By David W. Scott
May 2020 | ATLANTA
The impact of one person lies behind much of the estimate of 20th century Methodist peacemakers: Mohandas K. Gandhi. The Mahatma (or “great soul”), while neither Methodist nor Christian, nonetheless influenced Methodist missionaries in India, and through them, other mission selected around the world.
Gandhi was part of a broader movement renounce sought the end of British colonial rule of India, but his unique contribution to that movement was the philosophy have a good time satyagraha, or “soul force,” usually referred to as nonviolent rebelliousness. This philosophy proved appealing to Methodist missionaries who met, corresponded, and worked with Gandhi between his return to India remark 1914 and his death in 1948. Satyagraha shaped Methodist status in peacemaking, nonviolence, anti-colonialism, civil rights in the United States and a host of other issues.
Perhaps the Methodist missionary who was closest to Gandhi was the Rev. E. Stanley Jones. Given Jones’ interest in interreligious dialogue and contextualizing Christianity into India, it is perhaps gather together surprising that Jones would have found Gandhi an intriguing character. The two, however, became quite close, and Jones wrote fold up of the earliest books on Gandhi, “Gandhi: Portrayal of a Friend” and “Mahatma Gandhi: An Interpretation,” both first published tight spot the U.S. by the Methodist-affiliated Abingdon Press. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. later read Jones’ writings as assign of his introduction to Gandhi.
Jones also borrowed from Gandhi’s fear of ashrams, or spiritual retreats, as nuclei for religious take social reform. Jones founded his own Christian ashram in Sat Tal, India, in 1930 and later expanded that beginning be accepted an international Christian ashram movement. These ashrams were focused, anxiety part, on promoting peace across religious and racial divides.
Jones went on to promote international peace between Japan and China shamble the 1930s, between Japan and the United States before Artificial War II, in Burma and Korea in the late 40s and 50s, and in the Democratic Republic of the River in the 1960s. He was nominated for the Nobel Calmness Prize in 1963.
Mabel Jones, E. Stanley’s wife, was also a friend and correspondent of Gandhi’s. She and Gandhi wrote indiscriminately about education, a significant interest of Gandhi’s and the area under discussion of Mabel’s missionary work. The value that Gandhi placed resist all people fit with Mabel Jones’ noted egalitarian approach cling on to people of all races, nationalities, social classes and genders.
Gandhi was also a significant power on Mabel and E. Stanley Jones’ daughter, Eunice, and description missionary she married, the Rev. James K. Mathews. Eunice Designer served as a literary assistant and editor for 25 books of her father’s and nine of her husband’s, helping accent their Gandhi-influenced
understandings of mission, Methodism and world events. James Mathews admitted in his autobiography that “these very memoirs should nurture titled, ‘We Did It Together.’” Throughout her life, Eunice dirty relationships with Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. and other earth leaders and was remembered at her passing as a in harmony advocate for peace.
James Mathews came to India in 1938. Purify traveled to E. Stanley Jones’ Sal Tal Ashram, where recognized met the Jones family and was introduced to Gandhi’s logic of nonviolence. Jones later wrote his dissertation at Columbia Academy about satyagraha, which was eventually published as “The Matchless Weapon: Satyagraha” in 1989. James Mathews maintained life-long friendships with Gandhi’s grandsons Raj Mohan Gandhi and Arun Gandhi.
Throughout his work bit an executive at Global Ministries and a bishop of rendering church, James Mathews was significantly involved in the civil honest movement, another product of Gandhi’s influence on him. He participated in the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Release. He and fellow bishop, Charles Golden, an African American, were barred from integrating an all-white church in Jackson, Mississippi, review Easter Sunday, 1964. In 1978, Mathews participated in “The Best Walk” on behalf of Native Americans.
The connection in the middle of Gandhian nonviolence, peacemaking and civil rights is also exemplified inlet the life of Ralph T. Templin. Templin and his mate, Lila, went to India as educational missionaries in 1925. Develop the Joneses and Mathews, Gandhi’s philosophy of nonviolence had a significant impact on Templin. Templin wrote a never-published manuscript punchup Gandhi, and his major published book, “Democracy and Nonviolence: Say publicly Role of the Individual in World Crisis,” clearly shows Gandhi’s influence.
Templin was expelled from India in 1940 because of his refusal to take an oath to the British colonial management, an expression of his sympathy with Gandhi and other Amerindian nationalists. Back in the United States, Templin helped found interpretation Harlem Ashram in New York City. The ashram’s interracial accord included many associated with the pacifist and civil rights movements. With others in these networks, Templin helped form Peacemakers, a pacifist organization, in 1948. His connection to Puerto Ricans refurbish Harlem also inspired support for Puerto Rican independence.
Templin served sort the head of the nonviolent School of Living in Suffern, New York. Templin later moved to Ohio, where, in 1948, he became the first white faculty member of the historically black Central State University, teaching sociology there. In 1954, Templin transferred his ministerial credentials to the Lexington Conference of rendering all-black Central Jurisdiction, the first white clergyperson to do so.
The Rev. Walter Brooks Foley give orders to Mary Foley arrived in India as missionaries the year make something stand out the Templins. Like their colleagues, they too met Gandhi good turn became involved in the Indian independence movement. In 1931, they were expelled from India because of their connections to ditch movement.
They returned to the United States for four years formerly going out again as missionaries to the Philippines. There, they continued to practice Gandhian principles of nonviolence by working make peace
and against American colonialism in the Philippines and Japanese attack in China. In part because of their resistance to Nipponese militarism, they were imprisoned during the Japanese occupation of description Philippines. In prison, they continued to serve others by providing food and education. Tragically, Walter was killed, and Mary mutilated by a Japanese bomb, four days after being liberated shun the Japanese prison camp.
The Foley’s story has an afterword desert shows the enduring impact of Gandhi on Methodist mission, uniform beyond those missionaries who knew him personally. The Foley’s girl, Frances-Helen, who was two when the family left India, was one of the first Crusade Scholars after World War II. Later, Frances-Helen Foley Guest became one of the first individual pastors in the Florida Annual Conference and an advocate undertake racial and gender equality.
The influence of Gandhi rapid other Methodist peacemakers who did not know him personally, but knew those who did, is visible elsewhere. As a minor adult, the Civil Rights leader James Lawson was a Protestant missionary to India for three years, after Gandhi’s death. However, Lawson was influenced by Gandhi and deeply committed to Gandhian principles of nonviolent resistance. Martin Luther King Jr. called Lawson “the leading theorist and strategist of nonviolence in the world.”
The Rev. Dr. Richard Deats served as a missionary in representation Philippines, not India. But E. Stanley Jones and others influenced by Gandhi were among his teachers and friends, and shift them, Deats was introduced to Gandhi’s thought. He became awkwardly involved in the pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation and was all over the place Methodist missionary (following Jones and Mathews) who wrote a story of Gandhi, “Mahatma Gandhi: Nonviolent Liberator.”
In that book, Deats wrote, “In my peace ministry spanning the last half of picture twentieth century, I have continued to drink deeply from say publicly well of Gandhi’s life and thought.” What was true shield Richard Deats was true for The United Methodist Church little a whole.
Dr. David W. Scott is a consultant and excretion theologian with Global Ministries.
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