North East India: Combating the Converts

When India became independent in 1947, Jawaharlal Nehru adopted an official policy allowing tribal areas to develop their own cultural and religious traditions unhindered. But natives of an animist background resented the growing numbers of Christians who put away old tribal customs. And after Nehru died, Hindus in the 1960s began to persecute Christians in obscure Arunachal Pradesh, a province of 25,000 square miles in the extreme northeast corner of India, along the Tibetan-Chinese border (see map).

Robert Riehweh Cunville, a Khasi tribesman presently studying at the Fuller School of World Mission in Pasadena, California, said that the first wave of persecution occurred in 1968 and 1969. Another major series of attacks and harassments in the mountainous territory, where Western missionaries are banned, took place last spring and summer, he said.

The Baptist World Alliance and other sources corroborated reports of widespread looting, burning of homes and churches, and physical assault and torture of Christians. “Highly destructive vigilante attacks” were perpetrated by bands of high school students, the BWA reported. Its information came from workers of the Baptist General Conference, a 111,000-member denomination based in Evanston, Illinois, with mission work in Arunachal Pradesh.

Cunville, ordained a minister by the 400,000-member Presbyterian Church in North East India, produced documents alleging that three Christian churches in Arunachal Pradesh were burned in 1969, six in 1970, and seven in 1971. In addition, his records show, a Christian mission school was forced to move out of the state in 1970, and another was closed a year later.

Rochunga Pudaite, an Indian who formerly lived in northeast India and is now president of Bibles for the World in Wheaton, Illinois, showed a reporter lists compiled by the North East India Christian Council (NEICC) giving the dates and places of losses and damages allegedly occurring between March and June of 1974 in the Subansiri District of Arunachal Pradesh. Included on the list: thirty-seven churches burned down; twenty-five dwellings burned and seventy-four other dwellings damaged, affecting 343 families; fifty-three persons physically assaulted; sixteen granaries burned down and 162 destroyed or looted; 463 head of livestock and 1,275 fowl stolen.

The NEICC petitioned Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and the chief commissioner of Arunachal Pradesh in 1971 and again last May and June to stop “mob violence against Christians,” according to documents in Cunville’s possession. Concerned delegations also brought the issue to Mrs. Gandhi’s personal attention, Cunville added.

An NEICC memo dated June 7, 1974, told the Prime Minister that previous appeals for intervention “have borne no fruit.”

Rather, harassment of Christians has been on the increase with no interference from the government authorities whatsoever. In fact, resolutions were passed in public meetings presided [over] by high government officials in which direct threats were held out to Christians unless they renounced their faith. These threats are now being carried out.… Worst of all, the local government officials have refused to interfere … and the higher officials of the administration have feigned ignorance and are deliberately making themselves inaccessible.

Near year’s end, “the situation up in the hills” hadn’t improved. “Our brethren are very disappointed with the authorities,” an Indian Christian told Baptist General Conference officials.

Cunville, a former seminary teacher and past executive secretary of the NEICC, said the council also had petitioned the Indian Supreme Court for enforcement of the constitutional guarantee of religious freedom in Arunachal Pradesh, and for the protection of lives and properties of Christians there. The NEICC’s petition to Mrs. Gandhi asked that full compensation be made to those affected and that an impartial commission be set up to investigate “anti-Christian incidents.”

The NEICC also asked that its representatives be allowed to tour affected areas freely in order to restore “normal relationships” between Christians and non-Christians. The government rejected the requests on grounds that the people would be hostile toward “an outside agency.”

The chief commissioner, in 1972, had written Cunville that the “incidents” were not persecution but “rather an expression of reprisal in the tribal way on those responsible for causing division and disruption in the tribal society and sometimes disgrace to tribal morality.”

Neighboring states have large Christian communities, but only 6 per cent of Arunachal Pradesh’s 467,000 inhabitants are Christian. During the past ten years, one tribe in Arunachal Pradesh has added 4,000 baptized believers and more than fifty churches. Leaders say another thousand new believers are waiting to be baptized.

NEICC President L. N. Ralte said last June that the alleged attacks on Christians were fomented by high school students, roaming from village to village, who had been paid several hundred dollars by a councilor from Subansiri District “ostensibly for social work but with secret instruction to harass Christians.…” Ralte said the NEICC was prepared to prove its case before an impartial tribunal.

The province’s chief administrative secretary denied the charge, saying that some boys at the John Firth Mission School in North Lakhimpur could not tolerate the divergent views of a man who was “an ardent advocate of preserving tribal faith and culture.” They manhandled and “brutally beat” the man, triggering retaliation by youths and students who “burned a few thatched houses,” he said.

The BWA reported in October that about fifty Christian leaders and their families took refuge in the John Firth School, which was founded by the Baptist General Conference. BWA relief coordinator Carl W. Tiller said other families have remained in hiding in the hills, not daring to return to their destroyed homes. “They have been eking out a subsistence in the jungles on edible roots and leaves,” Tiller said.

Officials of the American Baptist Convention at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, and the Southern Baptist Foreign Mission Board in Richmond, Virginia, said persecution had not spread to the neighboring provinces of Assam and Nagaland, where they have mission work. Neither of the two bodies has specific projects in Arunachal Pradesh.

Meanwhile, Pudaite, the Bible distributor (see May 24, 1974, issue, page 54), has sent Bibles to 500 government officials in Arunachal Pradesh (all those who have telephones). He hopes the liberating Good News will change their hearts—and their attitudes toward Christians.

GREAT GIVEAWAY

Dutch businessman Evert Dekker attracted a large crowd as he gave away ten-guilder bills (about $3.80) outside the train station in Groningen in northern Holland. Police questioned him briefly. Satisfied that the money was real, they left, and Dekker went on with his giveaway.

Each bill, enclosed in a small plastic box, was attached to a mini-tapestry suggesting that the bill could be given away or spent on food or gasoline. Or, it added, “you can also buy yourself a Bible. Then this bill will get everlasting value.”

Dekker’s private campaign cost him nearly $4,000. Why did he do it? “In our day it is useless to hand out tracts,” he replied. “But I haven’t yet seen anybody throwing away a piece of tapestry with a ten-guilder bill attached.”

A recent survey shows that some 3.8 million people over age 15 in the Netherlands (about 43 per cent of the population) do not possess a Bible or Scripture portion. Further, it was found that 54 per cent of those who do have a Bible do not read it.

Fighting Another Famine

After more than twenty years of discussion and negotiation, fifteen evangelical church groups with some 500 congregations and 80,000 members recently organized the Federation of Evangelical Churches of India (FECI). About 150 delegates, many of them pastors, participated in the three-day inaugural meeting, held at the Christian and Missionary Alliance (CMA) headquarters in Akola, near Bombay. Seventeen other evangelical bodies involved in the negotiations did not participate; some are awaiting final approval by church councils or mission boards, some have taken a wait-and-see position.

The federation was created to link churches “for the evangelization of India and defense of the historic biblical faith.” Among the FECI’s architects were leaders of the twenty-four-year-old Evangelical Fellowship of India, a loosely knit alliance of individuals, churches, and organizations. The federation and the fellowship will be complementary, not competitive, say sources.

New Zealand theologian Bruce Nicholls, a seminary teacher in India for twenty years and coordinator of the Theological Assistance Program of the World Evangelical Fellowship, says the federation has the potential of equaling in size the United Church of North India formed three years ago and thus becoming a major force in Indian church life. There are 500,000 members of evangelical groups outside the ecumenical church unions, he points out.

FECI members include the St. Thomas Evangelical Church of Kerala, South India, which claims its roots go back to the apostle Thomas’s visit to India in 52 A.D., the Regions Beyond Missionary Union-sponsored churches in Bihar, North India, the Delhi Bible Fellowship (churches recently founded in the capital city by workers with TEAM, The Evangelical Alliance Mission), and independent churches such as Carey Baptist Church in Calcutta.

One of the first official actions of the FECI executive committee was to appeal to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to appoint a commission to investigate persecution of Christians in Arunachal Pradesh (see preceding story). Another was to join with other church bodies in extending an invitation to evangelist Billy Graham to come to India.

CMA leader Y. T. Aghamkar is FECI president, Pastor T. C. George of the St. Thomas Evangelical Church of South India is vice-president, and Disciples of Christ cleric P. Pannalall is general secretary. The federation will meet triennially in a general assembly, with regional assemblies for the local churches taking place in the interim.

Missiologist Donald McGavran of Fuller Seminary, who was on hand for the celebration, says India is ripe for the FECI’s emphasis on evangelism. Spiritual hunger and famine among India’s half-billion population is no less a disaster than the food shortage, he implies, yet many churches in the ecumenical camps seem more concerned about internal politics and social action than about outreach.

Among the developments attracting McGavran’s interest:

• Christians in the thousands of large new housing complexes are organizing Bible study groups, cell groups, even new congregations;

• The five million Mahars, one-time Hindus who turned to Buddhism in 1956 but found no saviour there, are “more responsive to the Gospel than they have ever been”;

• Christian radio is reaching hundreds of thousands, and many non-Christians are taking Bible correspondence courses, resulting in large numbers of requests for baptism.

As the government of India increasingly turns a cold shoulder to missionaries from the West, India’s financially hard-pressed churches and believers are doing more to reach India’s masses on their own. The FECI is one evidence. Another is a new missionary society organized in South India. It already has sent sixty-five South Indian couples as missionaries to North India and plans to send more—all on Indian money alone.

Bench Beliefs

Several court actions involving religious considerations were taken recently.

The U. S. Supreme Court, by refusing to hear an appeal, in effect let stand a ruling that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) can require religious broadcasting companies to maintain non-discriminatory employment policies. The case concerned the King’s Garden organization, which operates two radio stations in Edmonds, Washington. In 1971 King’s Garden turned down a job applicant for religious reasons, and he complained to the FCC. The FCC did note in a brief that religious broadcasters are permitted to discriminate in the employment of “key personnel,” including those on the air or TV screen.

The high court also let stand a lower-court ruling requiring members of the Bethesda Baptist Church of Port Chester, New York, to exercise due process in seeking to dismiss their pastor, James H. Howell. A majority of the members, accusing Howell of alien theological views, voted to fire him, but the church’s constitution required a three-fourths vote, and Howell refused to bow out. His opponents then took the case to court.

Pending before the Supreme Court is a petition filed in behalf of parents and their children who attend sectarian schools in Missouri. The petition asks the court to review a Missouri Supreme Court decision that denied the loss of textbooks to children attending church-related and synagogue schools. In that decision, children attending non-sectarian private schools were not denied textbook loans.

An appeal is also expected to be brought regarding a Minnesota Supreme Court decision that overturned as unconstitutional a 1971 law providing income-tax credits or refunds to parents of children attending private and parochial schools. The action continues a nationwide trend of court bans on parochaid in virtually all its forms.

In New York, a federal court upheld the constitutionality of state welfare regulations that permit “religious-matching” of children to foster-care institutions operated by religious groups but publicly funded.

Religion In Transit

Evangelist Billy Graham again placed second in the annual Gallup-poll list of men the American people most admire, behind Henry Kissinger and ahead of President Ford, Edward Kennedy, and George Wallace.

A court ruling in 1973 forbade government sponsorship of the traditional nativity scene near the national Christmas tree in the nation’s capital. A private group, the American Christian Heritage Association, led by a Baptist layman, was permitted to sponsor the scene that year. Last month there were three displays: the ACHA’s, an American Legion post’s (plastic figurines), and one by the Christian Service Corps mission agency (live drama with elaborate staging).

Evangelist Leighton Ford’s one-minute inspirational feature is now shown on thirty-two television stations in seventeen states. Viewer surveys indicate the comment-on-a-topic spot, scheduled right after news shows, is seen by a daily audience of about five million.

The 179,000-member Presbyterian Church in Canada, the country’s third-largest denomination, is observing its centennial year. The church was born of a merger of eight Presbyterian groups in Montreal in 1875. When three Canadian denominations—Methodist, Presbyterian, and Congregational—agreed in 1925 to form the United Church of Canada, more than a third of the Presbyterians remained aloof, choosing to continue the denomination.

Next month’s Convocation on Church Growth, headed by Pastor Robert H. Schuller of the 7,000-member Garden Grove Community Church in California, will meet at the church instead ofin Jerusalem. Travel costs and Mideast uncertainties were blamed for the shift.

No funds will be available to send any new Lutheran Church in America missionaries overseas this year, according to an LCA administrative report. Increased costs and declining support were blamed. There are 183 LCA overseas missionaries, down from 325 in 1969.

Seventh-day Adventists and Mormons rank lower in cancer mortality rates than any other groups of Americans, according to studies by UCLA medical researcher James Enstrom. He suggests diet and life-styles may be the reason.

The Bible-Science Association of Caldwell, Idaho, is publishing three weekly science readers for use in elementary and junior-high schools.

Named as chaplain to the California Senate: Shoko Masunaga, 58, Japanese-American pastor of the Buddhist Church of Sacramento, an affiliate of the 25,000-family Buddhist Churches of America (Jodo Shinshu Buddhism), headquartered in San Francisco. Masunaga was nominated to the one-year term by Senator Albert Rodda, a United Methodist who has made the chaplaincy nominations for the past sixteen years.

A questionnaire distributed to delegates to the three major Lutheran church conventions in Canada shows 81.6 per cent favor union of the three bodies (the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Canada and the Canadian sections of the Lutheran Church in America and the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod).

Personalia

Campus minister David A. Shank of Goshen (Indiana) College was named speaker for “The Mennonite Hour” radio broadcast, replacing David Augsburger, who has accepted a teaching position at Northern Baptist Seminary in suburban Chicago.

William L. Phillips, bilingual pastor of Eglise Baptiste d’Ahuntsic in Montreal, is the recently elected president of the Fellowship of Evangelical Baptist Churches in Canada.

Joy Hansell was promoted to the position of editor of Pentecostal Testimony, official organ of the Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada. Miss Hansell is the only woman to hold the senior editorial post on a major Canadian religious publication.

Richard M. Winchell, administrator andformer missionary to South Africa with The Evangelical Alliance Mission of Wheaton, Illinois, is TEAM’S new general director. He succeeds Vernon Mortenson, who was named chairman of TEAM’S board. TEAM has 1,008 missionaries on 23 fields with a national-church membership of 60,000 served by 334 pastors and 1,200 other workers.

World Scene

Four persons were killed and two others seriously injured last month in the worst highway accident in Operation Mobilization’s seventeen-year history. An OM van and a large truck crashed head-on in fog near Slavenski Brod on Yugoslavia’s treacherous two-lane auto-put. Killed were New Zealander Chris Begg, head of OM’s intensive evangelistic campaign in India’s Uttar Pradesh state, his wife, and two Americans, Earl Jay Sunanday, 24, a member of Allen-wood (Pennsylvania) Presbyterian Church, and Sharon Brown, 24, of Christ Bible Church in Hamilton, Montana.

The government of Uruguay last month shut down a publication of the fifteen-congregation Waldensian Church in that country. Officials, citing in part a July editorial that mentioned World

Council of Churches economic aid to groups in Uruguay, Chile, Viet Nam, and Africa, alleged that the WCC promotes subversive activity throughout the world. The WCC then threatened legal action against Uruguay if it does not retract “false and defamatory” statements.

Many Christians were imprisoned and killed in the war that began in the Portuguese colony of Angola in Africa because they were Christians and different from the rest of the population,” alleges missionary Donald Jeffrey in a recent article in Christian Missions in Many Lands. But sweeping changes were made under the new government installed in Lisbon last year. Christians have come out of hiding, and “among the thousands of untried, unsentenced, suffering prisoners released were hundreds of Christians.”

More than 20,000 Scripture portions in several languages were distributed by 200 young people of the Church of Christ in Zaire to the thousands who flocked to see the recent George Foreman-Muhammed Ali “fight of the century.”

Dejean Replogle, 16, and seventeen fellow Holy Land tourists from Main Street Baptist Church in Jacksonville, Florida, were the targets of a grenade attack at the ruins of Bethany outside Jerusalem. The teen-ager, hit by shrapnel, underwent amputation of her right leg. Pastor E. C. McDaniel and the others escaped injury.

Founder-president K. E. Abraham of the 500,000-member Indian Pentecostal Church of God died in Kottayam, India, at age 76.

Assemblies of God minister Joseph Gyanfosu, 55, leader of the Ghana delegation to the Lausanne congress on evangelization, resigned his post as acting secretary of the Bible Society of Ghana to engage in full-time evangelism. He attributes his decision to the challenges of Lausanne.

An International Congress of Chinese Evangelicals will be held in Hong Kong in 1976, an outgrowth of last summer’s evangelism congress in Lausanne.

DEATH

DON R. FALKENBERG, 80, founder and president emeritus of the Ohio-based Bible Literature International, which supplies literature in 175 languages to workers in 151 countries; in Kissimmee, Florida, after a long illness.

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