A pastor from India who Oakland Christian Church has been supporting from halfway around the world for years will speak at the church Sunday at 10:30 a.m.

Paul Raghu, a pastor and evangelist based in Kayathar, near the southern tip of India, has been working for decades to spread the gospel in his homeland.

His conversion to Christianity came in 1969, when he and his six siblings, all orphans, were prepared to kill themselves in their home in the village of Mangavaram, he said.

Before they could ingest the poison they had prepared, a missionary came into their home and read to them from Deuteronomy 31:8, Raghu said.

“It says the lord God goes before you,” he said. “He will be with you. He will never leave you nor forsake you. Don’t be afraid, don’t be dismayed.”

The missionary said Jesus already sacrificed himself to save him, as well as everyone else, he said.

“He already died for you on the cross of Calvary,” Raghu said. “He loves you, he’s still alive, he will take care of you.”

Raghu’s partnership with Larry Jamison, who is now the minister of Oakland Christian Church and director of the GTO Evangelizing Association, began in 1979, shortly after Raghu’s graduation from a Bible college, where he served as a translator for Jamison, who was evangelizing in India at the time.

Since then, Raghu’s ministry has grown to include two orphanages that take care of 124 children and 22 churches in various cities and villages.

Lemuel Palmer, a member of Oakland Christian Church who has helped local populations build church buildings on four continents, said the Oakland congregation has been helping Raghu’s ministry financially for years.

“We actually pay one of his ministers his salary every month and then we support two of his children in his orphanage,” he said.

It costs the congregation $30 a month to support a child in the orphanage, Palmer said, adding that an American dollar has a lot of value in India.

“His ministry’s growing and expenses for his pastors and expenses for his orphanage are growing too,” he said. “He’s here proclaiming that, hey we’re doing this work and we need some help.”

Raghu also uses his churches as vocational centers where people with little or no formal education can learn to tailor clothes, Palmer said.

“At all their churches they have schools. If they have a good church building then they have a school there,” he said.

The goal is to give people a skill they could use to make a better livelihood for themselves, Palmer said.

“They realize that the people are poor and if they help train them in certain positions like tailoring, sewing, then they can help support themselves and that’s part of what being a Christian is,” he said.

While in the United States, where Raghu has spoken at other churches and plans to speak at more as well, he is hoping to spread awareness of projects to build churches in Kayathar and Mangavaram.

“In this trip, I am trying to get more support so I can help more orphan(ed), poor, underprivileged kids in my home,” he said.

He and local Christians in Kayathar and Mangavaram have already started construction of the churches, though they need more funding to finish them, Raghu said.

The Kayathar church, which will include a tailoring school, and the Mangavaram church are expected to require another $35,000 and $17,000, respectively, before they can be completed, he said.

According to Palmer, who went to Pondicheri to help Raghu build a church building in 2011, Christians in India will often build their churches gradually.

The process often involves gathering relatively small amounts of money and building as much of the church as that amount allows and repeating the process, for more than a decade if necessary, until the church is finished, he said.

Only about 3 to 5 percent of India’s 1.2 billion people are Christian, Raghu said, adding that in the mostly Hindu regions of the country where his ministry operates, there is a threat of persecution.

“Many of our pastors were killed, beaten up, and the church buildings and the house were burnt to ashes,” he said.

Despite the potential for danger, Raghu is determined to spread the word, hoping to bring the gospel to more villages where the Christian faith is largely unknown and expand his ministries so he can help more orphaned and underprivileged children in India.

“We are praying and trying to reach this other 95 percent (of) people with the gospel message,” he said.