This little history staggers the imagination. The blessing of God in this history is beyond the belief of the unbelieving man.
John Clough was born in New York in 1836, but he was raised in the Midwest. While in school in Iowa he was born again, and felt led of the Lord to go to India as a missionary.
S.S. Day, Stephen Van Husen and Lyman Jewett had been working with the Telugus people for nearly two decades without any real success. Just before abandoning their work to move elsewhere, Brother Jewett and his wife knelt on a hill overlooking the city of Ongole, praying that God would send another missionary and that He would bless his work. Well, the Lord directed Brother and Mrs. Clough to that city, and on January 1, 1866 a church was organized with eight members. Bro Clough continued to work out of that church, preaching in more than eighty villages on a semi-regular basis, and the Lord began to save souls, calling some of those new converts into His ministry. By 1874 three other American missionary couples joined Brother and Mrs. Clough.
But then disaster befell the land. There was a year of drought, then a year of cholera, followed by another year of drought. The natives were dying right and left from starvation and disease. During this time the missionaries and their helpers were preaching Christ with apparently some success. Then the government stepped in, employing Brother Clough to employ people to dig canals for irrigation and drainage, relieving some of the sanitary problems. People were being fed, lives were being saved, people started to feel good about themselves. More people began to turn to the Christ the missionaries preached, or at least apparently they did. Soon hundreds wanted to be baptized, but the missionary refused to baptize anyone while the famine persisted. He didn’t want anyone to join his missions for the wrong reasons. Then after three years of intense activity, on this day (July 3) 1878, Two thousand, two hundred twenty-two people were immersed on their profession of faith in Christ. And for the next month more were added to the church until the number reached eight thousand, six hundred ninety-one.
Such numbers as these sound unrealistic; but actually they sound like they come straight from the New Testament. Cumulatively, I have been reading of the same sort of numbers in the middle of the 19th century here in America. Jehovah is still God, Christ is still saving souls, and He can still bless in quantities like these if the people of God remain faithful, trusting Him.