Testimony Tuesday: Unearthing the mystery of the creator God

By Bella Agnello

Before coming to Cedarville University in 2018, Dr. Mohan Pereira, associate professor of physics, received his postdoctoral training at Yale. While there in New England, he was able to initiate several Gospel initiatives with Cru’s international ministry, Bridges International.

Pereira’s passion for evangelism started years prior when he became a Christian in college. Yet, that was not the first time God spoke to him. Pereira witnessed God’s direct revelations to him long before he converted to Christianity.

Pereira grew up in Sri Lanka where he attended Buddhist Sunday school and became a devout Buddhist. At 10 years old, he began to ask life’s big questions out of the fear of death, which also promoted questions of life. As a Buddhist, he believed that there are no creator gods, but because he loved science, he tried to reconcile scientific explanations with his beliefs. For three years, he wrestled with his frustrations, unable to find answers to his puzzling questions.

On a clear, starry night when Pereira was 13, he went stargazing in his backyard. It was close to midnight, and he was studying the constellation of Orion.

“I was looking at Orion’s belt, and the question came to me suddenly, ‘How can these three stars be in a straight line by pure chance? How can this happen?’” Pereira said.

Pereira knew that the universe could not have been created by random chance. Someone must have designed it. Without understanding which creator god he was talking to – Allah, Brahma, the God of the Bible or intelligent aliens – he cried out to them for the first time.

“I know, I know you are behind all these things,” Pereira said. “I want to know you.”

One week later, Pereira sought out the help of a retired English headmaster that lived a few houses away from him. Because she was knowledgeable about a wide range of topics, intrigue compelled him to visit her.

The headmaster captured Pereira’s heart. She answered some of his questions and gave him several books, including an old King James Bible decorated with gold linings. He immediately began to read Genesis to Revelation.

“I loved fiction and folktales, so it seemed like the Bible was full of those wonderful stories,” Pereira said. “So I kept reading.”

The more he read, the more Pereira realized the Bible may be trying to reveal a mystery about the universe. He talked to the former headmaster about the Bible and realized that she was a secret believer who learned about the Bible through a pamphlet three months before he met her. She related specific ways that the creator God of the Bible radically changed her life.

God began to pull Pereira towards him with a logic he could not deny. Buddhism began to feel foolish, so Pereira stopped going to temple. When the village found out that he had been learning about Christianity, they spread gossip and falsities about him.

The persecution became so severe that Pereira’s father asked him to stop learning about God. Eventually, the headmaster disappeared to escape from the death threats she received.

Four years later, Pereira was able to escape from the village, too, and attended college in the capital. The city was more tolerant of Christians, so he brought all the headmaster’s books and sought out to find a church.

One of the books the headmaster gave Pereira said, “Distributed by the headquarters of the Methodist church of Sri Lanka.” He wrote to them and asked if they could help him find a good church. Shortly after, he received a handwritten letter with recommendations and encouragement to find a Campus Crusade (Cru) organization on his campus.

Pereira found out that Cru was a banned organization on his campus, though they found ways to meet in secret. When he found them, he met the Cru campus director for his college who shared the Gospel with him.

“God revealed himself to me through general revelation and through a copy of his special revelation,” Pereira said. “The evangelist is important in the process of understanding special revelation.”

God gave Pereira a spark for evangelism and discipleship, and he began sharing the Gospel with all his friends. In response to his conversion, his friends rejected him, calling him a betrayer of their religion, culture and family.

News of his conversion reached his family. At the time, his dad also became an alcoholic due to his failing business. Then, a cyclone came, destroying their home and leaving the rest of the region undamaged.

“It was a testing point for me, to see whether I’d wave my ideas and go back to my old religion,” Pereira said. “The Bible verse that helped me was Matthew 6:33. The worries of life come, and then verse 33 comes and covers them: ‘Do not worry.’”

The verse became God’s living promise to Pereira. Then, he considered the true cost of the Great Commission, a cost which nearly every apostle gave their life for.

“That means that I must be ready to go through the same thing,” Pereira said. “That is the price that is attached to following God.”

The night he came home after his first semester at college, Pereira shared the Gospel with his mother and siblings in their kitchen. Though his sister would not accept Christ until several years later, his mother and younger brothers came to know Christ as their Savior.

The next semester, Pereira went back to school where his faith would be tested again. Persecution against devout Christians increased throughout the country. Some of the university officials took away his good grades and scholarships, accused him of lying and did everything they could to make him leave.

God gave Pereira Philippians 4:1-7 to remind him to pray and give thanks in everything. Though it seemed irrational to give thanks in suffering, God showed Pereira how practical it was as he stripped him of everything to make him fully dependent on God.

“I got a peace that I did not experience before,” Pereira said. “The problems were there, but I was calm, and I wasn’t afraid of what they were going to do to me.”

Pereira was able to finish his degree and moved to the United States to complete his doctoral work and reach more people with the Gospel. He initiated Gospel movements that sparked other movements, which led to Gospel movements of their own.

“God’s formula is very simple: it’s multiplication, not addition,” Pereira said. “Theoretically, in our lifetime, we can share the gospel with the whole population. But it’s taken 2000 years because we do not do our job. Philosophy’s become more important than evangelism.”

After his time at secular colleges, God called Pereira to teach science at Cedarville, where he also equips students to evangelize in unreached parts of the world.

“Through the experiences I received from God and the passion God gave me, I can ignite some spark in them, train them and encourage them to be faithful to God’s Great Commission.”

Bella Agnello is a junior Broadcasting, Digital Media and Journalism major with a concentration in Journalism. She enjoys thrifting, listening to records and reading classic Russian literature in her spare time.

Photo by Scott Huck