From Foreign to Indigenous Mission
From Foreign to Indigenous Mission
The stated objective of most foreign missionaries from at least the midnineteenth century had been to establish self-governing, self-supporting, and self-propagating churches in mission lands.12 However, in practice, many western missionary societies had been reluctant to hand responsibility over to native Christians. Most missions were slow to execute the devolutionary ideal of establishing independent national churches in the field.13 The missionaries' unwillingness to share duties with capable Indian Christians was at least partly attributable to paternalistic if not racist-imperialist sympathies.14 Some Indian Christians - particularly the poor and less educated ones - also desired to be dependent on foreign societies. One of nineteenth-century India's most preeminent native pastors, W. T. Sathianadhan, predicted in 1873 that, unless the Indian church was weaned from its dependence on foreign societies, the native churches will entwine themselves like parasites about Missionary Societies, and their increasing number will entail such an amount of expenditure as the Home Churches and Societies, with ever-increasing calls upon their liberality, will not be able to meet.115
Sathianadhan's warning proved remarkably prescient.16 When S. Pulney Andy established the National Church of India in Madras in 1886 as a self-supporting, self-governing church unburdened by western sectarian differences, he received only limited support from both missionaries and Indian Christian colleagues.'? The missionaries objected that a new church would weaken already existing native churches, few of which were self-supporting, and would contribute to a multiplication of sects. Indian pastors also resisted recruitment into the new church because, Andy claimed, they preferred to be maintained by foreign missions and viewed dependence on Indian congregations as beneath their dignity. By 1898, interest in the new national church was waning universally.
Azariah's Tinnevelly Indo-Anglican church was more independent of its parent western domination than many other churches in India. Local CMS missionaries such as John Thomas had actually put mission theory into practice by trying to establish self-governing, self-supporting, and self-propagating churches. As the boy Azariah watched his father serve as one of the church's more prominent leaders, he developed confidence in the Indian church's ability and right to self-governance. Azariah was also encouraged by the YMCA's promotion of Indian leadership. Ecclesiastical models, rather than political models, gave Azariah a secure belief in the Indian church's ability to manage her own affairs and prompted him to launch India's first two major indigenous missionary societies: The Indian Missionary Society of Tinnevelly in 1903 and the National Missionary Society in 1905.
Indian Christians had undertaken internal evangelism before. Indeed, the initial successes of western missionaries were probably much more dependent on forgotten Indian pioneers than the missionaries cared to admit; and Azariah was conscious of several precedents within the Tinnevelly Diocese.18 A study of conversion in India has noted that, `even during the nineteenth century when Christian white missionaries were involved in evangelism in [India], the actual gospel work was largely done by Indians.'19 By 1858, there were four Indian workers for every foreign Protestant missionary and probably a similar proportion among Roman Catholics.20 Missionary reports aimed at European readers often referred to these merely as `native workers,' if at all.21 As one historian has observed, Azariah was described in CMS reports only as `a "native worker" in 1902, and was named "Azariah" for the first time in 1903.'22
Despite their obscurity in the West, Indian Christians employed by foreign missions always performed many critical functions, such as translating inaccessible languages, gathering cultural, geographical, economic and political information, and acting as virtually autonomous teachers and evangelists in rural areas where living conditions were more primitive and where Europeans did not believe they could survive. The Scottish Presbyterian mission ordained Narayan Seshadri to the full status of missionary in 1854 and placed him in charge of work at Indapur and Jalna (about 200 miles northeast of Bombay) from 1862 until his death in 1891. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, many foreign missions in South India established small native evangelistic bands to work locally among non-Christians. W. T. Sathianadhan organized a `Preachers' Association' in 1887 whose forty-two members were drawn from over six castes and were financially self-supporting.23 By 1904, G. S. Eddy was able to assert that `almost all the older and stronger missions of South India have organized missionary societies in the native churches.'24
Although most of these societies worked only within their own local culture areas, several Indian societies were formed with a wider missionary vision for work throughout India and abroad. The Home Missionary Society established in 1898 by the American Baptist churches in Telugu country sent Indian missionaries to unevangelized jungle tribes within their own districts, to hill tribes of the Kurnool District and the Nilgiris, and to the Telugu and Tamil people in Natal, South Africa. Eddy publicized the development of Indian missionary initiatives, arguing in several articles that, in the face of such efforts, greater responsibility should be given the Indian church to determine its own destiny.25
Most of these earlier indigenous groups were established by western missions and thus lacked organizational or financial identities apart from their parent societies.26 Azariah's Indian Christian missionary movement at the turn of the century took a new step by establishing autonomous missionary societies with self-supporting and self-governing organizational structures for sending Indian missionaries throughout India and abroad to evangelize `foreigners.' The IMS and NMS were by far the largest and most ambitious Indian missionary endeavors of their kind. Founded by Indian Christians, they remained organizationally distinct from western societies and forged their links instead with other native Indian churches.
Azariah played a foundational role in each of these pioneering associations. The IMS was the missionary wing of Tinnevelly's congregations (supported first by CMS congregations and eventually also by SPG congregations) to unevangelized areas, both in India and abroad. The NMS was an interdenominational society aiming to spread Christianity in India and surrounding territories such as Afghanistan, Tibet, and Nepal. Freedom from official control by foreigners gave both the IMS and the NMS greater independence in recruitment, financing, and evangelistic strategy than the earlier European- and American-based movements. However, both societies sought foreign advice and counsel, particularly in choosing fields of work that avoided competition with other missionary forces in India. Azariah's leadership helped produce in the IMS and NMS a remarkable example of a movement that achieved independence from and equality with western missionary societies without developing any major hostility in working relationships.