Telugu Mission Of The General

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Christian communities in the state Andhra Pradesh of south India and the Telugu Christians in diaspora have passed their stories from one generation to the next by oral traditions as well as in scattered texts. James Elisha Taneti's History of the Telugu Christians: A Bibliography lists more than 700 published and unpublished textual sources related to the history of Telugu Christians from south India, including monographs, journal articles, letters, reports, minutes and the proceedings of missionary conferences, unpublished theses, dissertations, souvenirs, and manuscripts. Taneti's insightful historiographical analysis and comprehensive list of bibliographic sources offer seminarians, historians, and scholars the opportunity to study the religious history of India through the founding and evolution of this community.

This volume narrates the history of Telugu Christians, a faith community located in the states of Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, and Pondicherry in southern India. A social history of a faith community, this volume analyzes how social aspirations of the community, local worldviews, and historical contingencies shaped the beliefs and practices of Telugu Christians. It relates and interprets the history of Telugu Christians chronologically from the sixteenth century until the current times. The first two chapters of the book examine the earliest encounters between the Christian message that European missionaries introduced and the local Christians. Covering three centuries, this section highlights the appropriation of the Christian message among the caste converts. Later chapters analyze the impact of Dalit conversions and women's leadership on the social fabric and theological texture of Telugu Christianity in the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. The book ends with a consideration of three dominant movements in the second half of the twentieth century and the early twenty-first, namely the process of Sanskritization, the influences of Pentecostalism, and those of Holiness movements on the Telugu church. In conclusion, Taneti recaps how caste and empire shaped the faith and practices of Telugu Christians.

Beginning in the nineteenth century, native women preachers served and led nascent Protestant churches in much of Southern India, evolving their own mission theology and practices. This volume examines the impact of Telugu socio-political dynamics, such as caste, gender, and empire, on the theology and practices of the Telugu Biblewomen.

This book highlights the transformative potential of democratic Church and Christian community in India. In the light of both ongoing and, also to some extent, foregone sociopolitical and theological challenges confronting Indian Christianity, this book invokes the need to democratize Indian Christianity in terms of its theology, liturgy, teachings, practices, resources, leadership roles, and institutional power relations/sharing by keeping contemporary “social realities” of Indian Christians at the core of its approach and discourse. It explores internal challenges – of caste, class, gender, and regional contestations – and external forces of communalism and majoritarianism confronting Indian Christianity today. Further, it underlines the importance of dignity, equality, fraternity, freedom, and responsibility emerging at an organizational level through strong mechanisms of deliberation, decision-making, and execution. A major contribution to religious studies in India, this book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of religion, especially Christian theology, South Asian studies, politics, and sociology.

Excerpt from The Telugu Mission: Of the General Council of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in North America; Containing a Biography of the Rev. Christian Frederick Heyer, M. D At the sixth convention of the General Council of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in North America, held at Akron, Ohio, November 7-13, 1872, a resolution was adopted instructing the Executive Committee of the Pennsylvania Ministerium, which was then entrusted with the administration of the foreign mission work of the General Council, to request the Rev. C. F. Heyer "to prepare for publication a history of his mission work in India and of the Missions there, with which he had been connected." The founder of the American Evangelical Lutheran Missions in India made an effort to comply with this request and began to copy and compile some of the letters which he had written from India to various correspondents in America; but even the task of copying what he had composed in the strength and vigor of his manhood was more than the pioneer, at the advanced age of eighty years, could accomplish; and before he had proceeded very far, the angel of death called him to his eternal reward. Since the death of Dr. Heyer much has been written about him, but no serious effort has been made, so far as we know, to write a full and complete biography of this remarkable man who was not only the first foreign missionary of the Lutheran Church in America, but who, also, in other spheres of service as a minister of the Church and a preacher of the Gospel, as a home missionary, as a pastor of congregations in Pennsylvania and Maryland, as an officer in a number of synods, as a leader in several important movements in our Church in his day, and as one of the founders of the General Council, proved himself to be a man of unusual ability, great initiative, indefatigable activity, strong faith and true piety. What Dr. Heyer in the feebleness of old age was unable to do, we have attempted to do in the following pages. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

The story of Christianity in the West has often been told, but the history of Christianity in the East is not as well known. The seed was the same: the good news of Jesus Christ for the whole world, which Christians call "the gospel." But it was sown by different sowers; it was planted in different soil; it grew with a different flavor; and it was gathered by different reapers. It is too often forgotten that the faith moved east across Asia as early as it moved west into Europe. Western church history tends to follow Paul to Philippi and to Rome and on across Europe to the conversion of Constantine and the barbarians. With some outstanding exceptions, only intermittently has the West looked beyond Constantinople as its center. It was a Christianity that has for centuries remained unashamedly Asian. A History of Christianity in Asia makes available immense amounts of research on religious pluralism of Asia and how Christianity spread long before the modern missionary movement went forth in the shelter of Western military might. Invaluable for historians of Asia and scholars of mission, it is stimulating for all readers interested in Christian history. --