Entire Churches May Be Gone After Catastrophic Flooding in Nepal
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Invest in NepalWhen Noah Lhomi first glanced at texts from friends telling him about flooding in Nepal, he wasn’t alarmed: “I said, ‘Yeah, we always get some sort of a flood in monsoon season.”
But as he saw the images of villages wiped out and people swept away, he realized: “No, this is not a normal flood.”
A week after a breakaway glacier caused catastrophic flooding on the border of Nepal and China, rescue workers are still looking for survivors in what some are calling “a Himalayan tsunami.”
By Sept. 1, more than a thousand were confirmed dead and at least 4,400 missing. First responders were burying some of the bodies in mass graves, and rescuers were searching for more than 900 workers trapped in hydropower tunnels.
Noah says it’s hard to grasp the depth of the tragedy when you hear the raw numbers: “But these aren’t just numbers. They’re people, families.”
And some of them are believers.
In the flood’s aftermath, Noah started hearing reports: In the majority Hindu nation, with a small number of Christians, whole churches had been wiped out.
WHEN 30 PEOPLE MISSING MIGHT MEAN EVERYONE
Noah lives in the U.S., but grew up in the Chepuwa village of northeastern Nepal, among the Lhomi people. (Radical featured Noah’s story in Hard to Reach: Nepal earlier this year.)
Soon after the flooding, Noah started hearing from Lhomi church leaders at Ghangri Church based in Kathmandu. They were safe there (and in the church in Chepuwa), but they said that in the flooded regions: “This is really bad.”
Noah himself heard from five close friends he grew up with who had lost multiple loved ones in the deluge.
He plugged into a wider network of believers in Nepal, and started hearing about their losses: 50 people missing in one church; 30 missing in another; 17 believers missing from another congregation; 4 from another.
The organization International Christian Concern reported church buildings swept away and numerous church members missing, including pastors. Those losses will likely grow as rescuers gain more access to communities still blocked by debris.
Nepali Christian Churches UK told Premiere Christian News many believers were missing or dead. In one church, they said it appears the pastor may be the only person who survived.
Noah points out that churches in Nepal are usually very small in number: “When you’re saying 30 people are missing, that could be the whole church completely wiped out.”
Nepal already had a small number of churches in the majority Hindu nation. But many of the churches that do exist are located in the flood zone. In the hard to reach country, many parts of this particular region had been reached by the gospel.
“It’s a famous trekking route, very easily accessible from Kathmandu, very well-traveled path for mission trips and short-term missions,” Noah says. “So, easy access, more reach, more believers as well.”
Now, he hopes believers will find ways to rally around local churches in need of practical help and gospel hope. And he hopes that people outside of Nepal won’t quickly forget about the suffering affecting so many communities.
In many ways, the disaster is just beginning.
After talking with the Lhomi church leaders who had arrived at the disaster scene, Noah said: “When you see it in person, it hurts you differently than just watching the news.”
