Bishop Vedanayagam Samuel Azariah
Introduction
The significant change in the Christianity’s center of gravity shifted in the twentieth century from the Western to the non- Western world. During that time many great Christian leaders emerged in non- Western countries, most of their names are unknown outside their own church or national boundaries. Their life stories can provide rich insights for Christians and non- Christians alike into issue of pressing concern for our world as well as to maintain religious and civil liberties within pluralistic cultures. This discussion is dealing with an Indian Christian leader Bishop Vedanayagam Samuel Azariah. His life, contributions to the mission, methods used in mission and the lessons from the methods are the main area of discussion.
1. Early years
1.1 Birth
Vedanayagam Samuel Azariah was born in a Tamil family in an obscure village in the Tirunelveli district, on August 17th 1874. Azariah had a very humble beginning. His father Velayudam was a Hindu and came to Christian faith and adopts the name Thomas Vedanayagam,[1] and Ellen was his mother. He was Ellen’s first and only son.[2] His father died early, so he was brought by a widowed mother who neither spared the rod nor spoiled the child but was a dominant influence in his life.[3] There was no softness in the upbringing of the future leader of the Church.
1.2 Education
Azariah attended the village school where the boys learnt to read from the Palmyra leaf books and traced their alphabets with their fingers on sand. At the age of ten Azariah was send to the boarding- School.[4] After passing through boarding- School he went to Church Mission College at Tirunelveli. In 1893, after a year as a pupil teacher in the C. M. S. high School at Palamkotta, he migrated to the Christian College, Madras, where he joined the B. A class, and there the principal gave the name Azariah, which he became famous.[5]
1.3 Conversion and Commitment
Azariah was born into a very spiritual atmosphere; his father was a ordained minister of the Anglican Church. From childhood onwards Azariah was dedicated to God for His service by his parents and he had a great love for missionaries. The wider background of the common life of the Tirunelveli Church also influenced him to commit him for the service to the Lord.[6] There was no recorded incident of a definite conversion experience in the life of Azariah; his family back ground was simple and deep evangelical piety. His life in boarding- School also helped him come closer to God and to grow in Christian experience and commitment.[7]
Azariah was in contact with YMCA since 1893 when he was a college student in Madras. He was an active member for three years, and he developed a special affection for the YMCA. After completion of his study he was offered the post of secretary of YMCA for South India and continued for the next thirteen years.[8] During this time he came to contact with Sherwood Eddy, the travelling Secretary for the YMCA in India and Ceylon. Azariah considered YMCA secretaryship as a call from God. As YMCA secretary Azariah dedicated himself work with humility, gratitude and sincerity of purpose.[9]
1.4 Marriage
In 1898he had married Ambu Mariammal Samuel, one of the first Christian women in South India to take a college course, whom he described as "the most spiritually minded girl in Tirunelveli."[10]
2. His Contributions
2.1 Indian Missionary Society of Tirunelveli (IMST- 1903)
In the year 1902, Azariah had come on a mission to Jaffna, there he found a completely indigenous missionary society, worked and supported entirely by Tamil Christians, and for the first time faced the bitter truth that India, with all its religious heritage, had allowed the spread of the gospel to be undertaken by foreigners.[11] He felt ashamed to think of his own church in Tirunelveli, with it all richness, not having any efforts for mission. When he returned to Tirunelveli, he shared the vision with other like minded Christians. They prayed, and in February 1903 they founded the “Indian Missionary Society of Tirunelveli”. Its principles were; “Indian men, Indian money and Indian engagement and an area of work where no other missionary society was working”. Later they found Dornakal to be such a place and decided to start the work. The Bishop gladly accepted the proposal and recognized as the new mission.[12]
2.2 National Missionary Society of India (NMSI- 1905)
Azariah was more encouraged by the YMCA’s promotion of the Indian leadership. Local CMS missionaries had actually put mission theory into practiced by trying to establish self- governing, self- supporting, and self- propagating churches. These gave more encouragement to promote Indian leadership, and a secure belief in the Indian church’s ability to manage her own affairs and prompted him to launch another indigenous missionary society.[13], ‘on Christmas Day 1905, in Carey’s historic library at Serampore National Missionary Society of India was launched by a group of Indian leaders, with Azariah as its first general secretary’[14], The NMS was an interdenominational society aiming to spread Christianity in India and surrounding territories such as Afghanistan, Tibet, and Nepal.[15]
Azariah’s Indian Christian Missionary movements brought a turn in the century to a new step by establishing autonomous missionary societies. IMS and NMS are the most ambitious Indian missionary endeavors, founded by Indian Christians; they remained organizationally distinct from the western societies.[16]
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| Mr.V.S. Azariah, Mr. K.T.Paul, Mr.J.W.N. Hensman The National Missionary Society Of India is founded on scripture particularly the great Commission of Jesus Christ in Mark 16:15 “Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature’, Vision India for Christ Mission To proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ to Indians by Indians with Indian money and methods. Faith Expect great things from God. Attempt great things for God. Beginning:On the commission of Jesus Christ, NMSI had its beginning on the Christmas day 1905 when it was founded by God’s chosen 17 Prominent Church men representing various churches and ministries. Among them Mr.V.S. Azariah, Mr. K.T.Paul, Mr.J.W.N. Hensman and others are significant. |
V. S. Azariah, an ex- untouchable, became a champion of ecumenism among the Churches of South India. Along with a few other Indian Christians he founded the first indigenous missionary society, the Indian Missionary Society (IMS) of Tirunelveli, in 1903, and the National Missionary Society (NMS) in 1905. He contended that Churches had to become missionary Churches. For many years he was the Chairman of the National Christian Council of India (NCCI), an effectual participant in the International Missionary Council (IMC), and one of the leaders in the movement which emerged as the Church of South India in !947. He was modern India’s most successful leader of the depressed classes and of non- Brahmin conversion movements to Christianity during the early twentieth century.[17]He lived to see a diocese of over one hundred thousand members where forty years before there had been only eight thousand.[18]
3. Missionary Call
In 1909 Azariah left the YMCA to become an ordained Anglican missionary of the IMS to Dornakal in the Telugu speaking dominion of the Nizam of Hyderabad.[19] As the first secretary of the IMST, Azariah was responsible for sending the first missionaries to Dornakal. After a meeting in Madras where he appealed for people to go as missionaries, suddenly he felt a burden that he must go himself.[20]
3.1 Missionary To Dornakal
As a missionary priest, Azariah regarded himself primarily as an evangelist. He lived in a tend and travelled to distant villages on his bicycle with his food packet, tracts, gospel portions etc. Thus he worked for three years as an ordinary missionary in the villages of Andhra Pradesh. He took great pains to master Telugu and its literary style as well as the village idiom. He loved Andhra with its fine old culture, and preserve as part of the heritage of the Telugu Church.[21] The six pastors under his care worked mainly with outcasts.[22]
4. First Indian Bishop Of the Anglican Church
Azariah was ordained as the first Indian bishop in the Anglican Church in 1909. In 1912 he was placed in charge of the diocese of Dornakal.[23] He has known in Dornakal Diocese by the affectionate honorific Thandrigaru (father). He remained the only Indian diocesan bishop in the Anglican Church until his death. [24]
As a bishop he did not have all the comforts and luxuries, he worked under considerable limitations and hardships. Travelling was so difficult, there were no roads, and the only means of travel was by bullock- cart or on foot. To avoid the heat of the day the bishop travelled by night. He had to face the thieves and the danger of the tiger- infested forest. But he was willing to pay the price to fulfill his mission to the people of Dornakal.[25]
5. Missionary Methods
a. He believed and advocated cross-cultural missions: - Azariah thought of Indians as beings missionaries in their own country and to their own people, crossing their own cultural boundaries and presenting the claims of Christ to people. He himself worked as a cross- cultural missionary in Dornakal.
b. He emphasized the prayer movement for the evangelization of India: -He emphasized the importance of prayer for missionary work in India. He advocated the formation of prayer groups to pray and intercede for the evangelization of India.
c. He believed in the centrality of the Church in Mission.
d. He gave importance to the witness of the whole Church.
e. He followed the people movement approach.
f. He emphasized teaching and training local leadership.
6. Lessons to Learn from the Life and Work of V. S. Azariah
a. Azariah was committed to his call and ministry; - He had the willingness to d any work, and always ready to make any sacrifice for the lord.
b. He was a man of prayer.
c. He had a fine inner humility.
d. He was a self- disciplined person.
e. He had an earnest desire to see thing from a spiritual perspective.
f. He had a vital interest in people rather than in things or places: - He had a supreme faith in his fellow men.
g. He had a commitment for mission and evangelism.
h. He was a self- taught man: - Even though he was unable to complete his degree course, yet he had a great eagerness to learn, and he was a good reader.
i. He was very conscious of time: - He utilized every opportunity he had to the best of his ability.
Conclusion
Bishop V. S. Azariah (1874-1945) is one of those little- known leaders whose life sheds new light on the challenges and opportunities faced by religious minorities throughout the world today. As a Christian leader in a non- Christian culture, he negotiated complex cultural, social, political, and economic pressures with exceptional skill and diplomacy. He promoted evangelism and Christian unity in India and was determined that Indian Christianity should be indigenous.
Bibliography
Anderson, Gerald H. eds., Mission Legacies: Biographical Studies of the Modern Missionary Movement. New York: Orbis Books, 1994.
Gill, Kenneth D. “Azariah, Vedanayakam Samuel. Evangelical Dictionary Of world Missions. Edited by A.Scott . Michigan: Baker Books,2000, 101- 102.
Graham, Carol. “The Legacy of V. S. Azariah”, International Bulletin of Missionary Research 9/1 (January: 1985), 16-19.
Graham, Carol. Azariah of Dornakal. Bloomsbury: S. C. M Press L. T. D, 1946.
Harper, Susan Billington. “Azariah, Vedanayagam Samuel”, Biographical Dictionary of Christian Missions. Edited by Geerald H. Anderson. Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1998,35-36.
Harper,Susan Billington. In the Shadow of the Mahatma: Bishop V. S Azariah and the Travails of Christianity in British India. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2000.
Jayakumar, Samuel. Dalit Consciousness and Christian Conversion: Historical Resources for a Contemporary Debate. Chennai: Mission Educational Books, 1999.
Ponraj,S. D. Pioneers of the Gospel: The Life and work of Missionaries Who Pioneered the Spread of Gospel in India. Madhupur: Mission Educational Books, 1996
[1]. S. D. Ponraj, Pioneers of the Gospel: The Life and work of Missionaries Who Pioneered the Spread of Gospel in India (Madhupur: Mission Educational Books, 1996), 88.
Well researched and very well written... God bless
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