Six works, and one purpose behind all of them.

Everything else this ministry does rests here. We gather each week to sing, to read Scripture aloud, and to pray — for our families, for our city, and for believers across Pakistan who are carrying more than we know.

Our worship is unhurried. There is room for silence, for confession, and for people to pray in their own words. Much of it is in Urdu and some in English, and the songs are often ones the congregation has known since childhood.

Prayer is not a preliminary to the work; it is a good deal of the work. Requests brought to these gatherings are written down and prayed over through the week, and we have seen God answer enough of them to keep asking.

We teach the children to pray aloud for the adults in the room, and they do.

We teach through books of the Bible rather than around topics. It is slower, and it means we cannot step around the difficult passages, which is rather the point. A believer who has been walked through Mark or Romans carries something no single sermon can give them.

Most of this happens in small rooms, with a handful of people and one open Bible. We keep it plain. If a truth cannot be explained to a new believer with little formal schooling, we have not explained it well enough yet.

Literacy varies widely among the people we serve, so much of our teaching is spoken, repeated and committed to memory. That is how the church has passed on the faith for most of its history, and it still works.

This is the centre of what we do. Someone comes to faith and, rather than handing them a programme, we hand them a person: a maturer believer who will meet with them regularly, read Scripture with them, pray with them, and stay when things become hard. Much of what might elsewhere be called counselling happens here: sitting with someone in grief, conflict, addiction or fear, and bringing Scripture to bear gently, and in confidence.

It is slow work and it does not scale the way a large meeting does. But it is how Jesus did it, and it is the only method we have found that produces disciples rather than attenders.

We ask one thing of everyone we disciple: that in time they will do the same for someone else. Discipleship that stops with the person receiving it has not finished.

The Gospel travels through relationships here far more than through events. Our people share Christ with neighbours, relatives, colleagues and shopkeepers, in ordinary conversation, over months, in the places they already live and work.

We also go out as teams: visiting homes we have been invited into, praying with the unwell, giving out Scripture, and sitting with anyone who wants to talk. We do not press. Where someone is not interested we thank them and leave well, because we may be back.

We go carefully. Karachi is a city where Christian witness has to be offered with wisdom as much as with courage, and we would far rather move slowly than put a new believer or a host family at risk.

Most weeks, most of this ministry happens in somebody’s front room. A dozen or so people, tea, an open Bible, and enough time for everyone present to say something.

Home fellowships are where a new believer is absorbed into a family rather than added to a list. They are where questions get asked that nobody would raise in a larger meeting, and where practical needs surface and are met quietly.

The children are part of this rather than sent out of it. We teach them to pray for the others in the room, and we put questions to them during the study, so that they are being discipled alongside everyone else rather than waiting for the adults to finish. A child who has prayed aloud for a grown man has learned something about the faith that no lesson teaches them.

Each fellowship is led by a believer we have discipled ourselves, and every one of those leaders is expected to be raising up whoever will lead the next.

We are building a discipleship school in Karachi: a concentrated season of study, formation and practice for believers who are ready to be trained to teach and disciple others.

The need is straightforward. Men here are telling us they want their lives to change, and many of them are struggling with addiction. A school lets us train a group properly at once, rather than one at a time over years.

The school is in development. The vision is settled. The premises, the timing and the funding are still being worked out.