Believing Without Belonging?: Religious Beliefs and Social Belonging of Hindu Devotees of Christ: 48 (American Society of Missiology Monograph)

This study examines an indigenous phenomenon of the Hindu devotees of Jesus Christ and their response to the gospel through an empirical case study conducted in Varanasi India. It analyzes their religious beliefs and social belonging and addresses the ensuing questions from a historical theological and missiological perspective. The data reveals that the respondents profess faith in Jesus Christ; however most remain unbaptized and insist on their Hindu identity. Hence a heuristic model for a contextualized baptism as Guru-diksha is proposed. The emergent church among Hindu devotees should be considered from the perspective of world Christianity as a disparate form of belonging while remaining within ones community of birth. The insistence on a visible church and a distinct community of Christs followers is contested because the devotees should construct their contextual ecclesiology since it is an indigenous discovery of the Christian faith. Thus the Christian label for the adherents is dispensable while retaining their socio-ethnic Hindu identity. Christian mission should discontinue extraction and assimilation; instead missional praxis should be within the given sociocultural structures recognizing their idiosyncrasies as legitimate in Gods eyes and in need of transformation like any human culture.