Baptist Church of Mizoram

The Baptist Church of Mizoram, abbreviated BCM is a Protestant denomination of India and the second biggest church in Mizoram state in northeast India.

The church was founded by Baptist English missionaries Rev. JH Lorrain (Pu Buanga) and FW Savidge (Sap Upa) in 1894. It has its headquarters at Serkawn, which is a missionary station and town close to Lunglei city, the second biggest city in Mizoram, a minor part of India bordering Myanmar.

Today BCM has 160,344 members in 606 local churches (BCM Statistics 2013-2014).It is the second biggest church in Mizoram after the Presbyterian Church of Mizoram, which was founded in 1897 by an English Presbyterian missionary Rev. D.E. Jones.

Rev. R.A. Lorrain, younger brother of Rev. J.H. Lorrain and founder of the Evangelical Church of Maraland (est. 1907), was the first pioneering missionary to the Mara people in the southernmost part of Mizoram state, completing the task of evangelizing the people of the whole state - Presbyterians in the north, Baptists in the middle and Evangelicals in the south.

The Baptist Church of Mizoram operates the following:

The year 1968 had remarkable significance for the Baptist Church of Mizoram. In that year, the Baptist Missionary Society (BMS), after working for almost 65 years, decided to withdraw their mission work in south of Mizoram due to the Indian Government’s rejection of their permission to stay longer in Mizoram. In the same year that the BMS decided to withdraw their mission work, the ZBM also sent Rev H. Rokhama as the first cross-culture missionary outside Mizoram. Moreover, on 18 January 1968, Rev C.L.Hminga was appointed as the first full-time ZBM Secretary, and the ZBM had also organized its own office in a separate building. From this time onward, until the Assembly of BCM decided to form a new structure, all the office works of the ZBM was conducted from this office.

A concise account of the BCM Mission works, as it stands for 46 years (1966 – 2012) from the inception of the BCM Mission Department as the Zoram Baptist Mission, can be made as follows:

ZBM started cross-culture missionary work, employing only two full-time missionaries in 1939. Now, (in 2012) BCM Mission Committee has more than 800 mission workers including missionaries.

...
Wikipedia