A Call to India

God called OMS missionary, Dr. Wesley Duewel, to India when he was five years old. Years later, as a student at God’s Bible School, Wesley felt the Lord definitely calling him to train Christian workers in Bible institutes in India. He zealously wrote to OMS explaining his call to India. Thanking him, the leaders informed him that OMS had no work in India or any plan to go there.

A Burden for India

A year later, in 1938, Eugene Erny, OMS missionary in China, wrote his fellow directors about his tremendous burden for India. Under seemingly impossible situations, with the Mission’s hands already full with China’s millions, Mrs. Cowman reported, “God always leads forward, on and on to the great undone…. We prayed through into the mind and will of God, and He…gave us new and inward illumination concerning the evangelization of earth’s millions in our generation…”

OMS Begins Work in India

In 1940, the Board voted to enter India and assigned Eugene and Esther Erny as leaders. God’s timing was perfect! Without our India involvement, the work of OMS in Asia would have halted with the bombings at Pearl Harbor. In December of 1940, three couples (including the Duewels) and a single woman departed on a ship from the U.S to India. The team hit Indian soil in February 1941, met up with the Ernys, and the work of OMS India began.

A Man of Prayer

Thus, the ministry in India was born in prayer. Wesley Duewel, author of several top-selling books on prayer, wrote years later about Eugene Erny, “He believed in prayer, and he practiced prayer. He saw prayer as all-essential to the work of God and to the OMS. He wanted OMS missionaries to be people of prayer. Again and again, when he was our India field leader, he would call us to prayer. ‘Let’s pray about it’ was one of his most frequent expressions…. He was a man of action, but it was action grounded in prayer.”

In 1942, the Allahabad Bible Seminary opened in North India, and the ministry began to grow.