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THE MODERN PERIOD
the missions as the body representing the Protestant Christian opinion of India. Its objects are "to stimulate thinking and investigation on missionary questions; to enlist in the solution of these questions the best knowledge and experience to be found in India and other countries and to make the results available for all churches and missions in India; to help to codrdinate the activities of the provincial councils; and through common consultation to help to form Christian public opinion and bring it to bear on the moral and social problems of the day." It is functioning efficiently as an agency for the codrdination of missionary enterprise throughout India and a clearing house of information and ideas concerning the whole Christian enterprise in this land. It holds all-India conferences: its official organ is the National Christian
Council Review. The Fraser Commission on Village Education, the Mass Movement Survey, the Lindsay Commission on Christian Colleges, the Survey of Christian High Schools, and spread of information regarding religious education, social hygiene, and advance in evangelism—are all so many definite and tangible results brought about by the work of the National Christian Council. The Council was also responsible for sending four Indian delegates as a Mission of Fellowship to the Churches in Great
Britain. All Christian workers, both foreign and Indian, ought to keep themselves in touch with the doings of this central
Christian organization and its provincial Christian councils.
Another feature of the work of the past quarter of a century has been the many cooperative tasks that have come into existence all over India. The Women's Christian College in Madras, the Vellore Women's Medical School and the Kinnaird Women's
College, Lahore, are recent instances of some of these union efforts. Codperation in training teachers, women evangelists, and ministers is also being attempted or planned in various areas. The shortage of financial resources in the "Sending Churches," and the growing conviction that union in missionary effort is strength to the Christian cause are together leading missions and Churches
INDIA AND THE CHRISTIAN MOVEMENT
to discover new avenues of codperative effort. In the growing competition with Government and non-Christian private institutions, missions cannot make their best contribution in these fields except by combining the available resources to produce efficient and model pieces of work.
A third feature of the missionary work that requires separate notice is known as the Christian Mass Movements.
It is a moderate estimate to reckon eighty per cent of all the Indian Christians as the result of mass movements. The Syrian
Christians in Travancore were most probably the result of a mass movement on the West Coast many centuries ago. The Roman Catholics on the extreme southwest and southeast coasts are descendants of converts that came out in large communal groups during the time of Francis Xavier. The great Christian communities in South Travancore, Tinnevelly, and Madura are the results of similar movements towards Christianity within the past hundred years. The tens of thousands of converts from the aboriginal tribes—Mundas, Oraons and Santals—are due to mass movements that took place two and three generations ago.
The recent large growth of the Church in the Telugu country is the result of accessions from caste and outcaste groups during the past seventy years. In this area it is still going on. The large additions to the Christian religion in the Punjab, the United
Provinces, and Western India from among the outcastes are the results of mass movements.
While these facts cannot be challenged, the importance of mass movements in the Christian enterprise and the responsibilities thrown by such movements on the Church were perhaps never before so fully realized as in the past thirty years. Among those who have advocated the cause of mass movements and have believed in them may be mentioned the late Bishop Thoburn of the Methodist Episcopal Church in North India, Bishop Whitehead of Madras, and scores of other missionaries, English and American, who are still in our midst. The subject has attracted great at-
THE MODERN PERIOD
tention through the Mass Movement Survey by J. W. Pickett under the auspices of the National Christian Council.
Dr. Pickett's report published under the title The Christian Mass Movements in India is a scientific study of these movements with the aid of data obtained by a careful survey of typical mass movement fields in different parts of India.
The conclusions arrived at by Dr. Pickett are these:
1. That mass movements for most Indian people constitute the most natural way of approach to Christ. The more individualistic way preferred in Western countries is not favored by people trained from early childhood to group action.
2. That group movements are a great protection from that social dislocation which carries grave menace to morality and religion. Those who have moved together exercise a stabilizing influence over one another.
3. That the danger of Westernization is minimized and that the life of the group continues in all external aspects are natural, real and therefore genuinely indigenous. The Church of the villages, which is predominantly the Church of the mass movement, is thoroughly Indian in social pattern and customs.
4. That they are a great aid to the propagation of the religion, by preserving the influence of converts upon their relatives, caste associates, and neighbors. The individual is left in the community to bear his witness to the faith, and not lifted up out of it as an individual convert often is, who thus loses all his influence on the community from which he emerged.
There are, however, dangers in group movements that have to be constantly watched and remedied.
Personal experience and individual conversion is apt to be neglected. There is great need in these fields for preaching repentance, forgiveness and personal faith. Patient instruction, adult education, special efforts for personal conversion cannot be neglected in such areas.
INDIA AND THE CHRISTIAN MOVEMENT
Caste distinctions are likely to be carried into the Church life also. The individuals who come out of their communities overcome caste prejudice easily, and by necessity. The groups are apt to be clannish and to confine their Christian fellowship to their own particular communal group. The leaders of the Church must be on their watch against this tendency to caste exclusiveness.
The importance of training the young in mass movement areas cannot be over-estimated. The first generation comes out by conviction; the second generation constitutes the young followers who have some acquaintance with their parents' change of worship and life; but the third generation inherits the Christian name and religion as a birthright and is apt to grow callous and indifferent to the deeper claims of religion on individual life. Church schools staffed by Christian masters for children of the converts become from the first a prime necessity in all mass movement work.
Missions and Churches that neglect these neglect them to their cost.
There is also the tendency to stagnation. According to Dr.
Pickett:
There are still many hundreds of thousands of unconverted members of the castes and tribes in which major mass movements have taken place. Non-Christian Malas and Madigas in the Telugu country (4,472,000) far outnumber those who have been converted. ... There are still more than seven hundred thousand Animists in Assam, more than 350,000 non-Christian Oraons, Mundas, Kharias, and Santals in Chota
Nagpur, more than 360,000 sweepers, and 5,800,000 Chamars unconverted in the United Provinces.
All this calls for a more intensive work for the Christians already gathered in. They are members of the Body of Christ, through which it is His will to accomplish His purposes for India. On the health, strength and witness of this Church depends further victories. Adequate provision of pastoral ministry, a wellthought-out plan for instruction in the faith, care of the young,
THE MODERN PERIOD
holding up a high standard of Christian conduct, firm exercise of Church discipline, and lastly, steps to increase the economic resources of the people—all these appear to be indispensable in any program of advance in mass movement work. Where these are neglected by Churches and missions, these: group movements hinder rather than further the expansion of Christianity.
One notable result already evident in the mass movement areas of the Telugu country must be recorded. Where the movement of the outcastes into the Church has been welcomed and cultivated and good care has been taken to provide adequate instruction and training to the converts from the earliest beginnings of their
Church life, the example of the converts has resulted in the ingathering of caste people. Caste conversions within the past few years total well over thirty-two thousand from about forty different upper castes. The reasons given by the converts for becoming Christians are truly striking. A large majority attribute their first interest in the Christian religion to the changed lives of the outcaste converts; some, to Scripture portions lent them by the Christian teachers or their own Christian laborers; some, to their early education in Christian village schools; and some, to help received in mission hospitals. But the first reason is what is given by a great majority of the converts. This is proved by the fact that in a large majority of instances, caste converts have come out precisely in those villages where there are already Christians from the outcaste communities. Dr. Pickett mentions an area where out of 187 villages with caste converts, 170 villages had already Christians of outcaste origin. In a neighboring mission district, it has been seen that caste conversions followed outcaste converts in sixty-nine out of a total of seventy-six villages. In the Dornakal Diocese, there is no caste convert in any village where already there were no Christians of outcaste origin.
Moreover, the caste converts in many places have expressly wanted to be shepherded by the teachers and pastors through whom they came to accept the faith in Christ, and are continuing
INDIA AND THE CHRISTIAN MOVEMENT
to look to them as their spiritual leaders, even though formerly they were inclined to look down upon them as belonging to outcastes.
This caste movement is still in its initial stage: but it is full of hope. Adequate instruction of the men and women converts is needed from the commencement. Carefully selected workers should be set apart for this work. Women missionaries and women evangelists will be needed to take charge of the instruction of women, as very often, because of past social conventions, it is most difficult to get women to receive instruction alongside of their men folk and from men teachers. Suitable literature is required to put into the hands of those who can read. Special facilities must be provided for the education and training of young people from these converts who are likely to become leaders in the future. Careful instruction has to be given on the duty of Christian stewardship, on the Christian attitude towards labor, on purity of home-life, and against the evils of caste pride. If these are carefully attended to from the beginning of the movement, there is no reason why the Christian movement should not spread very widely among these land-owning middle classes and win as great victories among them as it has in the past among those reckoned as depressed classes.
Che rena Ch varch NE of the most outstanding features of the World Missionary Conference held in Edinburgh in 1910 was the recognition it gave to The Church in the Mission Field. The chairman of the commission in introducing that memorable report pleaded most earnestly for recognition of the existence in the mission field of "not a little, but a great Church, established in the very heart of the pagan world, the young Christian Church which itself now was a great mission to the non-Christian world." A new era began in the missionary world when the indigenous Church was thus frankly acknowledged to be the greatest, the most potent, and the most natural factor in the evangelization of the country.
It is on the efficiency, purity, and missionary activity of this Church that the evangelization of India will ultimately depend.
But, alas, what is called the Indian Church is not one organic entity. The divisions of Christendom make it impossible for the indigenous Christians to belong to a visible "One, holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church," and in consequence they belong to as many Churches and sects as there are Churches and sects that send out missionaries from the West. What we term the Indian
Church is the theoretical aggregate of the indigenous Christians in all the Churches—having different ecclesiastical loyalties, following various forms of Church government, and worshiping in many differing ways in numerous churches and chapels throughout the length and breadth of this vast continent. There are a few things that may be said to be common to them all: they are all nominally Indian Christians, and enumerated as such for all civil
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purposes; they are connected with one or another of the numerous Christian Churches in the land; and at least in theory are all responsible for bringing India to the feet of Christ.
Strictly speaking, therefore there is no Indian Church in the singular; there are, in the plural. Churches, denominations or sects are numerous and their number cannot be accurately estimated. If therefore the term Indian Church is sometimes used, it refers to the groups of Christians gathered into the Church of Christ and grouped under these many separate units.
FEATURES OF THE INDIAN CHURCH
1. Numerical strength. The total Christian community in India numbered at the last census 6,296,763. Of these, 2,768,598 are
Roman Catholics; 525,607 belong to the Syrian Churches; and the remainder, that is 3,002,588 are connected with the non-Roman and non-Syrian Churches. Indian Christians number 5,990,234, of whom two-thirds are found in South India—that is Madras,
Hyderabad, and Mysore. In the Districts of Guntur and Tinnevelly one in nine, and in Travancore one in three of the population is Christian.
The rate of increase of the Indian Christian population during the past few decades is:
Per cent Per cent 10/7220 lars ane ncn ero
TOOLSET ga etn ee aes MachowROhh. dels Gage a or Eyl MOREE
AS OPRON Ra
fa <a (Sh CPREF RGN GIG Ta or eo, Set The actual number of Indian Christians in 1872 was 1,246,288; whereas in 1931 it was 5,990,234—an increase of 389 per cent. In sixty years indigenous Christians have increased nearly four-fold.
Moreover, Christianity shows the largest increase when compared with most other religions. During the past decade while the Buddhists increased 10.5 per cent, the Moslems thirteen per cent, and the Hindus 10.4 per cent, the Christian community increased
32.5 per cent. Christians of non-Roman connection increased forty-one per cent.
THE INDIAN CHURCH
Ti During the decade preceding 1931, the largest advance appears to have been made in the Hyderabad State (141.6 per cent).
Assam (88.7) follows next, and then come Travancore (36.8), Central Provinces (31.6), and Madras (29.9). The United Provinces comes near the bottom, with only two per cent advance in the ten years.
Educational attainments. This community, though numerically small, is well in advance of other communities in education and literacy. Of the almost six million Indian Christians, 1,089,000 are literate—that is 18 per cent. This is higher than that of Hindus,
Moslems, and Sikhs. Of those literate, fourteen per cent are literate in English. In female education, they are well ahead of all, except the Parsis. The Commissioner of the Census of 1911 uttered words which are still true:
Although Indian converts to Christianity are recruited mainly from the aboriginal tribes and the lowest Hindu castes who are almost wholly illiterate, they have in proportion to their numbers three times as many literate persons as the Hindus and more than four times as the Mohammedans.
In Bihar and Orissa the Indian Christians rank second in literacy only to Europeans and Anglo-Indians, having seventy-six per thousand able to read and write. The corresponding figure for the animistic tribes from whom the religion of Christ has mainly drawn its converts is five. In Madras twenty-two per cent of the Indian Christian men and eleven per cent of the women are literate, and six per cent of the men and three per cent of the women are literate in English. In general literacy and literacy in English, Indian Christian women are seen to be far ahead of other communities: the proportion per 1,000 being twenty-nine for Indian Christian women, 1.4 per Hindus and nine for Moslems. This spread of education is a great asset to the Indian Church. Who can measure the influence the community may exert over other communities by its intelligence,
INDIA AND THE CHRISTIAN MOVEMENT
learning, and enlightenment? Already there are indications that this influence has begun to exert itself on the life of the country.
Whereas Christians constitute only about one per cent of the population, seven per cent of those engaged in the teaching profession belong to this community. In the Madras Presidency the Indian Christian proportionately takes a larger share in the work of instruction than any one else, except the Brahman. There is probably no other community that has such a large proportion of its total number engaged in the work of imparting primary education. One service by which Indian Christians may make themselves essential and useful to the nation, is that of education.
To become the teachers of young India and to spread through the length and breadth of this land the blessings of education, even an elementary education, is no mean privilege. The service rendered through this one channel alone ought to justify the claim of the Indian Church to be one of the most powerful factors in the regeneration of the land.
3. Place in Indian civic life. The Indian Christian's freedom from caste prejudice and caste favoritism, his uprightness of character, his long training in boarding schools and hostels under the eye of the European missionary ought to fit him to be preéminently an impartial and correct officer in public service. There is no doubt that this is recognized and appreciated by the people and the Government. In speaking to an Indian Christian audience in South India the European District Officer said that "the Church had contributed an ever-increasing number of able officers to the public services and also given a large percentage of good and able men to other professions."* The fact that in some of the large cities in North as well as in South India the office of secretary or commissioner to municipal corporations has been acceptably held by Indian Christians, and that the appointment is often given by the vote of a non-Christian electorate, affords testimony to the respect and confidence won by deserving Indian Christians from 1 Quoted from the Madras Mail, vol. xlvii, no. 295.
THE INDIAN CHURCH
we their Hindu and Moslem countrymen. The service that the Christ-liberated Indian can thus render to the motherland is unlimited.
4. Organized Church life. Another feature of Indian Church life in recent years is the setting up of indigenous Church organizations in different parts of India. Only a few can be mentioned here. In the year 1907, the Presbyterian and the Congregational
Churches of South India formed themselves into The South India United Church. The churches established by the Congregational missionary societies of Great Britain and the United States and the Presbyterian missions of Scotland and North America form the constituent parts of this Church. Its supreme governing body is called the General Assembly and meets once every two years.
It combines in it eight Church councils located in South India and North Ceylon. The Moderator is elected at each General
Assembly and more than once Indians have been elected Moderators and have discharged their duties acceptably to all. Its total
Christian community numbers 263,000 (of whom 53,000 are communicants), ministered to by 239 ordained ministers.
The North India United Church is a similar organization, combining in one ecclesiastical organization the churches established by the missionary work of the American Presbyterian
Mission, Church of Scotland Mission, the Irish Presbyterian Mission, and other smaller Presbyterian Missions from Great
Britain, Australia, America, and Canada. It consists of five synods, subdivided again into nineteen Church councils. It was organized in the year 1924 and had in it at the end of 1931, 145,572 baptized persons, ministered to by 444 ordained ministers and 117 licentiates. The first Moderator of this organization was an Indian, and Indians are taking a prominent part in the deliberations of the governing body of this Church also.
The Federation of Evangelical Lutheran Churches in India is another organization of a similar type, established in the year
1926. The federation seeks to give "an outward expression to the
INDIA AND THE CHRISTIAN MOVEMENT
spiritual unity" of the Lutheran Churches in India and aims at conserving for the Church in India what is distinctive in the Lutheran Church. The Tamil, the Andhra, the Santal, the Gossner, the West and East Jeypore, Evangelical Lutheran Churches and the Danish Mission Church are all members of this all-India
Federation. The president of the federation in 1935 was an Indian layman.
The year 1927 saw great changes in the organization of The Church of England in India. On July 7 of that year, the National
Assembly of the Church of England passed the Indian Church Measure, providing for the dissolution of the legal union between the Church of England and the Church of England in India. This received Royal Assent on November 23. In the same year, Parliament enacted the Indian Church Act, making "provision incidental to and consequential on the dissolution," annulling all letters patent and all ecclesiastical corporations in India, and all statutory connection between His Majesty the King and the Indian Church. This Act received Royal Assent on December 22.
On March 1, 1930, the severance took effect and the Church of England in India took the name by which it is now known, The Church of India, Burma, and Ceylon. It thus became from that date an autonomous branch of the Anglican Communion. Its supreme governing body is the General Council which meets once in every three years. There are fourteen dioceses in this
Church of which one has an Indian diocesan Bishop. There were in 1935 three Assistant Bishops of whom two were Indian. Each diocese has a diocesan council with lay and clerical representatives from every organized parish or pastorate in the Church. The total membership of the Church of India in 1934 was 449,400, shepherded by 1,179 ordained ministers of whom 212 were taking care of English congregations.
In all these ecclesiastical organizations, Indians and non-Indians are working together as equal partners and codperators in the work of the Church.