The YMCA in India
The YMCA in India
The Young Men's Christian Association was created in the nineteenth century from an amalgam of different interdenominational organizations founded by young European and American men in response to changing work and living conditions in the Victorian period. In England, the YMCA was one of several socioreligious movements that arose to counteract the disruptive effects of industrial society on young men. The London Association was created on 6 June 1844 to provide for the spiritual welfare of young unmarried men of the commercial classes who had moved from farms to industrial centers to find employment and were confronted with difficult industrial living and working conditions.' Inspired by the panevangelical spirit characteristic of mid-nineteenth century British Protestantism, the YMCA was ecumenical from its inception. As YMCA founder George Williams discussed plans for founding the association with three other men in the drapery business, he said: `Here we are, an Episcopalian, a Methodist, a Baptist, and a Congregationalist - four believers but a single faith in Christ. Forward together!'2
The same combination of rapid industrialization and spiritual revivalism helped to turn the YMCA almost unintentionally into an international movement. Early associations were established in Boston and New York to `throw a kind of protecting influence around young men coming from the country to the city.'3 Associations were formed in smaller New England towns, often without knowledge of each other. In Europe, associations often grew out of men's organizations originally formed to meet the needs of wandering journeymen apprentices.4
Although these dispersed groups had no common origin, they united into a worldwide YMCA movement through the leadership, first, of the original London YMCA inspired by the international gathering at the Great Exhibition of 1851 and, later, of the World Alliance of YMCAs formed in Paris in 1855.5 The number of associations grew quickly from 338 in 1855 to 2043 in 1876 and expanded beyond the original western boundaries.6
This was a new creation of the modern age: an international ecumenical movement of young men representing neither a single Christian denomination nor a single nationality.? In South Asia, branches were established, at first largely by and for Europeans, in Calcutta (1854),8 Colombo (1859), Kandy (1861), Trivandrum (1873), and Lahore and Bombay (1875).9 The early organizations were established voluntarily and were generally unaware of each other's existence; and so this early period of YMCA activity in India to 1889 has been aptly described as the `Epoch of Introduction and of Isolation.'10 The South Asian associations were established by Europeans and Americans who had come to India and Ceylon as teachers, missionaries, or businessmen." Gradually, the associations came to include Indians and Sinhalas as full members, although the Calcutta branch long remained restricted to Europeans and Eurasians.
Later in the century, a powerful, largely forgotten upsurge of student missionary activity from America sparked an intense era of YMCA missionary activity in India. In 1886, a hundred young American men committed themselves to foreign missionary service at the first student sum met conference of the YMCA at Mt. Hermon School in Northfield, Massachusetts, sparking a nationwide wave of missionary volunteers which exceeded 2,000 within one year.12 At the helm of this movement was a charismatic Princeton University graduate, Luther D. Wishard (1854-1925), who dreamed of building a world student movement through the missionary extension of the YMCA.13 During a four-year world tour beginning in 1888, he laid the foundations for an aggressive global outreach program by the YMCA and its missionary wing, the Student Volunteer Movement (SVM), which was organized in 1888 by another dynamic YMCA secretary from Cornell University, John R Mott (1865-1955).
John Mott became a Nobel Laureate and is remembered today as American Protestantism's foremost ambassador of missionary ecumenism. His parish was nothing less than the student community of the whole world.'14 He served as National College Secretary of the YMCA from 1890 to 1915 and traveled more than two million miles during a lifetime that included frequent visits to India.15 His tireless efforts to promote student missionary enthusiasm had a profound impact on students around the world at the turn of the century. Motivated by its `watchword' slogan, the evangelization of the world in this generation,' his Student Volunteer Movement aimed to proclaim the gospel to the entire world, calculating that if each of the world's Christians witnessed to a hundred non-Christians, the whole earth would hear the Christian message by the year 1900 and be prepared for the millennium.16 This was the vision that gripped Azariah during his student days in Madras and during his years as a YMCA secretary from 1895 to 1909.
Azariah first heard John Mott in December 1896 while attending a YMCA conference in Calcutta. Mott was promoting the Student Volunteer Movement on a 60,000-mile world tour during a 20-month period from 1895 to 1897 which took him to 22 countries and 144 educational institutions.17 Azariah was impressed by Mott's intensity which contrasted so sharply with the more relaxed approach of his mentors at Madras Christian College. As Mott wrote about Miller's praeparatio evangelica strategy in later years:
I was pained, in India, to hear the president of a Christian college rise to say that he did not expect conversions in this generation among their students, and I could hardly trust my ears when he added that the governing board at home agreed with him that they were not to expect conversions in this generation.
This strategy, Mott believed, was doomed to failure in both the short and long term: