Over the past few years I have been seeking to live a life that expresses God's passion for justice and for the poor. At the moment, I am trying to be committed to the poor in Sheffield, whilst at the same time keeping a global perspective and agenda. As part of that balance I had been looking to gain overseas experience during holidays - that would have to be at most four weeks and preferably two. Recently the Christian relief & development agency at Tearfund have started running 2 week teams abroad over Easter. Having previously been to Kenya with Tearfund in 1997 I was up for going again and applied, soon hearing that I would be going to India. India is somewhere I have always felt hesitant about going; I thought that the poverty there was at a different level, almost overwhelming, so I have always felt cautious. It turned out that most of the team felt the same, but it was clearly God who in each case had led us to be there, working with the Delhi charity, ASHA, in the slums.

Looking back the main impression of the time was just that ASHA have somehow hit how it is that both development and following Jesus should be. They are a charity whose vision is to improve the lives of slum dwellers, and they carry it out in a profoundly radical way. The director and founder, Dr. Kiran Martin, told us how she started in 1988 with a borrowed table under a tree in a slum, holding a clinic. Slowly she began to build relationships with people, listening to their stories. 'For the first couple of years' she said 'I didn't mention Jesus'. 'How can you talk about Jesus to people who are having stones thrown at them on the toilet and whose children are eating sewage on the streets?'

The next step was that Kiran pushed the women in the slums to get together and unite so that they could fight for the right to their land. At first the women did not believe her, but after months of persistence they realised that her heart for the poor was genuine. As it stands, almost all slums in Delhi are illegal, and the government can and does move in with bulldozers at no notice and clear homes that people have lived in for years. The women elected reps, (the only women who could write), and began making applications to government. The government eventually offered them 12 1/2 feet where they were, or 25 feet outside Delhi. They took the first, and began dismantling the shelters they had. There was a stage when they had only foundations, and nothing to build new homes; for a time they regretted the whole thing and decried ASHA. Then, having had for a moment absolutely nothing, with ASHA's help they managed to get a loan and built their new homes.

We heard from a woman who was there through that process, and who swelled with pride at how her life had changed. Now she had a door she could lock, so all the kids could go to school and no-one had to stay and guard their home. She had been trained as a community health worker for 6 months (elected by the women's group), and had her own medical kit and responsibility for an area of the slum. ( ASHA have trained 1000 such women across 30 slums). The men who had been uncertain now take their concerns to the women. This woman who had been living under a tarpaulin had a photo on her wall of her standing with a senior government minister. We asked her what the women were fighting for now. 'Electricity meters' she said. 'Before, when we were living in the slum, we tapped electricity and we didn't care. Now we have our dignity, and we want to pay for our electricity.'

Not only that, but they had collected supplies from neighbouring estates and been to Gujarat. They have adopted another slum where they want to go themselves and take the message to other women. ' And' she said ' we want to go to other cities too.' Many women we met no longer wear a veil. In the slum where the first 3 women were elected, female literacy is now 50 % and 100% of the kids go to school. The land is in the name of the women, which is virtually unheard of in a heavily male dominated society, and protects poor women who are very vulnerable to just being kicked out by their husbands.

Now, I don't know about you, but that seems like the business of God to me. These Hindu women had been absolutely transformed because they had been loved unconditionally and trusted with their own destiny. Many of the Hindu women we met seemed very close to the Kingdom of God. A long way down the line, ASHA have seen a number of conversions, and the church that is growing is organic and it is totally Indian. We went to a prayer meeting in the backroom of a clinic with women and children who sang in Hindi, and gave testimony through translators of how they had come to faith, mostly through healing. For me the amazing thing about ASHA is that they have a passion for Jesus and his Kingdom, but the love that they show is profoundly unconditional, it is absolutely holistic, and it will not settle for anything less than a social transformation based on felt and not perceived need. Empowerment is an overused jargon word, but Jesus and His Kingdom really do it.