Conger

A disputed synod election has led to a brawl at the Church of South India’s Holy Trinity Cathedral in Palayankottai, with four men being held in custody by police for assaulting the Bishop of Tirunelveli, the Rt. Rev. S. Jayapaul David.

While leading a meeting for a clergy group at the Cathedral on the morning of Ash Wednesday, a mob stormed the church seizing Bishop David. The mob began to smash tables and chairs in the parish hall and shouted slogans denouncing the bishop’s management of the diocese.

When the clergy attempted to free the bishop, blows were exchanged and one of the attackers allegedly pulled out a revolver. The bishop was pulled from the mob’s clutches, which then retreated outside, smashing the windscreen of the bishop’s car and beat his driver. Bishop David was left with a torn cassock, but was otherwise unharmed.

The police are holding four men for questioning in connection with the assault and are seeking to question others involved in the Cathedral invasion, which is understood to have been prompted by factional disputes within the diocesan synod between the bishop’s supporters and opponents amongst the laity.

The 31st biannual synod of the Church of South India has elected a new moderator. The Rt. Rev. John Wilson Gladstone, Bishop in South Kerala, was elected leader of the united church by the 500 synod delegates meeting in Visakhapatnam on Jan 12.

The Bishop in Madurai, the Rt. Rev. Christopher Aswer was elected Deputy Moderator, and Mr. M. Jayakumar of Bangalore and Mr. Devasahayam of Warangal were elected General Secretary and Treasurer respectively, while 66 members of the church were elected to serve on its executive council.

Born in 1945 at Neyyattinkara near Trivandrum, South India the son of an Anglican priest, Bishop Gladstone was educated at University College in Trivandrum, United Theological College in Bangalore, and earned a doctorate in theology from the University of Hamburg. He has served as a youth pastor, instructor and then dean of the Kerala United Theological Seminary, and in 1997 was consecrated Bishop in South Kerala.

He has served on the board of a number of church and secular institutions and was President of the Senate of Serampore College, the only theological University in India, and was editor of the Journal of the Church History Association of India. In 2007 he was named an honorary fellow of Canterbury Christ Church University.

Bishop Gladstone is married to Dr. Hepzi Gladstone, an educationist, and they have two children.

India’s Supreme Court has postponed a hearing on a challenge to the country’s scheduled caste laws by Christian leaders.  On Nov 28 the court granted the government of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh a continuance, after the country’s solicitor general stated they were not ready to proceed to trial.

India’s Christian and Muslim minorities have brought suit against the government, charging that laws designed to protect and support India’s Dalits, discriminate against non-Hindus.

The postponement comes after 36 bishops of the Church of North India, Church of South India, the Roman Catholic Church, and Orthodox churches led a rally in Delhi urging an end to government sanctioned discrimination against Christians.

In May 2007, a government sponsored report prepared by former Chief Justice Ranganath Misra’s panel recommended that Dalits who converted to Christianity or Islam be given the same legal privileges offered to Hindu Dalits or converts to Buddhism or Sikhism.  In 1950 the government introduced an affirmative action programme for Dalits, the lowest caste with Hinduism, setting aside 15 per cent of government jobs and school places for them.  Dalits who convert to Christianity or Islam loose this benefit.

The Roman Catholic Archbishop of Madras, Msg. Malayappan Chinnappa told the rally caste discrimination was a form of terrorism against Dalits.

“We want the government to end this discrimination,” Bishop Jeyapaul David Swamidawson the president of the National Council of Churches in India and Church of South India’s Bishop in Tirunelvely told the rally on Nov 29.  Government sanctioned discrimination against Christian Dalits was “a violation of fundamental rights and human dignity,” the bishop said.

The Church of South India (CSI) has raised almost ₤500,000 to mark its 60th anniversary. The four million members of the CSI were each asked to pledge 10 rupees, approximately 12 pence, towards a special jubilee fund for educational scholarships, rehabilitation of 60 church-run orphanages, and to provide clean water to 120 rural villages.

“This jubilee is unique, as the entire church from top to the bottom is involved,” the church’s general secretary, Pauline Sathiamurthy, told ENI.

A spokesman for the CSI told The Church of England Newspaper that each congregation had been asked to mark the anniversary by sponsoring one missionary, planting one new church, constructing one rural church building, sponsoring at least five children’s school fees, and helping 10 adults to find employment.

Each missionary had been asked to lead 50 people to Christ, each city school had been asked to build a rural school, each church hospital had been asked to organize a health and ecology awareness programme, and each diocese had been charged with housing and caring for 100 HIV positive children.

On Sept 27 the CSI marked the 60th anniversary of its founding with a jubilee service at St. George’s Cathedral in Chennai (Madras), the sight of the inaugural service for the united church that brought together South India’s Anglican, Congregationalist, Methodist, Presbyterian and Reformed churches into a single episcopally-led, synodically government body.

The CSI’s 21 dioceses cover India’s four southern states of Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu, and the Tamil inhabited region of Jaffna in neighboring Sri Lanka. The Church has 14,000 congregations, runs 2000 schools, 130 colleges and 104 hospitals and maintains 500 residential hostels/orphanages supporting 35,000 children.

Newly elected ACC vice-chairman George Khoshy of the Church of South India and ACC chairman Bishop John Paterson of the Church of Aotearoa, New Zealand and Polynesia. Photo taken on Oct 6, 2002 at ACC-12 in Hong Kong. This was first published in The Church of England Newspaper.

Anglican Consultative Council vice-chairman George Khoshy of the Church of South India. Photo taken on 6.20.05 at ACC-13 in Nottingham. First published in The Living Church.

Christians across India are celebrating the defeat of Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) this week following general elections for the lower house of parliament, the Lok Sabha, which put the India National Congress party back in power after eight years in opposition.Many Christians shared the sentiments of Msgr Osco D’Penha, the Roman Catholic Auxiliary Bishop of Bombay, who called the victory of Sonia Gandhi’s Congress Party “a miracle wrought by prayer”.

India’s 14th general elections — the world’s largest electoral process — began on April 20 and ended on May 10. Prime Minister Vajpayee resigned after early returns indicated that the Congress Party would win 212 of the Lok Sabha’s 543 seats to the BJP’s 180.

Mrs Gandhi’s background sparked controversy in the election as BJP leaders raised the spectre of a foreign-born Prime Minister, an attitude that led to her shock withdrawal from the post this week.

A Roman Catholic born in Italy, Mrs Gandhi (57) became a naturalised Indian citizen in 1963. Her late husband, Rajiv, was Prime Minister from 1984 to 1989, her mother-in-law, Indira Gandhi was Prime Minister from 1968 to 1984, and her husband’s grandfather, Jawaharlal Nehru, led the country for 17 years following independence in 1948.

Electoral analysts credit the Congress Party upset victory to weariness with the BJP’s Hindu Nationalist agenda and economic frustrations. While India’s economy grew almost eight percent last year, the benefits of economic liberalisation over the past decade have been uneven with the vast majority of the rural poor untouched by the rising prosperity.

Opposition to the BJP brought together an unlikely alliance of Muslims and Christians with Communists and other left-wing secular parties opposed to the BJP’s militant Hindu agenda and free-market economic reforms. One plank of the BJP’s electoral platform called for the passage of a national anti-conversion law that would ban conversions from Hinduism to Christianity.

In the run up to the election Church leaders encouraged their members to go the polls to make their voices heard. The Rev Enos Das Pradhan, General Secretary of the Church of North India, asked a Student Christian Movement of India
Conference on April 15 if “Christians [were] still only a vote bank?” And were to remain “only a subject and not a participant in decision-making.”

Sherly Isaac, editor of the Church of South India publication Good News, stated the eight years of BJP rule had been harsh for rural Christians as Hindu militants
sought to eradicate the Church. “Many Christians were killed and many were burnt alive.”

“Of many, their hands and legs were chopped off. Many of them were made to walk naked on the streets and were beaten up severely. Many were told that either they should renounce their religion and join Hinduism or face death. Many Churches were demolished, burnt down or were converted to Hindu temples.”

Msgr Vincent Concessao, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Delhi, speaking on behalf of Catholic Bishops Conference of India, the Evangelical Fellowship of India, and the National Council of Churches of India noted “with a little regret [the Vajpayee's government's] deafening silence towards those fundamentalists who were spreading hatred against the minorities” and welcomed the election of the Congress government whose “mandate by the people of India is to strengthen the secular traditions for which India is known the world over.”