The Indian Church: Her Glaring Needs and Possible Remedies
A personal appraisal by Rev. P.T. Chandapilla
Rev. P. T. Chandapilla was the first Gen. Secretary of the Union of Evangelical Students of India and after 25 years in that role he became the first Gen. Secretary of the Federation of Evangelical Churches of India. He was also the Vicar General of the St. Thomas Evangelical Church of India with responsibility for overseeing STECI churches outside of Kerala State)
I want to bring before you for consideration some of the needs and weaknesses I have been able to sense in the Indian Church at large, and the evangelical churches in particular. After outlining those under several heads, I intend to propose possible remedies to deal with the situation in order that the Church will become vibrant and vigorous fulfilling her responsibilities in this nation. What I have to state here is primarily for the consideration of the leadership of the Church because I believe they are the people whether ordained ministers or lay leaders who can do much in the renewal of the Church. I consider myself as part of this appraisal.
Part I (Needs in the Church)
- Church Life: I find that there is general ignorance of God’s Word in its depth and power. The knowledge of the Scriptures wherever found is largely superficial. Those who claim to know the Word of God show blatant disregard and disobedience in practice.
Christian discipleship is not a missing phenomenon in the experience of the members of the Church but also conspicuous by its absence. In the last 23 years of my experience with the Church leadership in this country I have rarely come across those leaders who either talk about discipleship or show any understanding of the subject. The absence of this vital quantum of Christian experience has left the Church spiritually poverty-stricken and recessive.
It is also my observation that the Christian Church is a stranger to the Sermon on the Mount. It is not the basis and manifesto of living of either individuals in the Churches or groups of Churches. Both the leaders and the members of the Indian Church are equally culpable here. There is very little understanding of what it is to apply the Sermon on the Mount and its injunctions on a practical level of daily life and relationships among Christians. As a result we find among other things the Indian Church suffering from the awful disease of litigations and court-cases. Even among Church groups of a pacifistic persuasion fights, taking revenge and court-cases are not uncommon.
Thus the life of the Indian Church is at a very low ebb if not at its lowest in the last 30 years.
- Church Ministry: The local Church or localized groups of Christians are not recognized as the caring and compassionate communities following the Head of the Church, Jesus Christ. Therefore, the Indian Church being the sum total of local Churches has no message of compassion either to the nation or to the individual non-Christian. The compassionate ministry of the church locally in any community is almost nil. Consequently on the national level we are next to little in such activities. Many of the Church leaders are bothered by this in India, particularly in the Protestant denominations. They are unable to find a serving order of Christians among their members.
In practical outworking of life and methodology of evangelism the Indian Church is conditioned to American and western philosophies. The lifestyle and methodology of the New Testament days and the primitive Church of the first 3 centuries of this era have never been considered by the Indian Church. I do not know of one local Church anywhere in India which is committed to such a life and ministry. Here I am not referring to individuals. Further, we have failed to find out ways and methods suited to our genius and people in India, in the whole enterprise of evangelism. Nearly 30 years ago I knew of some Christian leaders in South India applying the principle of one by one or two by two evangelistic bands. Of course, the life and example of Sadhu Sundar Singh is given lip service to by the Indian Church but never seriously taken up in practice.
For the above reasons and others the Christian ministry in India, whether evangelistic or service oriented, is very weak indeed.
- Church Leadership: There is a shortage of leaders and ministers and workers in the Church. Even within the ranks of existing Indian Christian leaders one hardly finds true servants. The understanding of leadership as servant-hood is a missing quantum. The leaders do not love to serve. Rather they love to rule and boss about. I see very seldom leaders serving one another but I find many of them competing one with another and looking for opportunities to overtake one another. Where some take to the calling of serving, at the back of it, it is seen there are always ulterior and adulterated motives which flow out into the open sooner or later. Serving because it is the nature and vocation of Christian leaders after the example of Jesus Christ and teaching and preaching the message of servanthood on the level of Christian leadership in India are rare to find, indeed. Those leaders who started well as servants after they get leadership opportunities forget that they are any longer servants. Instead they take to bossing and lording it over probably unaware as to what they are doing and all the time auto-suggesting that they are serving.
This kind of leaders in the Church abound at present in India. Certainly this is one of the primary and significant reasons for the weakness of the Indian Church.
- Church viscera: By this I mean the internal condition in the area of thinking and feeling of the Church. Every church group is interested in its own promotion and growth, whatever happens to its neighbour church or to Christian churches abroad, particularly if these others churches do not belong to one’s own doctrinal and denominational persuasion. One cares a hoot about them. Actually, there are the thought and plans how not only to outdo but also to undo the others. I find very few Churches working and living for the betterment of other churches outside their fellowship and the Indian church at large.
Almost every church I have come across in India is at best caught up with its own local and limited problems. Very few churches are alive to the challenges around them, even locally. We find them satisfied with or gloating in their positions and prestige locally. There is very little consciousness in local Church congregations of world vision or a desire to know the problems and progress of the cause of Christ at large in the world or in this nation. Part of the reason is the language limitation of local Churches, with the many languages and dialects found in India. But even where different Church groups exist in the same language area they have very little intercommunication or concern for one another.
This sort of internal dynamics of self-centred thinking and feeling leaves the Indian church very anaemic and unhealthy.
- Environmental irrelevance: The Indian Christians, although they belong to a nation where there is religious freedom and equality, have very little Indianness in them. Their feeling for India, as say the RSS or Jan Sangh Hindu feels, is absent. They behave like foreigners only existing to enjoy the privileges and good things available here as long as possible and then to escape elsewhere in the world where goings can be better. They miss the purpose of their existence as Indian citizens in the Indian nation. Therefore, the Church made up of these Christians misses her role and destiny in this great country.
Christians all over India through a generation of Indian nationhood have at best learnt to be Indians by behaving and imitating like the non-Christian Indian citizens. After 30 years I find it increasingly difficult to make out the difference between non-Christians and Christians all over India. In our socio-economic and political behaviour we, Christians, compete with non-Christians employing non-Christian parameters of value judgements and standards. Thus we think we are identifying with India and are endeavouring to secure an identity in a non-Christian nation.
By and large Christians and Christian churches have little knowledge and sense of the history of our country, of Christian Missions in India or of the Indian Church. This is primarily expressed in our different and many languages. As a result of all this we Indian Christians do not know where India is going, what is our national destiny and place in the family of nations.
Like the rest of Indians, Indian Christians are also oblivious to beauty, indolent to cultivate beauty, whether in the neighbourhood and homes where they live or in the fellow Christians and people at large in this variegated nation of many colour, hues and reservoirs of beauty. Christians also, like all other non-Christian Indians, look at people and things around them for their utility value and for their acquisition. So very few Indians look for the aesthetic enjoyment of beauty in people and nature. This gross and callous heart of insensitivity to beauty is the result of ignorance and absence of the worship of God who is the most beautiful Being and who is a God of beauty.
These are other environmental irrelevances leave the Indian Church as the flotsam and jetsom of useless strivings and struggles for existence in this stupendous nation.
- General Factors: The Christian Church makes higher claims for itself and for its position than what it possesses. At best most of the boasting that the Church makes came to her at the expense of Christians and Churches abroad over three or four centuries. The Indian Church, for herself, has made very little original contribution. The Church does not want to look at herself and her failures of the past and present. As it is true of all other religious groups the Church likes to pat on her own back and show off how she is more right and better than others.
This unwillingness for self-criticism and correction is one of the sure marks of immaturity and weakness in the Indian Church. Wherever there is an individual, a group or a nation that tries to look for its own failures and shortcomings with the intention of learning from its mistakes there is much hope and also evidence of mature self-consciousness.
