Two recent news stories from the same day (February 3, 2016) offered a strange twist that has implications for world missions. Deepak Chopra, the Hindu holistic health expert and author of 84 books, spent three days leading a workshop for MBA students at Columbia Business School in Manhattan. According to The Wall Street Journal, "Roughly 65 students sat in silent meditation, eyes closed, their smartphones and laptops stashed out of sight." The affable spiritual guide to Oprah Winfrey, Lady Gaga, and Arianna Huffington, among others, told students, "Bring your awareness into your heart. Ask, 'who am I?'" Then he invoked Hindu goddesses, featured a band of urban yogis, and asked students to diagram their "soul profile."

Meanwhile, on the other end of the earth in the largely Hindu nation of Nepal, Christianity and church planting are both exploding. An article on NPR noted, "Now [Nepal] has one of the fastest-growing Christian populations in the world." According to the national census the Christian population has grown from zero in 1951, to 458 Christians in Nepal in 1961, to 102,000 in 2001, and more than 375,000 a decade later. As missiologist Christopher J. H. Wright has said, "Missions is now from anywhere to everywhere."