Church of North India - Her Unity and Witness 1929 – 1970 (Volume - 1)

Faced with discrimination and disadvantages Dalits have long sought and created alternative communities and ideas. One such community has been the Indian church which since the eighteenth century has sheltered them in large numbers. The CNI is one such protestant church whose great majority of membership comprises the Scheduled Castes and Tribes. However the missionaries who established the church in India carried the baggage of a divided church from Europe. In the twentieth century the Indian Christian leadership took the initiative to integrate their disjointed community. This first volume narrates the saga of a broken community that took forty years starting from 1929 to integrate as a united and unifying church of six religious denominations in northern India. The differences in social practices religious rituals and theological ideas were transcended. The negotiations were tough yet breakthroughs occurred which kept propelling the conversations among the denominational representatives. The conversations were in two phases. The first were called the Round Table Conferences starting from 1929 and after the preparation of the first draft of the Plan of Church Union in 1950 it entered the second phase of Negotiation Committee meetings. The Negotiation Committee through its sub-Committees kept fine-tuning the draft till they settled for the fourth edition as final. The document called the Plan of Church Union in North India and Pakistan 1965 (fourth edition) became the basis for the unification of six churches. This study shows that the church union movement in India was successful and as a result the Church of North India was inaugurated on November 29th 1970 at All Saints’ Cathedral grounds in Nagpur. In the past five decades this unified community which has surmounted various legal and political challenges has continued to thrive. For those interested in church history they will find this book a stimulating read with notable details and interesting episodes woven in a seamless saga of a minority community in the heartland of India. This research and publication are a part of the fifty-year jubilee decade of the Inauguration of the CNI. It is a story of people who are rooted in Christ and related to the soil their motherland India.