The modern movements in India

Affiliation

Dentist of Exeter; early member of the Dublin Brethren; self-supporting missionary to Baghdad (1829-33) and India (1833-52)

Appears in

The Plymouth Brethren and dispensationalism, The modern movements in India

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Life

Dentist of Exeter

Anthony Norris Groves was born on 1 February 1795 at Newton Valence in Hampshire, the son of a businessman. He trained in chemistry and dentistry in London, set up practice in Plymouth and then in Exeter, where he became prosperous. In 1816 he married his cousin, Mary Bethia Thompson. He was converted in his teens and longed to be a missionary, but his wife at first opposed it.

Christian Devotedness

In 1825 he published a short book, Christian Devotedness, arguing from the Sermon on the Mount that Christians should not lay up treasure on earth, but give away all beyond their daily needs and trust God for the future. He and his wife did so, and their example made a deep impression on several young men, among them George Müller, later Groves's brother-in-law, and Henry Craik.

Dublin

Intending to be ordained in the Church of England and sent out by the Church Missionary Society, he studied at Trinity College Dublin from 1826. In Dublin he met a circle of earnest evangelicals, including John Gifford Bellett and Edward Cronin, and in 1827 he suggested to them that believers, as disciples of Christ, were free to break bread together each Lord's Day without waiting for an ordained minister, since Scripture did not require one. This conversation is often regarded as one of the beginnings of the Brethren movement. He came to the conclusion that ordination was unnecessary for preaching or for the Supper, and gave up his plan to be ordained.

Baghdad

In June 1829, with his wife, two sons and a small party including the deaf scholar John Kitto, he set out for Baghdad without the support of any mission society, travelling by way of St Petersburg and the Caucasus. In Baghdad he opened a school and studied Arabic. In 1831 the city was struck by plague, flood and siege; his wife died in May and his infant daughter soon after. A small party of Brethren, including Francis Newman (brother of John Henry Newman), arrived to join him. The mission produced few converts.

India

In 1833 he went to India. He travelled widely, encouraging Indian evangelists and urging missionaries of every society to cooperate. On a visit to England in 1834-35 he married Harriet Baynes and recruited William Bowden and George Beer, who founded the Godavari Delta mission in Andhra in 1836. To make the mission self-supporting, he tried a series of business ventures in the Chittoor district, including sugar production; they mostly failed and left him in debt. Among the Indians he trained was John Christian Aroolappen of Tirunelveli, who later led an indigenous revival.

The letter to Darby

On 10 March 1836 he wrote to J.N. Darby warning that the Brethren were becoming defined by what they rejected, and that Darby was building a system as exclusive as those he had left: "you will find the position you are now taking... will make you more known by what you witness against than what you witness for." When the movement divided in 1848 he remained with the Open Brethren of Bethesda, Bristol.

Key dates

• 1 February 1795 - Born at Newton Valence, Hampshire
• 1816 - Marries Mary Bethia Thompson
• 1825 - Christian Devotedness
• 1826-27 - Studies at Trinity College Dublin
• 1827 - Proposes the breaking of bread without ordained ministers
• June 1829 - Leaves for Baghdad
• May 1831 - His wife dies of plague in Baghdad
• 1833 - Arrives in India
• 1835 - Marries Harriet Baynes
• 10 March 1836 - Letter to J.N. Darby
• 1836 - Godavari Delta mission begun by his recruits
• 1852 - Returns to England, ill
• 20 May 1853 - Dies in Bristol

Teachings and claims

Living by faith

Groves taught that Christians, and missionaries above all, should not accumulate wealth or depend on guaranteed salaries, but trust God to supply their daily needs, giving away everything beyond that.

Free ministry

He held that the New Testament requires no ordination for preaching or for the breaking of bread, and that every believer may serve as gifted by the Spirit.

Catholicity of spirit

Unlike many of the Brethren, he held that the bond of fellowship is life in Christ, not agreement on church order, and that believers should be received whatever their denomination. He continued to share in worship with Anglicans and others.

Indigenous mission

He insisted that Indian Christians should lead their own churches, that Indian evangelists should not be dependent on foreign salaries, and that missionaries should adopt a simple way of life.

Documented controversies

Baghdad

His decision to take his family to Baghdad without support, and the deaths that followed, were criticised by contemporaries as imprudent. Groves saw them as a trial of faith.

Missions in India

His insistence on self-support and his criticism of salaried missionaries brought him into conflict with established missions, and his business ventures failed.

Brethren divisions

His appeal to Darby went unheeded, and he lived to see the division of 1848, which he had foreseen.

Death

He returned to England in poor health in 1852 and died on 20 May 1853 at Bristol, in the home of George Müller, aged 58. He is buried at Arnos Vale cemetery in Bristol.

Legacy

Groves has been called the "father of faith missions". His example and writings inspired George Müller, Hudson Taylor and the many missions that followed the faith principle. His emphasis on indigenous leadership anticipated principles that later became standard in mission theory. In India, the Brethren churches of the Godavari delta and the indigenous movements of Tirunelveli connected with Aroolappen trace their beginnings to him. Within the Brethren, he is remembered as the voice of an open, catholic spirit against Darby's exclusivism.

Measured against the creeds

Groves confessed the creeds' doctrine of God and Christ, and his self-denial, his willingness to suffer, and his charity towards Christians of other churches were admirable. His warning to Darby is one of the wisest documents of the Brethren movement.

His teaching on ministry, however, departs from the historic order. The four traditions hold that Christ instituted the ministry of word and sacrament, and that the apostles appointed elders and gave instructions for their ordination (Acts 14:23; 1 Timothy 4:14; Titus 1:5). The Augsburg Confession (Article 14) teaches that no one should publicly preach or administer the sacraments unless rightly called. To make the Lord's Supper possible without an ordained ministry was the first step in a movement that, as Groves himself feared, came to have no means of settling its disputes except by division.

Major writings

• Christian Devotedness (1825)
• Journal of Mr. Anthony N. Groves, Missionary, during a Journey from London to Bagdad (1831)
• On the Liberty of Ministry in the Church of Christ (1835)
• Memoir of the Late Anthony Norris Groves, compiled by his widow (1856)

Affiliation

Brahmin Sanskrit scholar and social reformer; Christian from 1883 (baptised in the Church of England); founder of the Mukti Mission, Kedgaon

Appears in

The modern movements in India, The history of tongues

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Life

A pilgrim childhood

Ramabai Dongre was born on 23 April 1858 in the forest of Gangamul in the Western Ghats, in what is now Karnataka, into a Chitpavan Brahmin family. Her father, Anant Shastri Dongre, a Sanskrit scholar, had taught his young wife Sanskrit against the custom that forbade it to women, and he taught Ramabai in turn. The family lived as wandering pilgrims, reciting the Puranas at temples and holy places across India. In the great famine of 1876-77 her father, mother and sister died of starvation.

Calcutta and marriage

With her brother Srinivas, Ramabai walked thousands of miles and reached Calcutta in 1878, where her learning astonished the pandits. They gave her the titles "Pandita" and "Saraswati", unprecedented for a woman. She lectured on the education of women and on the rights given to women in the ancient texts. Her brother died in 1880, and she married Bipin Behari Medhavi, a Bengali lawyer of a lower caste - a marriage that defied convention. Their daughter Manorama was born in 1881. Her husband died of cholera in 1882.

Pune and England

Widowed at twenty-three, she moved to Pune, where she founded the Arya Mahila Samaj, a society for the education of women, and gave evidence in 1882 to the Hunter Commission on education, urging the training of women teachers and doctors. In 1883 she went to England, supported by the Anglican sisters of the Community of St Mary the Virgin at Wantage, to study medicine. There, after long study, she was baptised in the Church of England in September 1883, with her daughter. She studied at Cheltenham Ladies' College and taught Sanskrit. Her correspondence with the sisters and with the Bishop of Bombay shows a mind that would not accept doctrines it did not understand: she questioned the Athanasian Creed and, for a time, the full deity of Christ, and resisted pressure to submit to Anglican authority in all things.

America and the Sharada Sadan

In 1886 she went to the United States, where she published The High-Caste Hindu Woman (1887), an indictment of child marriage and the treatment of widows. American supporters formed Ramabai Associations to fund a home for widows. Returning to India, she opened the Sharada Sadan ("Home of Learning") in Bombay in March 1889, moving it to Pune soon after. It was officially non-sectarian, but when some residents became Christians, Hindu reformers who had supported her, including leaders of the Pune nationalist press, accused her of proselytism, and many withdrew their daughters.

A deeper conversion

Around 1891 she experienced what she described as a personal conversion: she had been a Christian by conviction, she wrote, but now found Christ as her Saviour. Her faith became more evangelical, and she drew closer to the holiness and revival movements.

Mukti

During the famines of 1896-97 and 1899-1900 she travelled into the famine districts and brought hundreds of starving girls and widows to a farm she had bought at Kedgaon, near Pune. There she built the Mukti ("Salvation") Mission, which by the early 1900s sheltered around two thousand women and children, with schools, workshops, farms and a printing press, all run on the faith principle. Inspired by news of revival in Australia and Wales, she organised praying bands from 1903. In June 1905 a revival broke out at Mukti, with confession of sin, weeping, visions and, from late 1906, speaking in tongues. Her colleague Minnie Abrams described it in The Baptism of the Holy Ghost and Fire (1906), which was read widely by early Pentecostals.

The Marathi Bible

From 1904 she devoted much of her time to translating the Bible into simple Marathi from the Hebrew and Greek, which she had learned for the purpose. She completed it shortly before her death. Her daughter Manorama, who was to succeed her, died in July 1921.

Key dates

• 23 April 1858 - Born in the Western Ghats
• 1876-77 - Parents and sister die in the famine
• 1878 - Reaches Calcutta; titled "Pandita"
• 1880 - Marries Bipin Behari Medhavi
• 1882 - Widowed; founds the Arya Mahila Samaj in Pune
• 1883 - In England; baptised in the Church of England
• 1887 - The High-Caste Hindu Woman
• March 1889 - Opens the Sharada Sadan
• c. 1891 - Personal evangelical conversion
• 1896-1900 - Famine rescues; Mukti founded at Kedgaon
• June 1905 - Revival at Mukti
• 1907 - A Testimony
• 1919 - Awarded the Kaisar-i-Hind medal
• July 1921 - Her daughter Manorama dies
• 5 April 1922 - Dies at Kedgaon

Teachings and claims

Women's dignity

Ramabai taught that women, including widows and girls of every caste, are made in God's image and must be educated and protected. She attacked child marriage, the treatment of widows and the exclusion of women from learning.

Christ above denomination

She held that her loyalty was to Christ and Scripture rather than to any denomination, and she was critical of Western missionary divisions. Mukti was independent of any mission board.

Revival and caution

She welcomed the 1905 revival as God's work but cautioned against seeking tongues, against treating them as the necessary evidence of the Spirit, and against excitement. She taught that the Spirit's chief fruit is love and that the Spirit's presence is shown by humility and holiness.

Documented controversies

Conversions

Hindu reformers and nationalists accused her of breaking her promise of religious neutrality at the Sharada Sadan, and the controversy damaged her standing in Pune.

Independence

Some Anglican and missionary leaders criticised her for her doctrinal independence and her refusal to submit to church authority, and for her later association with revivalism.

The revival

Some missionaries were critical of the emotional phenomena at Mukti and of the tongues. No personal scandal is recorded.

Death

She died at Kedgaon on 5 April 1922, aged 63, a few days after completing the proofs of her Marathi Bible.^†

Legacy

Ramabai is honoured as one of the great figures of modern India - a scholar, social reformer and pioneer of women's education - and the Government of India issued a stamp in her honour in 1989. In the Church she is commemorated in the calendars of the Episcopal Church in the United States and the Church of England. The Mukti Mission continues at Kedgaon. The 1905 revival made Mukti a significant site in the early history of Pentecostalism, and her caution about tongues has been cited by those who resist making them a test.

Measured against the creeds

Ramabai's mature faith confessed Christ as Lord and Saviour and the authority of Scripture, and her love for the destitute is one of the clearest examples in modern Christian history of faith working through love (Galatians 5:6). Her early questions about the Athanasian Creed and the deity of Christ were those of a searching convert, and she came to a clear confession of Christ.

Her caution about tongues is close to the historic churches' view that the Spirit's gifts are many and that love is the greatest (1 Corinthians 12-13). Her independence from church order is the point at which she differs most from the historic tradition: she was baptised into the Anglican Church and remained in communion with it, but Mukti was an independent work, and she valued the inner experience of revival more highly than the sacramental life of the Church. Her own life, though, shows how far the gospel can lead someone in the service of the neighbour.

Major writings

• Stri Dharma Niti (Morals for Women, 1882)
• The High-Caste Hindu Woman (1887)
• The Peoples of the United States (Marathi, 1889)
• A Testimony of Our Inexhaustible Treasure (1907)
• Marathi translation of the Bible (completed 1922)

Affiliation

Disciples of Christ missionary in India (1923-54); founding dean of Fuller Seminary's School of World Mission (1965)

Appears in

Church growth, seeker churches and the megachurch, The modern movements in India

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Life

A missionary family

Donald Anderson McGavran was born on 15 December 1897 in Damoh, in the Central Provinces of British India, the son and grandson of missionaries of the Disciples of Christ. The family returned to America when he was a boy. He served in the US Army in the First World War, studied at Butler College in Indianapolis, and in 1920, at a student missionary convention, committed himself to mission. He studied at Yale Divinity School and the College of Missions in Indianapolis and married Mary Howard in 1922.

India, 1923-54

In 1923 he and his wife went to India under the United Christian Missionary Society. He served as an educator and administrator and, from 1929, as secretary of the mission, responsible for its schools, hospitals and churches in the Central Provinces. In 1936 he received a doctorate in education from Columbia University.

He was troubled that after decades of work, the mission's stations had produced only small, static congregations, while elsewhere in India whole communities were becoming Christian in "mass movements". In 1934-36 he worked with the Methodist bishop J. Waskom Pickett, whose study Christian Mass Movements in India (1933) had documented these group conversions, on surveys of church growth in the central provinces. From 1937 he gave up administration to work as an evangelist among the Satnami people of Chhattisgarh, hoping to see a people movement begin; over seventeen years, about a thousand were baptised, fewer than he had hoped.

The Bridges of God

His reflection on these years produced The Bridges of God (1955), which argued that peoples, not only individuals, come to faith, and that missions should seek "people movements" in which groups become Christian together along the bridges of family and kinship, rather than extracting converts one by one from their communities into mission compounds. The book was widely read and widely contested.

The Institute of Church Growth

After further studies of churches in Africa, Latin America and Asia, he founded the Institute of Church Growth at Northwest Christian College in Eugene, Oregon, in 1961. In 1965 Fuller Theological Seminary invited him to become founding dean of its School of World Mission and Institute of Church Growth in Pasadena. He recruited a faculty that included C. Peter Wagner and Ralph Winter, and for a decade the school was the centre of evangelical missiology. Understanding Church Growth (1970) became the standard text of the movement. He continued to write, teach and edit the Church Growth Bulletin until his eighties.

Lausanne and after

His ideas were prominent at the International Congress on World Evangelization at Lausanne in 1974, and controversial there. The Lausanne Committee's 1977 Pasadena consultation was devoted to the homogeneous unit principle. In his last years he defended the priority of evangelism against what he saw as the dilution of mission into social action.

Key dates

• 15 December 1897 - Born in Damoh, India
• 1922 - Marries Mary Howard
• 1923 - Missionary in India with the Disciples of Christ
• 1929-37 - Secretary of the India mission
• 1936 - PhD, Columbia University
• 1937-54 - Evangelist among the Satnami of Chhattisgarh
• 1955 - The Bridges of God
• 1961 - Institute of Church Growth, Eugene, Oregon
• 1965 - Founding dean, School of World Mission, Fuller
• 1970 - Understanding Church Growth
• 1974 - Lausanne Congress
• 1977 - Pasadena consultation on the homogeneous unit principle
• 10 July 1990 - Dies in Altadena, California

Teachings and claims

Church growth as faithfulness

McGavran taught that God wills the growth of His Church, and that faithfulness in mission should be measured by whether people are actually being discipled and churches multiplied. He criticised what he called "search theology", which valued the proclaiming of the gospel regardless of response, and urged "harvest theology": find the responsive peoples and reap.

People movements

He held that people decide together, especially in group-oriented societies, and that missions should welcome "multi-individual, mutually interdependent conversion".

The homogeneous unit principle

His most famous and most disputed thesis was that "people like to become Christians without crossing racial, linguistic or class barriers". Churches grow fastest when they consist mainly of one people group, and missions should plant churches within each group rather than require converts to join a church of another culture or caste.

Discipling and perfecting

He distinguished "discipling" - bringing a people to Christ and baptism - from "perfecting" - their growth in holiness afterwards, and argued that missions had too often delayed the first in the name of the second.

Documented controversies

Segregation and caste

The homogeneous unit principle was criticised from the start as legitimising divided churches - racially segregated churches in America and caste-based churches in India. At Lausanne and at the 1977 consultation, critics argued that the gospel creates one new humanity in which the divisions of race and class are overcome (Ephesians 2:14-16; Galatians 3:28). McGavran replied that he was describing how people come to faith, not how they should remain, but the distinction was not always observed by his followers.

Pragmatism

Theologians criticised the movement's reliance on statistics and the social sciences, arguing that it treated the Church as an enterprise to be optimised and growth as the measure of truth.

Social action

His insistence on the priority of evangelism over social and political engagement placed him at the centre of the evangelical debate on mission in the 1970s.

Death

He died at his home in Altadena, California, on 10 July 1990, aged 92, a few months after his wife.^†

Legacy

McGavran is regarded as the father of the Church Growth Movement. Through Fuller, his ideas shaped evangelical mission strategy for a generation, including the focus on "unreached people groups". In North America, Wagner and others applied them to the local church, giving rise to the church-planting, seeker-sensitive and megachurch movements, and, through Wagner, eventually to the New Apostolic Reformation. In India, people-movement thinking remains influential in mission strategy.

Measured against the creeds

McGavran's concern that the Church actually make disciples of the nations is the concern of the Great Commission (Matthew 28:19), and his insistence that converts not be torn from their families and communities echoes the household baptisms of Acts (16:15, 33) and the Church's long practice of baptising whole peoples. His work drew attention to forms of mission that had, in practice, made Western culture a condition of the gospel.

But the historic churches confess the Church as one, holy, catholic and apostolic. Its catholicity means that it gathers every people into one body at one table, so that in the Eucharist "we, being many, are one bread" (1 Corinthians 10:17). A principle that builds churches around the boundaries of race or caste, however useful for growth, sits uneasily with that confession; the Church in India, in particular, has long struggled against caste divisions within its own congregations. And the Church's faithfulness is not measured by its numerical growth: the seed is sown by the word, and the growth is God's (1 Corinthians 3:6-7; Mark 4:26-29).

Major writings

• The Bridges of God (1955)
• How Churches Grow (1959)
• Understanding Church Growth (1970; rev. 1980, 1990)
• With Win Arn, How to Grow a Church (1973)
• Ethnic Realities and the Church: Lessons from India (1979)

Affiliation

Sikh convert (1929, Canada); founder of the Hebron assemblies, Hyderabad

Appears in

The modern movements in India, The Plymouth Brethren and dispensationalism

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Life

A Sikh childhood

Bakht Singh Chabra was born on 6 June 1903 at Joia, in the Punjab (now in Pakistan), into a prosperous Sikh family. He was educated at a Christian school, but he despised Christianity and once tore up a copy of the New Testament. He studied at Punjab University and in 1926 went to England to study agricultural engineering at King's College, London. He adopted a Western way of life, cut his hair and gave up his Sikh observances.

Conversion in Canada

In 1928 he moved to Canada to continue his studies and work in Winnipeg, Manitoba. There, through a Christian family who befriended him and through reading the New Testament, he was converted in 1929. He was baptised in Canada in 1932.^† He resolved to return to India as an evangelist.

Return to India

He arrived in Bombay in 1933. His family, who had expected him to return as an engineer, were bitterly hurt by his conversion and disowned him. He began preaching in the streets and in churches of every denomination, and was soon in demand as an evangelist. In the late 1930s campaigns he led in Karachi, the Punjab and Madras saw many conversions and a revival among Christians, marked by public confession of sin and restitution.

Indigenous assemblies

Bakht Singh became convinced that the denominational churches of India, dependent on foreign missions and divided by Western traditions, did not follow the New Testament pattern. From 1941 he began to establish independent congregations, the first of them Jehovah Shammah in Madras (Chennai). In 1950 he made Hyderabad his base, where the Hebron assembly became the centre of a network of hundreds of local churches across India and in Pakistan and beyond, known informally as the Hebron or "Brother Bakht Singh" assemblies. They had no formal denomination, no foreign funding and no paid clergy in the usual sense.

Holy Convocations

From 1941 he held annual "Holy Convocations", gatherings of believers lasting several days, at which thousands camped together for prayer, preaching, the breaking of bread and baptism. They became the signature of the movement.

Later years

He travelled widely in India and abroad, including Britain, North America and Australia, and was regarded by many evangelical leaders as one of the most significant Indian Christians of his age. In his last years he was frail, and leadership passed to elders of the assemblies.

Key dates

• 6 June 1903 - Born at Joia, Punjab
• 1926 - Goes to England to study engineering
• 1928 - Moves to Canada
• 1929 - Converted in Winnipeg
• 1932 - Baptised
• 1933 - Returns to India
• late 1930s - Revival campaigns in Karachi, the Punjab and Madras
• 1941 - Jehovah Shammah assembly, Madras; first Holy Convocation
• 1950 - Hebron, Hyderabad, becomes his base
• 17 September 2000 - Dies in Hyderabad

Teachings and claims

The New Testament pattern

Bakht Singh taught that the local church should follow the pattern of the New Testament as he understood it: believers' baptism by immersion, the breaking of bread every Lord's Day, leadership by a plurality of elders, prayer and fasting, and dependence on God alone for finances.

Indigenous Christianity

He insisted that Indian churches should be led and supported by Indians, worshipping in Indian languages and with Indian forms - sitting on the floor, singing Indian lyrics, men and women seated separately, women with covered heads.

Holiness and prayer

He preached repentance, holiness, separation from worldly practices, and the power of persistent prayer. Many of his hymns in Hindi, Urdu and Telugu are still sung.

Against denominations

He taught that denominational divisions were unscriptural and that believers should gather simply in the name of the Lord.

Documented controversies

Rejection of the historic churches

His assemblies, like the Brethren whom they resembled, regarded the historic churches' ministry and sacraments as unnecessary or worse, and rebaptised members who had been baptised as infants. Churches of the Church of South India and other bodies lost members to the assemblies and criticised his teaching as divisive.

Succession

After his death, and in his last years, the assemblies experienced divisions over leadership and property.^†

No personal scandal is recorded.

Death

He died in Hyderabad on 17 September 2000, aged 97.

Legacy

Bakht Singh is widely regarded as one of the most important leaders of indigenous Indian Christianity in the twentieth century. The Hebron assemblies continue in India and the diaspora, and his example of an Indian-led, self-supporting church movement influenced many other independent churches. His hymns remain part of Indian Christian worship.

Measured against the creeds

Bakht Singh confessed the Trinity, the deity of Christ and salvation by grace through faith, and his evangelistic zeal, his personal holiness and his insistence that the Church in India should not depend on foreign money command respect.

His ecclesiology, however, departs from the historic churches at the same points as the Brethren. The creeds confess "one baptism", which the Church has given to infants since the earliest centuries; to rebaptise those already baptised in the triune name denies that their baptism was Christ's. The Church is "catholic and apostolic", not a fresh gathering recovering a pattern lost for centuries; the Lord promised to be with His Church always (Matthew 28:20). The weekly breaking of bread was a recovery of ancient practice, but the historic churches hold that the Supper is the Lord's body and blood given by Him through His ordained ministry, not only a memorial of the gathered assembly.

The movement's dependence on one leader's gifts, and the divisions that followed his death, also illustrate the difficulty of churches without a wider order.

Affiliation

Independent Baptist, then independent Pentecostal-style healing evangelist; founder of the "Message" movement

Appears in

The healing revival, 1947-58, and after, Oneness Pentecostalism, The New Order of the Latter Rain, 1948, The modern movements in India

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Life

A Kentucky cabin

William Marrion Branham was born on 6 April 1909 in a log cabin near Burkesville, Cumberland County, Kentucky, the eldest of ten children of a poor family; his father drank heavily. The family moved to Jeffersonville, Indiana, across the Ohio River from Louisville, around 1912. Branham later said that a light had appeared over his crib at birth, and that at the age of seven a voice in a whirlwind told him never to drink, smoke or defile his body because there would be a work for him to do. He had little schooling.

Conversion and the Jeffersonville tabernacle

After working at various jobs, including a spell in Arizona, he was converted in about 1931 and ordained as an independent Baptist minister. In 1933 he held a tent revival in Jeffersonville and, by his later account, while baptising converts in the Ohio River on 11 June 1933, a bright star descended over him and a voice declared that as John the Baptist was sent to forerun Christ's first coming, so his message would forerun the second. Contemporary newspaper accounts of the baptism do not mention the light. ^† His followers built the Branham Tabernacle in Jeffersonville.

In 1934 he married Amelia Hope Brumbach. In 1937 the great Ohio River flood struck Jeffersonville, and Hope and their infant daughter Sharon Rose died of illness soon afterwards. Branham later interpreted their deaths as God's punishment for his having refused, on the advice of his Baptist friends, to minister among the "Oneness" Pentecostals who had invited him. He married Meda Broy in 1941.

The angel and the healing campaigns

On 7 May 1946, by his account, an angel appeared to him in a secret place and told him that he was sent to take a gift of divine healing to the peoples of the world, with two signs: a vibration in his left hand when he touched the sick, which would reveal the disease, and later the ability to discern the secrets of people's hearts. His first great campaign was in St Louis in June 1946, and within a year he was drawing crowds of thousands across the United States.

From 1947 his campaigns were organised by Gordon Lindsay, who founded The Voice of Healing magazine (1948) to promote them, with the healer F.F. Bosworth and others as associates. Branham's meetings - with "words of knowledge" about strangers' names, addresses and illnesses, followed by declarations of healing - set the pattern for the whole post-war healing revival. In January 1950, in Houston, a photograph taken during a debate between Bosworth and a Baptist critic showed a light above Branham's head, which his followers regard as a supernatural halo. He held campaigns in Scandinavia (1950), South Africa (1951), India (1954) and elsewhere, claiming crowds in the hundreds of thousands.

Decline and the "Message"

From about 1955 his campaigns declined as other evangelists - Oral Roberts, A.A. Allen and many more - drew the crowds, and his ministry ran into debt and tax trouble. He turned increasingly to teaching at the Branham Tabernacle, and his doctrine moved away from mainstream Pentecostalism. In 1960 he preached a series on the seven church ages of Revelation, identifying himself, by implication and then openly, as the angel-messenger to the seventh, Laodicean, age. In 1963 he moved to Tucson, Arizona, and preached a series on the seven seals, claiming that seven angels had appeared to him on a mountain near Sunset Peak in February 1963 to reveal them; his followers connect this with a ring-shaped cloud photographed over Arizona that day.

Key dates

• 1909 - Born near Burkesville, Kentucky, 6 April
• c. 1912 - Family moves to Jeffersonville, Indiana
• c. 1931 - Conversion; ordained an independent Baptist
• 11 June 1933 - Ohio River baptismal service
• 1937 - Ohio River flood; his wife and daughter die
• 7 May 1946 - Claimed angelic commission
• 1946-55 - Height of the healing campaigns
• 1948 - The Voice of Healing begins
• January 1950 - Houston "halo" photograph
• 1956 - Tax settlement; campaigns decline; meetings with Jim Jones
• 1960 - Sermons on the seven church ages
• 1963 - Moves to Tucson; sermons on the seven seals
• 18 December 1965 - Car crash near Friona, Texas
• 24 December 1965 - Dies in Amarillo, Texas

Teachings and claims

The healing gift and discernment

Branham claimed that his gift came directly from an angel and that God confirmed it with two signs, the hand vibration and the discernment of hearts. He spoke of "the Spirit of God" or "the angel" standing beside him during his meetings.

The serpent seed

He taught that the original sin in Eden was sexual: Eve had intercourse with the serpent, who was then a man-like creature, and Cain was their offspring. Humanity is therefore divided into two seeds - the seed of the serpent, descending from Cain, and the seed of God through Seth. He drew from this a harsh view of women, whom he blamed for the fall, and strict teaching on marriage and divorce.

God and baptism

He rejected the doctrine of the Trinity, calling it a doctrine "of the devil" that came from the Council of Nicaea, and held that the Father, Son and Spirit are three manifestations, or "offices", of one God, Jesus. He baptised in "the name of the Lord Jesus Christ" and taught that those baptised with the Trinitarian formula should be rebaptised.

The end-time messenger

He taught that each of the seven church ages of Revelation 2-3 had its messenger - Paul, Irenaeus, Martin, Columba, Luther, Wesley - and that he was the messenger of the last, the Elijah of Malachi 4:5-6, sent to restore the faith of the apostles before Christ's return. His sermons, his followers believe, are the "spoken Word" by which the bride of Christ is prepared for the rapture.

Denominations as the mark of the beast

He taught that organised denominations were a system of the "harlot" church of Revelation 17 and bore the mark of the beast, and urged his followers to come out of them.

Prophecy and the end

In 1933, he later said, he received seven visions of the future, culminating in the destruction of the world, and he predicted that these would be fulfilled by 1977.

Women and dress

He taught that women may not preach, cut their hair, wear trousers or make-up.

Documented controversies

• Failed healings. Investigations by journalists, doctors and church leaders in South Africa, Canada and elsewhere found that many people declared healed at his meetings were not; one "cripple" was found to have been pretending.

^†

• Tax. The Internal Revenue Service pursued his ministry for unreported income; in 1956 he agreed a settlement, paying a $40,000 penalty.^†
• Race. In a 1963 sermon he spoke warmly of the Ku Klux Klan and opposed racial integration, and he taught that the races should not intermarry.
• Jim Jones. He shared a platform with Jim Jones at Jones's Indianapolis convention in June 1956; Jones later used his methods of "discernment".
• Failed prophecies. His prediction that the world system would end by 1977 failed. His 1965 prediction that Los Angeles would sink into the ocean has not been fulfilled.
• Embellished stories. Historians have found that many stories of his childhood and early ministry grew in the telling and are not supported by contemporary sources.

Death

On 18 December 1965 Branham's car was struck head-on by a car driven by a drunk driver near Friona, Texas, while he and his family were travelling to Jeffersonville for Christmas. He was taken to hospital in Amarillo and died on 24 December 1965, aged 56. His burial was delayed until April 1966, after Easter, and some followers expected him to rise from the dead. A pyramid-shaped monument with an eagle stands over his grave in Jeffersonville.

Legacy

The "Message" churches - independent congregations that treat his recorded sermons as inspired revelation - are found worldwide, with especially large numbers in Africa, Latin America and India; estimates of followers range up to two million or more. ^†

His wider influence was greater still. He set the pattern of the post-war healing revival, and leading figures of that revival, the Latter Rain movement of 1948, and later prophetic movements drew on him; Paul Cain travelled with him, Oral Roberts and others imitated his methods, and Paulaseer Lawrie in India claimed to fulfil his prophecies. His teaching on the "manifested sons of God" and a final end-time company of overcomers fed into the Latter Rain and, through it, into later apostolic and prophetic movements.

Measured against the creeds

Branham's denial of the Trinity, his rejection of baptism in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and his serpent-seed teaching each place him outside the historic Christian faith. The Nicene Creed confesses one God in three Persons, and the Church condemned modalism before Nicaea. The serpent-seed teaching contradicts Genesis 4:1 ("Adam knew Eve his wife; and she conceived, and bare Cain") and, by making some human beings the offspring of Satan, denies that all are made in God's image and that Christ died for all (1 Timothy 2:4-6).

His claim to be the end-time Elijah, whose sermons are the "spoken Word", sets one man's revelations above Scripture and the apostolic faith, which was "once for all delivered to the saints" (Jude 3). The four traditions hold, with Christ, that Elijah came in John the Baptist (Matthew 17:12-13). The test of a prophet is whether what he foretells comes to pass (Deuteronomy 18:22); Branham's predictions did not.

Major writings

Branham wrote little; his teaching survives in more than 1,100 recorded sermons, transcribed and published by his followers.

• An Exposition of the Seven Church Ages (1965, edited from sermons)
• The Revelation of the Seven Seals (1963 sermons, published 1967)
• Sermons published by Voice of God Recordings, Jeffersonville

Affiliation

Healing evangelist and follower of William Branham; founder of the Manujothi Ashram near Tirunelveli

Appears in

The modern movements in India, The healing revival, 1947-58, and after

Profile

Link to this profile

Life

Tirunelveli

R. Paulaseer Lawrie was born on 24 February 1921 in the Tirunelveli region of Tamil Nadu, into a Protestant Christian family.^† Little is recorded of his early life. He trained and worked as a stenographer, and spent some years in Bombay.

Visions and Branham

In 1953, after a series of visions which he believed called him to ministry, he left his work. In 1954 William Branham held a healing campaign in Bombay, and Lawrie attended and attached himself to it, coming to regard Branham as the prophet of the age. He became a promoter of Branham's teaching in South India and Ceylon (Sri Lanka), holding healing meetings and distributing Branham's sermons, and travelled to Britain and the United States, where he met Branham and his followers. For a time he worked closely with a Ceylonese associate, Alwin R. de Alwis, from whom he later split over leadership.

The claim of 1969

After Branham's death in 1965, Lawrie came to believe that Branham's prophecies pointed to him. On 21 July 1969 he announced that he was the second coming of Christ - the Son of Man foretold by Branham's sermons on the seven seals - and that the end of the age would come by 1977, as Branham had predicted. He founded the Manujothi Ashram near Tirunelveli as the centre of his followers.

The Kalki avatar

When 1977 passed, Lawrie's teaching moved away from Christianity. In the 1980s he reinterpreted his mission through Hindu scripture: he taught an "Aadhi Bali" ("Supreme Sacrifice") drawn from the Purusha Sukta of the Rig Veda, the hymn of the cosmic man whose sacrifice brings forth creation, and identified the sacrifice with Christ. He took the name Gurudev Shri Lahari Krishna and presented himself as the Kalki avatar, the final incarnation of Vishnu whose coming Hindu tradition expects at the end of the present age, uniting in himself the expectations of Christianity and Hinduism.

Key dates

• 24 February 1921 - Born in the Tirunelveli region
• 1953 - Leaves his work after visions
• 1954 - Joins William Branham's campaign in Bombay
• 1950s-60s - Promotes Branham's teaching in South India, Ceylon, Britain and America
• 1965 - Death of Branham
• 21 July 1969 - Claims to be the second coming of Christ
• 1977 - Predicted end passes
• 1980s - Teaches the "Aadhi Bali"; presents himself as the Kalki avatar
• 24 February 1989 - Dies on his 68th birthday

Teachings and claims

Branham's message

In his early ministry he taught Branham's doctrines: healing, the rejection of the Trinity, baptism in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, the serpent seed, the seven church ages and Branham as the Elijah of Malachi 4.

The Son of Man

From 1969 he taught that he was the Son of Man whose coming Branham had foretold, the returned Christ, and that the "Message" of Branham had prepared the way for him.

The Aadhi Bali and Kalki

In his final teaching he presented the Vedic sacrifice of the Purusha as a revelation of Christ's sacrifice and himself as the Kalki avatar, the culmination of all religions.

Documented controversies

Claim to be Christ

His 1969 claim, and the failure of the 1977 prediction, place him outside Christianity, and Branham's own followers repudiated him.^†

Religious syncretism

His turn to the identity of a Hindu avatar marked a complete departure from the Christian faith with which he began.

Division

He split with his earlier associate de Alwis over authority, and his movement remained small.

Death

He died on 24 February 1989, his 68th birthday, and was buried at the Manujothi Ashram near Tirunelveli. His followers had expected that he would not die. [[verify - Bergunder 2003]]

Legacy

His movement continues on a small scale at the Manujothi Ashram, which presents itself as a universal spiritual centre. His career is studied by historians as an example of the interaction between American Pentecostal-style healing movements and Indian religion, and as the clearest illustration of where Branham's claims to prophetic authority could lead in a follower who took them to their conclusion.

Measured against the creeds

The creeds confess that Christ "ascended into heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty; from thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead". The Lord warned that "if any man shall say unto you, Lo, here is Christ, or there; believe it not", for His coming will be as the lightning that shines from east to west (Matthew 24:23-27). Lawrie's claim to be the returned Christ is precisely what the Lord warned against.

His earlier teaching repeated Branham's departures from the creeds - the denial of the Trinity and the claim to new prophetic authority - and his later identification of himself as a Hindu avatar abandoned the confession that Christ is the one mediator between God and men (1 Timothy 2:5), incarnate once for all.

His story shows the danger, discussed in this section's pages on Branham and the healing revival, of accepting a prophet's claims on the strength of signs. Once a man's words are treated as revelation above Scripture and the Church's faith, there is nothing to stop the next man claiming that the prophecies are fulfilled in him.

Affiliation

Bank clerk; independent charismatic evangelist; founder of Jesus Calls Ministries and Karunya University

Appears in

The modern movements in India

Profile

Link to this profile

Life

Surandai

Duraisamy Geoffrey Samuel Dhinakaran was born on 1 July 1935 at Surandai, in the Tirunelveli district of Tamil Nadu, into a Christian family of modest means in the Protestant tradition of the region.^† He was educated in local schools and at college, and went to work as a clerk in a bank in Chennai (then Madras).

Despair and conversion

He later described a period in his early twenties of deep despair, which he said ended in 1955 when a relative spoke to him of Christ and he gave his life to Jesus. In his own account, in 1962 Jesus appeared to him in a vision, filled him with the Holy Spirit and gave him a ministry of healing and prophecy. He began to preach in the evenings and at weekends, and in time left the bank to preach full-time.

Jesus Calls

From the late 1960s his meetings grew rapidly. In 1970 he founded Jesus Calls, which began with a prayer ministry and a magazine and, from 1972, radio broadcasts. His mass meetings in Tamil Nadu and across India, sometimes attended by hundreds of thousands, followed a pattern of worship, preaching, prayer for the sick and personal prophecy, in which he announced healings and spoke "words" to named individuals in the crowd. He travelled widely abroad among the Indian diaspora and in the West.

Prayer towers

From 1986 he built "prayer towers" - centres staffed around the clock by volunteers who receive prayer requests by telephone and letter - first in Chennai and then in other cities of India and abroad. The model became one of the distinctive features of his ministry.

The Young Partners Plan

Jesus Calls says that on 25 July 1985 Dhinakaran received a revelation of a plan for "the young who want to join as partners" in the ministry. The Young Partners Plan, known in Tamil as the Ilam Pangalar Thittam (இளம் பங்காளர் திட்டம்), invited parents to enrol a child, from birth upwards, with an offering, or young people to enrol themselves.^† In return the ministry undertook to pray for each partner daily until adulthood (today, until the age of 21 or 25 or marriage, depending on the branch), to send a certificate bearing a Bible promise, to pray for the partner on each birthday, and to have the Dhinakaran family pray for the partner personally once in a lifetime. The plan was built on the prayer of Jabez (1 Chronicles 4:10), and it promised three blessings: protection from the evils of the world, wisdom for studies, and prosperity in life. The ministry's American branch today suggests an offering of $300; the amounts asked in India in the 1980s are not given in the sources consulted.^†

The plan was launched in the year before Karunya opened, and it is widely remembered in Tamil Nadu as the means by which the college was paid for, with families across the state enrolling their children. The published sources consulted, however, do not document how far Young Partners offerings, rather than other gifts, fees and loans, financed Karunya's land and buildings, and the ministry's own pages describe the offerings as supporting its prayer work generally.^† The two were later linked in practice: Jesus Calls states that it subsidises the fees of young partners who study at Karunya.

Karunya

On 4 October 1986, some months after his daughter Angel was killed in a road accident, Dhinakaran opened the Karunya Institute of Technology, a residential engineering college, on a site in the foothills of the Western Ghats near Coimbatore. He said he had been given a vision of "a Technological Institution founded on faith, which will produce teachers, engineers and managers" who would serve the nation.^† The college was a self-financing institution, receiving no government grant; in 1999 it became the first self-financing institution in India to be granted autonomy, and it was later recognised as a deemed university (Karunya University, now the Karunya Institute of Technology and Sciences), with Dhinakaran as its first chancellor. The campus grew to some 700 acres.

Television

From the 1990s Jesus Calls produced television programmes in Tamil, English and other Indian languages, which made him one of the best-known religious figures in South India. His son was associated with him in the ministry from the 1980s and later succeeded him.

Key dates

• 1 July 1935 - Born at Surandai, Tirunelveli district
• 1955 - Conversion
• 1962 - Reports a vision of Jesus and a call to healing ministry
• 1970 - Founds Jesus Calls
• 1972 - Radio broadcasts begin
• 25 July 1985 - Announces the Young Partners Plan (Ilam Pangalar Thittam)
• 1986 - Death of his daughter Angel; first prayer tower
• 4 October 1986 - Opens the Karunya Institute of Technology near Coimbatore
• 1999 - Karunya becomes the first self-financing institution in India granted autonomy
• 1990s - Television ministry
• 20 February 2008 - Dies in Chennai

Teachings and claims

Healing and prophecy

Dhinakaran taught that Jesus heals today and that the gifts of the Spirit, including healing, prophecy and the "word of knowledge", are given to the Church. In his meetings he claimed to see, by revelation, specific healings taking place and to receive messages from God for individuals.

Visions

He described many visions of Jesus, heaven and the angels, and wrote and spoke about them at length.

Blessing

He taught that God wills to bless His children in family, education, employment and finance, and that faithful prayer and giving bring that blessing. His "blessing plans" - the Young Partners Plan for children, and family and business plans for adults - invited supporters to give in return for prayer for their families, studies and work. The Young Partners Plan promised children protection, wisdom in their studies and prosperity in life, on the pattern of the prayer of Jabez.

Prayer

His prayer towers expressed his conviction that intercessory prayer should be offered continually and that anyone in need should be able to reach someone to pray with them at any hour.

Documented controversies

Prophetic claims

Critics within the Indian churches, including CSI and evangelical leaders, questioned the verifiability of his healings and personal prophecies, and the absence of independent follow-up of those declared healed.^†

Blessing and giving

His blessing plans, and the linkage between giving and the expectation of blessing, were criticised as a form of prosperity teaching suited to the aspirations of India's growing middle class. The Young Partners Plan drew particular criticism because it was addressed to parents' hopes for their children - protection, examination success and a good future - and because the enrolment offering was presented as the occasion of those blessings. ^†

Style

Some Indian church leaders were uneasy with the American-style methods of mass meetings and broadcasting, and with the drawing of members away from their congregations.

No criminal charge against him personally is recorded.^†

Death

He died in Chennai on 20 February 2008, aged 72, after a long period of heart and kidney illness.

Legacy

Jesus Calls continues under his family's leadership and remains one of the largest Christian ministries in India, with prayer towers, broadcasting and the Karunya university. Dhinakaran was the most widely known Tamil Christian of his lifetime and the model for many later healing and prophetic ministries in South India. In Tirunelveli and the rest of Tamil Nadu his ministry reshaped popular Christianity, encouraging the expectation of healing and personal prophecy among Christians of the historic churches as well as the independent ones.

Measured against the creeds

Dhinakaran confessed the Trinity and the deity of Christ, preached repentance and faith, and his prayer ministry and his care for the sick reached many in need. The founding of an institution of higher education is a lasting contribution.

The difficulties lie where they lie for the healing and blessing movements generally. The historic churches pray for the sick, anoint them and expect God to act (James 5:14-15), but they do not announce healings from a platform without verification, nor promise that health and prosperity follow faithful giving. The creeds promise the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting, not material blessing in this life. Personal prophecies addressed to individuals in a crowd are not, in the historic churches' understanding, how God ordinarily guides His people, and every claimed revelation must be tested by Scripture and the Church's faith (1 Thessalonians 5:20-21; 1 John 4:1).

The historic churches also hold that the Spirit's gifts are given through the ordinary means of word and sacrament in the congregation, rather than chiefly through a gifted individual at the head of a ministry independent of the Church.