A Third-Generation Call
Dr. S. Karunakar comes from a family already given to ministry — his grandfather planted roughly thirty to forty churches around Hyderabad, and his uncle also pastors. Vacation Bible School wasn't new to him. But on April 29, 1996 — the fourth day of that year's VBS — something happened that turned a childhood familiar with church into a life surrendered to Christ.
The Accident That Started It All
He was twelve. A group of children were marching through the streets with banners, chanting "Jesus is coming," when a scooter rider swerving to avoid the crowd braked hard, skidded, and was thrown against a road divider. Karunakar remembers the moment with unusual clarity — the man's leg torn open, the bone visible in the morning light.
A question rose in him that he didn't ask out loud: If this man dies, where will he go? He answered it the only way a child raised in a Christian home knew how — if the man believed in Christ, heaven; if not, hell. But a second question followed, and this one wouldn't let him go: If he goes to hell, what are you doing about it?
Confessing His Sins on the Roadside
"I didn't know what to do for his body," he says, "but this was about his spirit." He walked the rest of that street in tears, confessing every small disobedience of his twelve years, quoting every Bible verse his Sunday school teachers had ever made him memorize, searching for one that would settle the weight in his chest. None did — until Matthew 6:33 surfaced in his memory: seek first the kingdom of God. He didn't fully understand it. It brought peace anyway.
"I Want to Be a Missionary"
Days later, at the closing service of that same VBS, his pastor asked if anyone had been blessed during the week to come forward and share. Karunakar — who had never spoken publicly in his life — ran to the stage, took the microphone, and said the only thing he knew to say: "I want to be a missionary. Please pray for me."
He stopped playing cricket. He started reading his Bible morning and evening. When he later moved to a boarding school with no church nearby, he laid a bedsheet under a tree behind his hostel and held his own version of a service — worship, reading, prayer — until, week by week, classmates and seniors began sitting down beside him.
The Verse With Five Question Marks
Years later, praying for direction as a young doctor, Karunakar kept returning to one request: Lord, reveal Your plan. One night he heard, faintly, an instruction: open your Bible and read. He turned to Mark 8:38 — and understood so little of it that he marked it with five question marks in the margin. He read it five times. Nothing.
Then, he says, the Holy Spirit asked him directly: do you find any disease in it? Reading the words again — "this adulterous and sinful generation" — one phrase surfaced in him, unprompted: HIV/AIDS. He hadn't been looking for it. It came, he says, with a weight he could feel, and with it a sentence: for these people, I have made you a physician.
By 2008, that impression had become a credential: he was part of the first government-trained batch of HIV physicians from the Telugu-speaking states, at a time when few doctors in India specialized in the field at all. Over the years that followed, he treated more than 20,000 patients.
A Church Born in a Clinic Waiting Room
Around 2001 — before the specialization was even complete — Karunakar began each clinic day the same way: sitting quietly before his first patient arrived, worshiping, praying. Patients started noticing something in the room before he said a word. Some wept. Some, he says, were healed. Without planning to, he had planted a church in his own consulting chamber.
"Ministry isn't a platform," he says. "Wherever you are, the Holy Spirit is inside you. You can minister right there."
A Ministry Beyond Hyderabad
In 2021 and 2022, that same sense of direction moved again — this time toward Madhya Pradesh. "You have a bigger ministry here than in Hyderabad," he says he heard. He and his wife arrived not knowing a single person in the area; a handful of local believers, he says, simply appeared to support work God had already arranged.
Of everything since, he points to one story above the rest: nearly a dozen couples, some married eight to ten years without children, prayed for and — he says — blessed with sons.
"You Will Be His Testimony"
The message closes the way it began — with an invitation, not a lecture. Surrendering your life to God will bring opposition, Karunakar says plainly; it did for him, from family and friends alike. But it will also mean, in his words, that "your life will never be the same again." He closes by asking anyone ready to surrender their life to Christ to lift their hand, and to come forward for prayer.