History of Protestant Missionary Education in India

Abstract

The subject of missionaries provokes considerable scholarly and political disagreement. Unlike other aspects of colonialism, missionary work continues unabated in the postcolonial present. Evangelical organizations maintain schools, churches, and hospitals in the non-western world where they are simultaneously lauded and resented by governments and native populations. In India, this is especially true as evidenced by heated debates over the legality of proselytizing, the anxiety over conversion, and the recent violent attacks on missionaries and churches by right wing Hindu groups. On the scholarly side, this is paralleled by the general emphasis on conversion as the main feature of the evangelical encounter. This focus has produced two very divergent sets of studies: Church historians who write teleological accounts of the founding of a particular mission or Church and anthropologists who examine the conceptual and theoretical meanings of “conversion.” Not surprisingly, much of this work tends to be geographically focused on South India, which saw the growth of the largest number of Churches and converts. Historians of missions, meanwhile, are slightly less concerned with the conceptual meanings of conversion than with the assessment of evangelicalism’s place within imperial expansion. Yet it may be more productive to consider how attention to pedagogy can reveal the influence of Christian evangelicalism on colonial society through the development of modern forms of education, instead of an exclusive focus on the percentage of the population who chose to convert.