NRB has closely followed the landscape for Christian communities in India for some time, but the headlines rarely capture the full story.
To go beyond the surface, we recently spoke with someone who has spent decades walking alongside our brothers and sisters on the ground. Leah Kadwell, president and CEO of Good Shepherd India (GSI), reflects on a journey that began when she was a young newlywed and has since evolved into a lifetime of partnership.
The Good Shepherd Church of India, headquartered in Hyderabad, is an indigenous church movement present in every state of the country, led and staffed by Indians. GSI, the U.S. organization, is an auxiliary of the Good Shepherd Church of India.
“My team at GSI exists as the American expression of that movement,” Kadwell said, “strengthening its ministry, resourcing its priorities, and inviting others to take part.”
From navigating pending parliamentary amendments that threaten historic church assets to shifting the communications posture, Kadwell details the specific challenges facing indigenous ministries and offers practical guidance for Christian media professionals stateside.
NRB:
For those who don’t know, could you give an overview of the work and mission of Good Shepherd India?
Kadwell:
Our ministry focuses on these areas: education, healthcare, anti-trafficking, skills training, persecution relief, Bible distribution, and churches. We invest heavily in empowering programs for women and girls, and on advocacy for religious freedom and civil rights.
The thread running through it all is dignity. India’s caste structures have taught tens of millions of people — Dalit and tribal communities especially — that they are disposable. The Good Shepherd Church’s answer has been to build institutions that say otherwise, in places where a school or a clinic is itself a theological argument.
NRB:
How did you first get involved with ministry in India broadly, and with GSI specifically?
Kadwell:
My husband and I went to India in 1996 with a touring group from our faith community in Beaverton, Oregon. As 20-something newlyweds, we expected another accomplishment to add to our young résumés. We got a lifetime instead: a lasting commitment to, and connection with, the India we have grown to love so much.
What captured me in those first days wasn’t a cause or a program. It was the people: their joy, their hope, their hospitality. I remember being handed chai by a woman who had almost nothing, in a home smaller than my kitchen, and understanding that I was the one being hosted, taught, and cared for. That reversal never really ended.
For the next twenty years, I lived and worked in India, and I learned everything I know about my faith and effective leadership from Indian colleagues doing much harder work than I did, with a fraction of the resources. I stood alongside people who had been denied their dignity for generations as they leaned into their authority as visionaries and built a lasting, homegrown institution, the Anglican Good Shepherd Church of India, that is making a generational difference in the lives of millions.
I went to India thinking I had something to offer. I stayed for decades because I discovered I had much to receive. That is still the posture I try to hold as I lead the U.S.-based Good Shepherd India.
“I went to India thinking I had something to offer. I stayed for decades because I discovered I had much to receive.”
NRB:
Speaking to the idea of dignity you mentioned before, how has the church perhaps found favor with locals in sharing the good news of Jesus?
Kadwell:
Favor is earned slowly, and it is earned by staying.
Some of Good Shepherd’s schools, clinics, and community care initiatives have been in their communities for decades. When a family sends a child to a school where she is called by name and embraced as someone with infinite worth, she encounters a truth about herself that the world around her has withheld for generations.
When a clinic treats a person others would not touch, it speaks the same truth with hands. Our priority is simply to be the hands and feet of Jesus. His love, presence, and acceptance are what compel us, and we are there to affirm that God-given dignity and help people live into all that God has for them.
India’s own reformers understood this. Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, the father of India’s constitution, argued that institutions must build dignity, not merely declare it. The institutions I am describing were built by Indians, are staffed by Indians, and are trusted because the people who run them are neighbors, not visitors.
Sixty years of showing up earns a hearing, and that is why people are willing to listen.
NRB:
What are the main issues facing Indian Christians today? What are the main challenges to doing ministry in the country today?
Kadwell:
I would frame it as pressure on minority faith communities generally. Christians are not the only ones facing challenges. Several other faith communities are navigating versions of the same thing, and the mechanisms are often identical.
Practically, though, three things.
First, regulatory complexity. Compliance now requires legal and accounting capacity that a rural school or a small clinic simply does not have, and the cost of getting it wrong is severe. The scale is easy to miss: the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law counts roughly 22,000 FCRA registrations canceled, and another 15,000 allowed to lapse since 2010. Most of those were not scandals. They were small organizations that could not sustain the paperwork. Twelve states also have “Freedom of Religion” statutes in force, adding prior-notification and reporting obligations that institutions must navigate carefully.
Second, uncertainty. When you cannot be confident about your funding position two years out, you stop planning and start surviving. Institutions that serve the poor are exactly the ones with no reserves to absorb that. A school cannot promise a family it will be there when their daughter is due to graduate.
Third, local social pressure, which varies enormously by region. The United Christian Forum — an Indian ecumenical body that operates a national helpline — has recorded a rising trend for five consecutive years: 486 incidents in 2021, 601 in 2022, 734 in 2023, 834 in 2024, and approaching 900 in 2025. The data also shows how concentrated it is. Uttar Pradesh and the tribal belts of Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, and Odisha account for a large share, while much of the country sees very little.
One category from the 2025 figures stays with me: 23 incidents involving the denial of burial, 19 of them in a single state. Families unable to bury their dead in their own villages. That is not a dispute about belief. It is a question of whether a person’s body is treated as belonging to the community they lived in. This is exactly the dignity question, at the very end of a life.
The through-line is that all of this lands hardest on the smallest organizations serving the most vulnerable people.
“Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, the father of India’s constitution, argued that institutions must build dignity, not merely declare it.”
NRB:
What does your day-to-day work look like now on the U.S. side?
Kadwell:
My role today is to be the bridge: to make sure the movement has what it needs, and that its story is told accurately here.
I focus on three things, in rough proportion: resourcing, communications and advocacy, and leadership and pastoral care for our staff, our board, and our colleagues in India, which mostly means my calendar obeys two time zones!
I’m writing, placing commentary on the persecuted Church in India with U.S. outlets, and briefing journalists on the legal pressures Indian ministries are facing. You can follow us in the Christian Post, The Hill, CBN, Premier, RNS, and The Washington Examiner, among other outlets.
NRB:
What are the top religious freedom and civil rights advocacy issues you’re working on?
Kadwell:
The first is freedom of conscience. Article 25 of India’s Constitution guarantees every person “freedom of conscience and the right freely to profess, practice and propagate religion.” That is not a foreign import; it is an Indian constitutional commitment, and our advocacy is simply for its full application.
The second is caste-based discrimination and its downstream effects, particularly the exploitation of vulnerable workers, women, and girls. India abolished untouchability in Article 17 of its own Constitution, prohibited forced labor in Article 23, and has protective legislation on the books. The work is in the distance between those protections and daily life. Vulnerability compounds. The communities most likely to be treated as disposable are the same communities most exposed to bonded labor, unsafe work, and exploitation of every kind. That connection deserves far more attention than it receives.
The third is the asset provisions in the pending FCRA amendment. American donors tend to assume a gift is given, spent, and finished. Under these provisions, a school building funded decades ago could still be at stake today.
On all three, we work alongside Indian coalitions like the All India Christian Council, which Good Shepherd’s Archbishop Joseph D’Souza founded, that have been making these arguments in Indian forums for decades.
We are supporting an existing conversation, not starting one.
NRB:
From your perspective, how has the FCRA affected ministries on the ground, and how will the amendments affect them?
Kadwell:
The current law’s effect is mostly friction: reporting burden, banking requirements, audits, and long approval timelines. Real money and real hours go into compliance rather than into programs. That is a cost, but it is a manageable one.
The amendment introduces something different. As introduced in March, it creates a Designated Authority that can take control of assets acquired with foreign contribution when an organization’s certificate is canceled, surrendered, denied renewal, or simply lapses — administratively, without a prior judicial hearing.
Set that alongside the numbers above. Some 37,000 registrations have already ended since 2010, most of them quietly, most of them small organizations that could not keep up with the paperwork. Under the current law, an organization in that position closes its books and goes home. Under the amendment, each of those exits becomes a question of who owns the building.
And the hardest cases are the ordinary ones. An institution that received foreign funds in the 1970s, has been locally funded for thirty years, and lets its registration lapse because it no longer needs one — what happens to the ground its school sits on? Mixed-funding scenarios are genuinely unclear, and clarity matters more than severity here.
An organization can plan around a strict rule. It cannot plan around an ambiguous one.
Encouragingly, the Bill was referred to a 31-member Joint Parliamentary Committee in August rather than passed straight through, and the committee is expected to report in the Winter Session. That is the deliberative process working, and it is the right moment for careful, specific input.
“Our instinct as communicators is to give a voice to the voiceless. But they were never voiceless. They were unamplified.”
NRB:
What can fellow Christian communicators do to help in the current situation?
Kadwell:
A few things, and the first is the simplest: Pray for our colleagues in India. I don’t offer that as a formality. The people carrying this work carry it every day, and prayer is what they ask for more often than anything else.
Second — and this is the one I am still learning — tell these stories with the people in them as the protagonists. Our instinct as communicators is to give a voice to the voiceless. But they were never voiceless. They were unamplified. I told these stories the other way for years, with myself somewhere near the middle, and it took a long time to see it.
Same facts, different protagonist: not the American who visited a village, but the headmistress who has run its school for eighteen years and knows every family in it.
Third, the story I wish someone would cover is the boring one. Incidents get attention because they are dramatic. The parliamentary committee report due this winter is not dramatic, and it will shape operating conditions for thousands of schools, clinics, and community organizations.
Fourth, use me. Details that are harmless here can create exposure there, and it is genuinely hard to know which is which from this distance. I have not always known myself. Send me specifics, and I will tell you what I know. Better still, let me introduce you to the people doing the work. I would rather your audience heard from an Indian principal, physician, or pastor than from me.
Write to me at leahkadwell@gsi.org.
The people I would introduce you to are not waiting to be rescued. They have been at this for sixty years. What they could use is a wider hearing and our prayers.
Allie is the Managing Editor of Publications at NRB.