For those of us who have walked the streets of India’s cities or the dirt tracks of its villages as pastors and evangelists, reading the pages of Out of the Clay Pit by Gerald Christo compares to the times when we watch family home videos on a quiet Sabbath evening. The places and those we know and worked with come before us, even if these are just glimpses, but they become sufficient to call to mind our own memories of association of places and people and what they did in building up the church in southern Asia.
Christo has gathered together valuable and historic details to tell his story, including how often he saw God’s hand in his life and in the church to which he had dedicated himself. The difficulties he faced in his preparation for the ministry and the positions of leadership that lead him to being elected president of the Southern Asia Division of Seventh-day Adventists, is a gripping story.
The book, Out of the Clay Pit, gets its title from a clay mine that Gerald Christo’s father ran. The clay, collected in long tanks, surrounded the mine. When nobody was around, Gerald, as a young boy, liked jumping from one tank to another. One day, when only he was out near the pits, he missed his step and fell into the wet clay and started sinking. A messenger just passing by saw the boy struggling for his life, jumped in and pulled young Gerry Christo out, saving him from sinking in the mire.
Pastor Christo, who says he has often been thought of as coming from the Anglo-Indian people (he is Bengali) because of his speech and many friends from this community, pays tribute to Anglo-Indian church workers, both men and women, by devoting three pages of his short book to their dedication and vision in building up the church in southern Asia in all phases of its work, even listing them by name and their fields of labor.
For sixty years, standing close at his side, helping him daily, was his wife, Birol Charlotte Kharkongor, from the hills of Shillong, the “Scotland of the East.” Together, they raised three sons and two daughters, with three of their children working in the church. Christo’s only regret as a pastor was that he missed out on graduate studies. “Nevertheless,” he says, “Andrews University conferred an honorary doctorate on me for reasons best known to them.”
