Cover -- Blurbs, Half Title Page, Series Page, Title Page, Copyright, Dedication, Map, Series Foreward -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Preface -- Introduction -- Chapter 1. The Religious Context in North India: Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity -- Chapter 2. The Religious Context in North India: American Evangelicalism -- Chapter 3. The Missionaries: Religious and Social Innovators -- Chapter 4. Indian Workers and Leaders: Negotiating Boundaries -- Chapter 5. Theology in a New Context -- Chapter 6. Community in a New Context -- Conclusion -- Bibliography -- Index of Places -- Index of Subjects and Names

The first Christian communities were established among the population of Hindi- and Urdu-speaking North India during the middle of the nineteenth century. The evangelical North American Presbyterian and Methodist missionaries who arrived in what were considered the Hindu heartlands discovered a social and religious landscape far more diverse than expected. With its Hindu majority and significant Muslim minority, the region also proved home to reform and renewal movements both within and beyond Hinduism. These movements had already carved out niches for religious difference, niches where Christianity took root. In Missionary Christianity and Local Religion Arun Jones documents the story of how preexisting indigenous bhakti movements and western missionary evangelicalism met to form the cornerstone for the foundational communities of North Indian Christianity. Moreover, while newly arrived missionaries may have reported their exploits as totally fresh encounters with the local population, they built their work on the existing fledgling gatherings of Christians such as European colonial officials, merchants, and soldiers, and their Indian and Eurasian family members. Jones demonstrates how foreign missionaries, Indian church leaders, and converts alike all had to negotiate the complex parameters of historic Indian religious and social institutions and cultures, as well as navigate the realities of the newly established British Empire. Missionary Christianity and Local Religion provides portrayals and analyses of the ideas, motivations, and activities of the diverse individuals who formed and nurtured a flourishing North Indian Christian movement that was both evangelical and rooted in local religious and social realities. This exploration of new Christian communities created by the confluences and divergences between American evangelical and Indian bhakti religious traditions reveals the birth and early growth of one of the many incarnations of Christianity.

In this major work, two world religion and mission experts present a new relational model for Christians interacting with people of other faiths.

This book makes visible an important but neglected aspect of Christian missions: its transnational character. Missionaries considered themselves global actors, yet they operated within a variety of nation-states. The volume demonstrates how processes on a national level are closely linked to larger transnational processes.

Presents an introduction to mission studies - the history, theology and issues of mission. This book also offers a theological framework for mission, which applies both globally and locally, to help the reader discern the movement of the Spirit of Christ among the many other spirits of this world.

Christian missionaries, usually regarded as relics of an outgrown and mostly discredited colonialism, are still playing an active role in many parts of the world. Their number is, in fact, increasing. In this book, Kenelm Burridge examines their work from a new perspective, combining anthropology with insights from history, sociology, missiology, and theology. He exposes and explicates the contradictions and ambiguities involved in missionary endeavours and establishes a theory about theapparently inevitable processes that arise out of the nature of Christianity and the building of a Christian community.

There is a profusion of missional issues emerging in the Asian fields that call Christ's followers to actively witnessing the Truth. Missionaries from different continents have come to serve the Asian nations, and yet, these God's loving missionaries' effectiveness often seem to have left in the shade by some damaging fruits and (sometimes) being too much of Westernness stemming from a diversity of lacking knowledge particularly the local contexts to contextualize, and lack of preparation. The irrefutable finding is appealing within the Asian mission study in regard to the essentiality in equipping the Christians so that the ministries in Asia will experience the effectiveness in cultivating the diverse contexts (cultures) with the text (Scripture) they have. Many principles and practical information from this book grew out of the authors' experiences and the reflection of Missiologists and scholars such as Andrew Walls, Christopher Wright, Kazoh Kitamori, Paul Hiebert, etc.