Sadhu Sundar Singh A Biography

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11. At St. John's Divinity College
The friends and well-wishers of Sundar Singh wanted to make sure that he was not lost to the Indian Church.
Hence they prevailed upon him to join the Divinity College at Lahore, there to receive a theological education which
would lead on to ordination and licensing to preach in the Anglican Church.
It must have taken a supreme effort of the will for Sundar Singh to confine himself to the intellectual training
of the class room. To one who had practical communion with God and a growing knowledge of God from walking
intimately with Him through a life of prayer, some of the lectures on the Book of Common Prayer, History of
Religion, Apologetics, etc., were rather insipid and quite academic in content. It was but natural for him to feel
strange in the usually unreal atmosphere of the theological college, where semantics is specialized in rather than the
practical application of the Scripture.
His classmates too kind of kept him at arm's length from them because he seemed a strange character to
them. Probably they had already acquired the regrettable propensity so redolent of theological circles, of holding
practical religion in disdain. In any case, Sundar Singh almost felt he was a stranger among them. He managed,
however, to complete a few courses and was granted a licence to preach.
The saintly Bishop Lefroy tried to convince Sundar Singh that ordination would mean that he confined his
attention to a single parish or to a small group of churches. Sundar Singh himself was burning with a longing to
reach the unreached areas with the Gospel and to awaken an unfeeling church which had lost its mission, wherever
he found it, from the north to the south in India. The Bishop gently tried to convince him that such itinerations and
free-wheeling from diocese to diocese would simply not be possible, as the regulations of the Anglican Church
would not permit it. Sundar Singh, of course, felt that on these terms he must refuse ordination and without any hard
feelings he also returned the licence to preach in that diocese. Henceforth he belonged to all churches and would
preach wherever God took him.
It is hard to imagine how Sundar Singh felt in his heart when the good Bishop tried to convince him that his
protracted tours to Tibet would be quite impossible, when he was ordained in the Episcopal Church. Tibet was close
to his heart. He felt strongly that whereas missionaries had failed to establish the work of God in Tibet down the
centuries, it was the special responsibility of the Indian Church to take Christ to the people of Tibet. That Tibet was
still a 'closed' land was not thought of as being of any great consequence by Sundar Singh. Perhaps it can be
irrefutably stated that more than any other single person's, Sundar Singh's twenty missionary journeys into Tibet
were the most serious onslaughts which were ever launched on the superstitions, fear and degradation in which Tibet
lay.