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The story of conversions in India is an excellent example of the indigenous discovery of Christianity (rather than a Western Christian discovery of indigenous societies). No culture is sacred but every culture has the potential to become so. Throughout history, Christian faith has transcended ethnic, national, and cultural barriers, reshaping and redeeming the cultures it has entered. But Christian faith has also taken the shape of those "host cultures" as people in each culture recognize resonant themes in the faith.

Missionaries from abroad bring an initial stimulus, with new technologies for transmitting both Scripture and science. Those technologies serve, together with local agents, to "translate the message" into idioms that are locally acceptable and attractive. After an incubation period—during which early converts absorb, thoroughly internalize, and adapt the gospel to their own culture—explosions of spiritual energy turn whole communities to the new faith. Nowhere can this pattern be more clearly seen than in the process that culminated in Tirunelveli (then spelled Tinnevelly). From 1799 onwards, whole villages forsook old ways and turned temples into chapel-schools. Christians doubled or tripled their numbers in every decade thereafter.

This story starts in eastern Germany—in Halle and Herrnhut, the wellsprings of Pietism. Evangelicalism and Enlightenment were twin engines in A. H. Francke's vision of bringing universal literacy and numeracy to every person on earth—man, woman, and child—so that each might gain access to God's Word in his or her mother tongue.

Ziegenbalg came to Tranquebar on the southeast coast of India in 1706. He built the first modern Tamil schools, printed schoolbooks, scriptures, and scientific studies. As small congregations and trained Tamil pastors and teachers proliferated, the Halle vision spread to more and more villages in the Tamil countryside. By the 1730s, Tamil evangelical leaders such as Aaron and Rajanayakkan had gained royal patronage and were building the first model school in Thanjavur. Forty years later, disciples whom C. F. Schwartz (one of Ziegenbalg's successors) had trained at higher-level schools in Thanjavur were fanning out, two by two, across the peninsula, until their chapel-schools reached Palaiyankottai in Tirunelveli Country.

Schwartz, perhaps the most remarkable of all Halle missionaries in India, was adept in Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Persian, Sanskrit, Portuguese, and other European languages, both modern and classical. A skilled preacher, teacher, schoolmaster, diplomat, and statesman, he ended his 50-year career as Raja-Guru, Protector-Regent, and "Father" to Serfoji, Maharaja of Thanjavur.

By then, gifted disciples he called "Helpers" had gone far and wide—from Tranquebar to Tiruchirapalli, to Tirunelveli, and even as far as Travancore (almost 300 miles away). This outreach occurred during times of ceaseless war, famine, and suffering. It took place in the face of implacable opposition to Christian missions from the English East India Company, whose forces were then extending their rule over much of the subcontinent.

Missionaries from abroad deserve only limited credit for the efforts that turned Tamil communities toward Christian faith. Time and again, adventurous and gifted converts brought the gospel to their home villages in their own tongue.

Schwartz's disciples illustrate this. As early as 1769 a Vellalar (from a high caste that had created a proud classical Tamil civilization) Christian soldier stationed with the East India Company's garrison at Palaiyankottai wrote Schwartz about his small congregation, begging for a pastor. In 1778, Schwartz himself came to Palaiyankottai. While there, he baptized an affluent Brahman widow whom he already knew. Christening her "Clarinda," he gave her a place of leadership within the small congregation. Clarinda, with help from a Vellalar catechist-disciple named Rayappan, ran the local school and endowed the building of a proper (pukka) "prayer/school" hall. She was not satisfied until her small congregation had its own full-fledged and properly trained pastor-teacher.

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