“Look for God. Look for God like a man with his head on fire looks for water.” – Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat Pray Love

Searching for oneself – and God – became hip in 2006 when writer Elizabeth Gilbert published her memoir Eat Pray Love, launching her onto the global stage and Oprah’s recommended reading list.

In her search for God and peace, Gilbert travels to an Indian ashram, a common Hindu retreat promoting meditation, yoga and inner contentment. The book was a worldwide phenomena: women everywhere inspired by the notion of travelling for ‘self discovery’.

While Gilbert launched her book in the US, two Australians – Brendan and Leaf*  – were hatching a plan of their own to intercept spiritually-searching travellers in India and lead them to Jesus.

“Leaf and I have always been a part of the hippie subculture,” says Brendan. “When we were in India, exploring the possibility of development work, we met hundreds of passionate, thoughtful, spiritually-minded travellers who came to India to find Enlightenment. We thought: wow, we would love to live in India and share the good news of Jesus with these hippies, people that we connect with on lots of levels.”

Five years later, the ministry is flourishing, and has recruited two new team members for their affectionately nicknamed ‘Jesus Ashram’ – Joshua and Naomi*, in Australia recently to renew their visas.

Joshua and Naomi don’t look like your typical gospel workers. “There’s no polar fleece here,” says Naomi cheekily. The dreadlocked couple – Joshua armed with a theological degree from SMBC, and Naomi with a degree in International Aid and Development – along with 2 year old daughter Elkarnah, who sports tinkling bells on her trouser cuffs – have made a home in India’s most holy city in Northern India.*

“Westerners, jaded with what they perceive as western spirituality, come to India to, well, I guess eat, pray, love. They come to find themselves,” says Naomi.

“And we’re hoping they’ll do just that: Find themselves through Jesus.” The Ashram, described by Joshua as a “Jesus devotional community”, runs weekly Lectio Devina meditations, using the Bible as the basis for reflection.

“During the traveller season, we’ll have anywhere between five and 20 people turn up for each meditation. Whoever is leading gets people into a contemplative place to focus on what we’re here for. We’ll have a Psalm or a teaching of Jesus, and we read through that a number of times, leaving pauses for meditation.”
The meditations are relaxed and can last for about an hour. Then comes the talking circle. “We have a talking stick that is passed around, and everyone shares their feelings and experiences from the meditation.”

“We believe that God’s Word is what it says: living, active and sharper than any double-edged sword,” says Joshua. “So when people are sitting and listening to it, meditating with it, it’s amazing hearing people share what they’ve learnt from it.”

“The amount of times someone’s said, ‘I never realised that’s what Jesus said or did’ is really exciting.”

A new initiative this year in the Jesus Ashram are five to 10 day retreats onsite. So far, five travellers have been on a retreat, and all have become followers of Jesus. “Someone can stay with us and spend their time studying the entirety of our faith as devotees of Jesus,” says Joshua.

According to Naomi, the exciting thing about the retreats is the genuineness of the travellers that participate.

“These people are honestly searching, and they’ve made a decision on their own to find out more about Jesus. And we take them right through the gospel.

“The biggest thing to me is that God’s Word doesn’t lie when it says, ‘When you seek, you’ll find’. When we had the first girl come on retreat, I said to a teammate ‘if this girl doesn’t get saved, I’m going to need Biblical counseling or something’. I don’t understand how someone can spend 10 days reading the Bible, nutting through things and not get saved.

“Thankfully,” Naomi says, laughing, “I didn’t need counseling. God is faithful.”

Word of mouth is the Jesus Ashram’s main marketing tool. And travellers will often just knock on the door of the ashram. At least two of them. Every day.

“I think of how much advertising we needed to do in Australia for a church event and it blows my mind that we have sometimes 20 people arrive on our doorstep each week, coming of their own accord, to sit and listen to the scriptures,” says Joshua. “We don’t sugar coat it. It’s just Jesus. And they keep coming.”

Joshua and Naomi’s new city, on the banks of the Ganges River is a “spiritual melting-pot”. Travellers come from all over the world seeking spiritual healing.

“Our city is kind of the mecca for alternative spiritual seekers,” says Joshua. “It’s a pretty hard place to live. The only reason you’d stay for any period of time as a traveller is to do music or do the spiritual seeker thing.”

The Jesus Ashram is “sandwiched between a Kali Hindu temple and a mosque”.

“Kali is one of the most bloodthirsty Hindu deities,” says Naomi. “If you’ve seen Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, it’s set in a Kali temple. So that gives you some idea.”

“It’s a spiritually intense place, especially at festival time. You’ll have deities being paraded down the streets of the city, goat sacrifices – wild stuff like that.”

Almost every hippie you meet will have been to India, or is planning to go, says Naomi. “We’ve always had a heart for hippies, and for people of the New Age. We’ve spent the past nine years in Australia doing ministry with those kinds of people, running around with thousands of hippies in the bush at festivals like ConFest, to teach about Jesus.”

This “radical, upside-down, game-changing” kind of faith, can be seen in action everyday in India. The ashram has conducted several baptisms in the Ganges River, one of a European fashion stylist who’d packed up and travelled to India to change her life.

“We saw this girl’s life completely transformed from a pretty wild past,” said Naomi.

A ministry of meeting travellers where they are provides much greater flexibility in the types of people who can help out.

“The time you stay here doesn’t really matter here – weeks, months, years. It works in a way that that I don’t think would work in many other ‘short term settings.”

“It’s just travellers talking to other travellers.”

* Last names and city names have been removed for security reasons.