Baptism

People Movement and Missionary dilemma.
The experience of missions in the third world countries where there is
communal coherence and strong family ties belied the missionaries. The
mission compound strategy of the missionaries was to encamp in an alien
society and live as alien Christians failed miserably. The individualistic
salvation brought in only the rejects and rebellious of the society into
Christianity. Thus Christianity remained a foreign religion with little
relevance to them. Those of us who have lived and worked in other cultures
and who have tried evangelism have soon to discover the wisdom of the Great
commission calling for disciplining through baptism and teaching. Thus came
the mass movement or peoples movement.
In 1933 Bishop J. W. Pickett of the Methodist Church published his Christian
Mass Movements in India Bishop Pickett pin pointed that virtually large
growth of the churches in India had been through mass conversions. A mass
movement at that time was defined as a movement which eventually resulted
in the turning of a large proportion of the members of a certain caste to
become Christians. Later the term "mass movement" was changed to "group
movement" and "people movement". Extensive studies in these directions are
being done. It began in 1955 when India missionary Donald McGavran
published The bridges of God. Later, McGavran established the chair of
church growth at the School of World Missions at Fuller Theological
Seminary in Pasadena, Cal. In 1981, Peter Wagner replaced McGavran at
Fuller Seminary. Strangely enough it was the Mennonites who triggerred this
change in understanding. The word "people" is defined, not in racial or
national terms, but by identifying them as communities who do not usually
marry outside their own grouping. This makes it possible to use one term for a
typical early European or modern African tribe, or a caste scattered among
many other people over a large part of India, or a clan, or clannish group of
people, within a nation or city. If there had been a church growth through
missionary efforts in Africa and Asia, this was through people’s movement,
which contradicts basically with believer’s baptism and personal conversion.
Even when personal conversion is assumed these were never based on
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