying for her healing and invited her to church. She went through a six-month process of preparing for baptism.
“A week before her baptism,” Pokharel recalls, “she stood up at church to give her testimony but suddenly started crying and went into convulsions. She became a different person, very forceful, talking in a voice that wasn’t hers. After she vented for about fifteen minutes, Bimala and other women led her to an office and prayed for her for six hours.
“At her baptism, she was cool and calm and said she’d been completely delivered. She said God told her, ‘Now you have seen and joined my kingdom.’ It took her husband about a year to believe. They led twenty-two neighbors to Christ and helped establish churches in a few villages. That’s actually a pretty common story here.”
This story has all the elements that Cross-Way focuses on to live out a gospel vision for the body of Christ: hospitality, healing, prayer, and celebrative worship that includes lament.
Hospitality
Kathmandu, Nepal’s capital and its largest city, attracts “a big mix of people,” Pokharel says. “Nepal has more than 120 languages and people. Nepal’s caste system has been outlawed for several decades, but social structures haven’t changed. People come to Kathmandu for jobs and opportunities to go abroad to study or work.
“Cross-Way Church attracts people from all walks of life, all with different cultures, languages, and worldviews. It’s a big challenge to address while we try to shape a worldview according to the paradigm of God’s kingdom. One way we do that is to practice hospitality alongside people in the margins,” Pokharel explains.
Cross-Way’s strong international presence includes missionaries in Kathmandu for language learning; international staff in schools, hospitals, and development organizations; and Nepalis who became Christian abroad and returned home. Cross-Way’s four pastors preach in Nepali but include enough English on screen for expats to follow along.
Although most Nepalis speak Nepali as their first or second language, many are subliterate. As an act of hospitality, Cross-Way offers adult literacy classes. Often as many as half of the students become Christians.
“Most people at Cross-Way and Nepali Reformed Churches (NRC) congregations are recent converts,” Pokharel says. “They come to find refuge and friends, and they appreciate our biblical teaching. They stay for love, community, care, prayer, and advice. This community is called to be hospitable to everyone within its reach for the sake of the gospel."
Healing
Pokharel explains that healing has been an essential aspect of Cross-Way’s ministry—one that attracts Nepalis to Christian faith and leaders to ministry. Nepal has many Assemblies of God, charismatic, independent, and Pentecostal churches with healing ministries, but healing is important in the NRC too.
“Nepal is full of trauma and injustice from being a poor country,” Pokharel says. “In villages, people who’ve gone to shamans or witch doctors for physical healing or who have no money to continue at hospital will go to church as a last resort. Everyone wants to send a kid to study in Kathmandu or abroad, so the kid can send money back to the family. This can create a sense of family alienation or fracture for the person designated to succeed. People have doubts and questions about life, family, and future stability. It’s not uncommon for a wife to leave her village so her children can get a better education in Kathmandu. Meanwhile the husband is working in an airport in Qatar or Dubai. Women living on their own are so vulnerable.
“We preach that God can heal, and we pray for healing, though it’s not a main feature of worship as in some Nepali churches. Still, people are delivered from family conflict or evil spirits. Some even scream during this deliverance. Even if someone is not immediately healed in the way they ask, they may experience healing and peace in other ways,” Pokharel says.
In rural animistic villages, people often seek deliverance from evil spirits. Children and tweens stay in Saturday worship long enough to hear testimonies of healing before going to their own worship space if they have separate services.
A Cross-Way member rented a flat in his house to a family. While the landlord was talking with the tenant family, the father had a ministroke that paralyzed half his body. The landlord shared the gospel and explained that God can heal. Besides receiving therapy, the father welcomes church members who come twice a month to pray for him. “I’ve seen him cry when we pray for him,” Pokharel says. “I don’t know whether he will be physically healed, or if the family will join (the church). That’s up to God. But they are experiencing how God’s gifts of healing make the body of Christ dynamic.”
In 2023, Cross-Way invited people from the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship (CICW) to present at its interactive annual conference, which draws around three hundred people from around Nepal. Pokharel especially appreciated Charlotte vanOyen-Witvliet’s presentation on psychologically-attuned worship. An expert in trauma and forgiveness, she noted that people often request prayers for healing while experiencing physical, emotional, spiritual, or sexual abuse.
To pastors asked to mediate in abuse situations, vanOyen-Witvliet advised: “Don’t turn a silent ear or a blind eye or do nothing because you don’t know what to do. For the sake of the victim and the abuser, your first conversation should be with the victim. Ask, ‘What’s going on? Are you safe for now and in the future?’ Offer to help them access resources. Remember that personalities and lives vary.”
She cautioned against rushing into asking the victim to forgive the abuser because forced forgiveness can help sustain abuse and injustice. “Abusers sometimes take forgiveness as permission to keep abusing. Addressing harms and safety before forgiveness is for the sake of the victim, the community, and the person who needs to be held accountable. What a gift it is to be shaped by the beautiful gifts of relationships and networks that we see among Cross-Way and its daughter churches,” she said. After her presentation, attendees stayed for three hours to continue the conversation about trauma and healing.
Prayer
In the 1700s, Catholic missionaries were allowed to build two churches in the Kathmandu Valley, but they were expelled in 1769 when Prithvi Narayan Shah unified Nepal and declared it a Hindu kingdom. The priests and seventy baptized Christians were escorted across the border to India, where there are now many Nepali churches. For nearly two hundred years, no foreigners or Christian missionaries were allowed into Nepal. By 1914, Rev. Ganga Prasad Pradhan, a Nepali educated in India, had translated the entire Bible into Nepali. And Nepali Christians in India kept praying for Nepal.
In 1951, Nepal’s government began allowing international Christians and organizations in to build hospitals, establish schools, and share their professional expertise in industrial and rural development. They couldn’t proselytize, but they could pray and depend on God for the results.
The ongoing fruits of prayer include missionaries trusting Nepalis to lead new churches on their own and a prayerful Cross-Way offering a well of resources from which other NRC congregations can draw.
“The Nepali Reformed Church is a fervently praying church with solid biblical teaching,” seminary professor Anne Zaki said. “Many of its pastors and leaders are first- or second-generation Christians. Arbin Pokharel isn’t even age 50 yet, but he is among the ‘senior Christians’ there. They all depend on God through prayer.” Zaki teaches in Cairo, Egypt, and presented on preaching at Cross-Way’s annual conference. She also preached twice at a Nepali church and seminary.
“Nepali culture is very expressive,” Pokharel said “When we worship, we all pray our individual prayers out loud and together at the same time. During our two-hour Saturday services, we also allow time for people to put written prayer requests in a bronze bowl. The whole congregation divides into groups of three to five people to pray.”
After the Saturday service, up to fifteen people stay on to pray some more. The Wednesday afternoon prayer service draws between more than a dozen people.
Besides its four pastors, Cross-Way has twenty-five small group leaders Pokharel meets with monthly for coaching and Bible teaching. The congregation began in 2005 and began planting other churches in 2007. There are now more than forty NRCs in Nepal’s seventy-seven districts. Each small group is assigned a church plant to visit, connect with, and pray for. The NRC’s vision is to plant a church in every district.
Celebration and lament
Pokharel describes two characteristics of the church as the body of Christ: Worshipers come to God as people to reenact their identity, and they go out to bring Jesus into every sector of life.
“We bring our whole self to worship,” he says. “Our emotions matter, so we don’t feel guilty or ashamed for what we bring to worship. God honors our honesty more than a polished self that we might rather present. Nepal has an oral culture, so we also need to be careful that hearing someone else’s emotions doesn’t lead to gossip.”
In a COVID-era online conversation with Maria Eugenia Cornou, CICW associate director and program manager, Pokharel said, “We as the church are called to be the genuine presence of Christ in people's situations, so let us lament, but with the hope of Christ in us. And perhaps that way we can celebrate, because our joy, our hope, is founded on something different than what the world gives us.”
Saturday services open with times of prayer, song, and scripture reading. Worship leaders include lament verses from different parts of the Bible and project songs onto a screen. “Two of our worship leaders also use this time to offer long times of silence,” Pokharel says. “There is a serious deficit of active listening in the culture, and more so in the practices of silence and solitude. Although there is vibrant growth in the evangelical church, there can be a lack of corresponding depth in spiritual disciplines. We need that time of silence to listen for God’s response to our prayers.”
Cross-Way is blessed with several worship teams, bands, and choirs, and for many years it had composer and worship leader Adrian Dewan on staff. Dewan is an ethnic Nepali from the Indian state of Darjeeling. “His music is very well-known across Nepal and its diaspora,” Pokharel says. “We offered Adrian a chance to study for a year in seminary in exchange for him to write worship songs that we’d publish. We invited his band here to do a benefit concert at Cross-Way, and we’ve done three albums with Adrian.”
After Nepal’s 2015 earthquake, Dewan wrote “Tyagne Cchaina Parmeshwarle,” a song that follows the model of biblical psalms of lament. The English meaning includes these phrases: “O Lord! Have you forgotten our people? Have you forgotten us? . . O Lord! With healing on your wings, you will come to us. O Lord! In your hands, our nation will become new and beautiful again.”
Cornou noted after attending the 2023 conference that including lament in liturgy is “very pastoral. And yet we also saw so much joy in worship. Nepalis are very good dancers. Church members dance with people in villages as a part of outreach and interaction.”
LEARN MORE
According to Nepal's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the nation has 123 languages and caste/ethnic groups living in places ranging from subtropical rainforests to snow-capped mountains and alpine deserts. Nepal is named for Ne, a prehistoric Hindu sage. Hinduism is the world’s third largest religion, and Nepal has the world’s highest percentage of Hindus (variously reported between 80 and 82 percent) followed by Buddhism at about 8 percent and Islam at about 4 to 5 percent. The Buddha was born in southern Nepal in 623 B.C., just a few years after the prophet Jeremiah began preaching.
According to government statistics, fewer than 2 percent of Nepalis are Christians, though Pokharel believes it’s slightly more than 3.5 percent. Most sources agree that the number of churches and Christians has grown rapidly in the last quarter-century.
Nepal’s monarchy was abolished in 2008, and the country was declared a secular democracy. Christians are free to practice their religion but not to proselytize. Nevertheless, people who are not Hindu or who are lower caste continue to report restrictions on religious freedom.
Learn more about the history of Christianity in Nepal through a 2008 Yale University exhibit and Arbin Pokharel’s 2020 Fuller Theological Seminary DMin thesis, “A Strategy for Equipping Pastoral Leaders of Nepali Reformed Churches.” In Kathmandu, Nepal, Reformed & Presbyterian Seminary trains Christians for ministry.
In this Words of Hope video (03:35), leaders in the Nepali Reformed churches explain how broadcast media help extend the gospel message and Reformed worldview to unreached people and train new church leaders.
Listen to or read some of Charlotte vanOyen-Witvliet’s research on forgiveness. Listen to more of Adrian Dewan’s songs on Paul Neeley’s Global Christian Worship blog and on this Adrian Dewan playlist on YouTube.