The Christ of the Indian Road

For more than one hundred years, E. Stanley Jones has led the way in evangelism by contextualizing Christ in the existing culture, wherever that may be. In The Christ of the Indian Road, he recounts his experiences in India, where he arrived as a young and presumptuous missionary who later matured into a veteran who attempted to contextualize Jesus Christ within the Indian culture. He names the mistake many Christians make in trying to impose their culture on the existing culture. Instead, he makes the case that we learn from other cultures, respect the truth that can be found there, and let Christ and the existing culture do the rest. In his book Ordinary Man, Extraordinary Mission, Stephen Graham, a biographer of Jones, wrote: The Christ of the Indian Road was a frontal assault on the cultural prejudices of most European and American Christian missionaries in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Jones was one of the first Western Christians to realize that in Asia, Africa, and Latin America the Christian gospel was often betrayed by being enmeshed with the economic and political self-aggrandizement of Western nations. In so doing, Jones declared his moral and intellectual independence from Western political and religious imperialism.

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