a contextual missiology of the spirit - eTheses Repository ...

of fishing villages in the southeast and southwest coasts of India, and Robert de
Nobili, who began to work among the Brahmins of Madurai in Tamilnadu. Thus,
by the beginning of the eighteenth century, the Catholic Christianity was well
established in India. However, Christianity was barely visible and showed few
signs of growth in north India, where the population were Hindus, with Muslim
rulers. 54
2.2.3. The Modern Missionary Movement
The missionary spirit of the eighteenth and nineteenth century was a major factor
behind the later Pentecostal revival. In its special issue on Pentecostalism, the
editorial of Dharma Deepika, comments that Indian Pentecostal historiography
must consider the work of mission agencies in India as ‘the increased missionary
fervour of the period was important for the spread of Pentecostalism in India.’ 55
Protestant Christianity was established in India only in the beginning of the
eighteenth century through the coming of several missionaries from the West. The
German Bartholomaeus Ziegenbalg and Heinrich Pluetschau of the Danish-Halle
Mission came to Tranquebar, India in 1706 as the first Protestant missionaries to
India. One of the remarkable contributions of their mission activity was
Ziegenbalg’s translation of the New Testament into the Tamil language, the first
Indian language into which the Bible was translated. The Moravian Missions were
54
Samuel Hugh Moffett, A History of Christianity in Asia, vol.2, 1500-1900 (Maryknoll, NY:
Orbis Books, 2005), 23-26.
55
Chief Editor, ‘Editorial- Pentecostalism,’ Dharma Deepika 6, no.2 (2002): 2.
58