1 of 5

As Christianity's demographic center of gravity shifts from the West to Asia and Africa, Third World Christians increasingly regard the secular West as a field for mission and ministry. A Nigerian nun passes out evangelistic literature in Harvard Square. An Indian (Telugu) Methodist minister delivers the opening benediction at a Fourth of July parade in Rosemont, Pennsylvania, a typical American suburb. London's largest church, Kingsway United Christian Center, is mainly Nigerian rather than British. Third World Christians are having a significant, although still insufficiently understood, impact on the West. As various Third World cultures and religious practices meet and interact over time within different strata of Western culture, history predicts that the outcome will be determined as much by indigenous as by imported cultural and religious preferences.

As we have seen in previous articles, the history of Christianity in India was not a simple tale of one-way Western impact upon a heathen culture. Instead, Indian Christians were highly selective in what they chose to adopt from American and European missionaries. They were also discriminating in choosing which cultural elements to retain from their pre-Christian heritage, much to the dismay of many Western missionaries who were promoting greater "indigenization." The resulting Indian Christian cultural and religious idioms emerged not only from interactions between missionaries and Indian converts, but also between Indian castes (jatis), language/regional groups, and non-Christian religions. Indian Christianity is now as complex as the subcontinent into which this already varied and multi-denominational religion was introduced.

Roughly 80% of all Indian Christians hailed not from the upper castes of Pandita Ramabai, Nehemiah Goreh, and N. V. Tilak, but from the so-called "depressed" classes-the untouchables or outcastes. The life and ministry of South Asia's great Christian leader, Bishop Vedanayagam Samuel Azariah (1874-1945), illustrates the complex issues surrounding Indian converts' relation to their indigenous Hindu-Muslim culture. His father was a convert from the semi-untouchable Shanar caste, whose turn to Christianity was part of the caste's broader upward mobilization into the now influential modern Nadar caste. Attracted by Christianity's commitment to transcending caste prejudices and divisions, Azariah created India's first indigenous missionary societies in 1903 and 1905 and served as the first Indian bishop of the Anglican Church from 1912 until his death on the eve of Indian Independence. His life and ministry provide a window on the ambivalence outcaste Christians felt toward indigenization within local cultural systems that had oppressed them but from which they still desired respect and acceptance.

Azariah left his Tamil roots in 1909 to go as a missionary to Telugu-speaking regions of the Nizam's Dominions and the Madras Presidency, where he subsequently led some of 20th-century India's most successful depressed class and non-Brahman conversion movements to Christianity. The total Anglican Christian population in his Telugu-speaking Dornakal Diocese increased from 56,681 in 1912 to 225,080 in 1941, a number that exceeded the total number of Anglican converts for all of Japan, Korea, and China combined. In 1936, the Dornakal church baptized 11,400 new converts, at an average rate of over 200 per week.

This successful public ministry took place in the midst of rising Indian nationalism and an increasingly powerful Independence movement, which put pressure on the Indian Christian community to prove its indigenous character. Mohandas K. Gandhi's swadeshi campaign for Indian economic self-reliance and his galvanizing calls for swaraj, or Indian Home Rule, influenced educated Indian Christian elites and progressive Western missionaries to accelerate a centuries-old campaign for church self-sufficiency brought to India by pietist Lutherans such as C. F. Schwartz and Anglo-American missionary statesmen Henry Venn and Rufus Anderson.

next page... |  1 of 5

share this page

RSS Feed   RSS Help