Mennonites in India

The photos are of David and Paul Wiebie sitting by the mission station their grandparents had built, some women in a church service,and a typical rural Indian Mennonite church.


Mennonites arrived late in India. Hinduism, said to be the oldest living religion, has been here in various forms at least since the beginning of recorded history. Buddhism was born here during the fifth millennium BCE. Christians in South India claim that the Apostle Thomas founded their churches in the first century CE. Sufis and Muslim traders brought Islam to India early in the seventh century CE.

Mennonite missionaries from the Ukraine and North America first arrived at the end of the nineteenth century as part of the Protestant mission movement. Most of India had already been divided into mission fields allotted to various denominations under an ecumenical comity agreement. Three different Mennonite denominations began working in fields that were given to them in central India.

The Mennonite Brethren, the first to arrive, were given a field in what is now the state of Andhra Pradesh. The Mennonite Church was given a field surrounding the town of Dhamptari in the present state of Chhattisgarh. The General Conference Mennonite Church was given a field a little further north in an area around the town of Champa, also in the state of Chhattisgarh.

All were responding to the missionary call to spread the Christian faith. They were also responding to the hunger and human suffering in colonial India caused by drought and governmental indifference. They were pioneers who overcame huge obstacles to establish mission posts in remote, rural communities far removed from their homes. And they came expecting to spend their lives in India.

One brief story must suffice. John and Susie Kroeker came from the Ukraine in 1899. After studying at Bethel College in Kansas, they responded to the call to serve in India. They traveled by bullock cart to reach the town of Janjgir where they began working among a group of poor Dalit people. After eight years they became people without a country because of the political turmoil in the Ukraine. They decided to return to the Ukraine where John was arrested and vanished in a gulag in Siberia, never to be heard from again. The mission station they built now houses an elementary school.

As I visit these places, I try to imagine the world of such missionaries and the local people who became Mennonites through their efforts. They were part of a mission era that no longer exists. India was the jewel in the crown of the British Empire. Mennonite missionaries were not directly related to the British colonial administration but could hardly have functioned in central India without it's support. Early pictures of Mennonite missionaries, pith helmets in hand, fits them into that colonial world.

They came to evangelize and plant churches but were soon also involved in starting rural hospitals and schools. The mission compounds and churches they built looked like they would be more at home in rural America or the Ukraine than in central India. They must have seemed very strange to the local people who first saw them. Yet it’s hard to be too critical of the missionaries’ religious and humanitarian zeal. It’s much easier to see their blind spots from our historical vantage point than it was for them as they poured their lives into those efforts.

The first converts were from lower caste Dalit communities. They responded to the compassion and love of the foreigners who were serving them. The churches began to slowly grow. Converting to Christianity meant being ostracised from the majority Hindu religious and social world. As a consequence, the Indian Mennonite communities were economically and socially dependent on the foreign funded mission hospitals, schools, and churches.

After several decades such dependence on foreign resources became an increasingly perplexing problem with no easy solution. The colonial era ended rather abruptly at the end of World War II. Britain was finally persuaded to “quit India” through Gandhi’s campaign of nonviolent resistance and India became an independent country in 1947. Nobody was prepared for the new post-colonial era that followed.

It became increasingly clear than foreign missionaries serving in the colonial mission model were no longer welcome in independent India. The enthusiasm for such mission efforts was also drying up in North American churches. By the 1970s almost all the foreign missionaries had gone home and the mission institutions were turned over to the control of the local churches. The transition was traumatic.

In spite of often heroic efforts, it proved impossible to maintain these institutions on their former level. Some hospitals and schools have been able to find ways to survive (not flourish) on the local economy but their existence remains precarious. Former mission stations slowly falling into disrepair are a common sight in all the Indian Mennonite communities. Another chapter of the transition is the church conflicts that erupted over matters of leadership and property ownership. This often involved drawn out litigation in local courts.

In spite of all those challenges, the Indian churches remain and continue to grow in some locations. The Mennonite Central Committee works with them through several modest projects in rural development, education assistance, peace training, and HIV/AIDS training. The North American mission agencies that founded these churches now give only token support. Mission administrators occasionally visit.

The colonial mission era is gone. The difficult post-mission era is also coming to an end but we’re still too close to clearly see what will emerge. I try to discern “the signs of the times”—how God’s Spirit is working in our midst today. A promising new generation of Indian church leadership is emerging. We’re experimenting with some new models of global church partnerships even though historic patterns of unequal and unjust international relations persist and often thwart our efforts. What will it mean to faithfully and courageously follow the ‘man from Galilee” in this emerging world? A vigorous discussion on such matters is long overdue.