THE IDEA OF THE CHURCH

The story of Christianity in India must be primarily the story of Indians becoming Christians, developing as Christians, creating for themselves an identity as Indian Christians, adapting the church in an Indian setting, making themselves felt as a recognised and integral part of Indian society. At the start, however, Christians in a non-Christian country will be foreigners. Up to 1786 the story has to be largely the story of the foreigners.

If, however, missionaries had been asked to state the way in which they understood their position and their work, the majority would have declared almost passionately that the purpose of their being there was the emergence of an Indian church, that their role could not be more than transitory, and that it was the Indian church that must take root and thrive and survive. This was what Ingoli had insisted on from the very day on which the Propaganda was constituted in 1622. Similar utterances can be quoted from other parts of the Christian world.

So far there would have been general agreement; but if the missionaries had been asked in what way they understood the meaning of the phrase ‘an Indian church’, there might have been considerably less agreement.