A Church is Born: Church of South India Inauguration

Introduction > About the Archives

Missionary Research Library (MRL)

This collection of images and exhibit script is part of the Missionary Research Library Archives (MRL) located at the Burke Library at Union Theological Seminary, Columbia University Libraries. The MRL collections were organized according to geographic location, or "series" as MRL called it. The film strip is part of Series 3: South Asia.

Series 3: South Asia

The collection pertaining to the inauguration of the Church of South India resides with a number of other similar collections. This series contains a wide variety of collections, such as the love letters of William Chapin and his wife Isabel (William Wilberforce Chapin Papers, 1860-1865); photographs of Lucknow, India (“Views in Lucknow” Records, 1890-1919); records on specific Missions in India (American Madura Mission Records, 1944 and American Marathi Mission Records, 1813-1962); and correspondence and diaries of various individual missionaries in India.

The images of the inauguration of the Church of South India depicts visually the road India travelled before it reached unification. The Church of South India is currently the largest Protestant church in India, with twenty-two dioceses, its own prayer book, and its own communion service that draws from several denominational sources.

History

The images date to 1947-1948 and were scanned from a film strip produced by the India Committee of the Foreign Missions Conference of North America.

FMCNA and NCC

The Foreign Missions Conference of North America (FMCNA) was a voluntary cooperative association comprised of participating foreign mission boards from the United States and Canada from 1893–1952. It was established to create dialogue between missions-based action committees confronting contemporary crises of war, famine, and poverty.

In 1940, FMCNA, along with the Federal Council of Churches and six other interdenominational agencies, formed a special “Committee on the Closer Relationships of General Interdenominational Agencies” to discuss the possibility of merging into a single corporate entity, originally known as the North American Council of the Churches of Christ. In 1944 it was determined that Canada would not participate in the merger, and in 1950 the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States (NCC) was formed. By 1952, FMCNA had fully merged into NCC and it became the Division of Foreign Missions (DFM) of the NCC.

NCC’s Division of Foreign Missions (DFM) continued the work of the FMCNA. During the 1970s, social instability, suspicion of corporatism and authority, and demands for minority rights, along with theological trends including feminist and liberation theologies, the rise of Evangelical and Pentecostal churches, and an increasing focus among mainline denominations on alleviating oppression and interreligious dialogue, led to a slow but overall decline in the NCC’s influence, particularly in the area of foreign missions. The Division of Overseas Ministries published its final triennial report in 1987.

Today, the main work of the NCC is carried out through five main program commissions: Justice and Advocacy, Communication, Interfaith Relations, Education and Leadership Ministries, and Faith and Order. The organization still exists, but is much smaller and appears to be fading from significance.

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