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Dr.
E. Stanley Jones
(1884-1972)
Missionary Extraordinary
For
more than half a century, Dr. E. Stanley Jones proclaimed the
Gospel of Christ and applied it to men’s personal, social,
national, and international problems as they arose on every
continent and among all cultures.
He was probably the world’s best-known and longest-tested
Christian missionary and evangelist.
He moved among statesmen and among leaders without
portfolios as counselor, friend and worker for peace and goodwill.
He helped hundreds of thousands, from village outcasts in
India to molders of public opinion in America, Japan, Europe and
India.
In
addition, he initiated and helped support institutions and
movements on five continents-- institutions and movements that
have aided many thousands to achieve better lives religiously,
socially and medically. The proceeds from his Spiritual Life
Missions and speaking engagements in America, as well as the
royalties of his twenty eight books—most of them best
sellers—were devoted wholly to these causes.
Stanley
Jones was born in Baltimore, Maryland, January 3, 1884.
He was educated in Baltimore schools and studied law at
City College before being graduated from Asbury College, Wilmore,
Kentucky in 1906. He was on the faculty of Asbury College when he
was called to missionary service in India in 1907 under the Board
of Missions of the Methodist Episcopal Church.
He
began his work among the members of the very low castes and the
outcastes. He did not attack Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, or any
Indian religion. He presented the Gospel of Jesus Christ,
disentangled from western systems and cultures, and their
sometimes non-Christian expressions. “The way of Jesus should
be—but often isn’t—the way of Christianity,” he said.
“Western civilization is only partly Christianized.”
Brother
Stanley, as he was familiarly called by thousands of people,
attracted wide attention among the high castes, the students and
the intelligentsia. He was invited to speak at ancient
universities and before learned societies. Soon he was set aside
by his church to interpret the Christian Gospel especially to
educated men and women. In
1919, with foresight and great-heartedness, the Board of Missions
of the Methodist Episcopal Church offered him the wide-ranging
role of “Evangelist-at-large” to India and to wherever else he
might feel led, which subsequently proved to be to the far corners
of the earth.
Dr.
Jones conducted great mass meetings in leading Indian cities.
At one such meeting, their leader said, “We may not agree
with what Dr. Jones is saying, but we can certainly all try to be
like Jesus Christ.” He inaugurated “round table conferences”
at which Christian and non-Christian sat down as equals to share
their testimonies as to how their religious experiences enabled
them to live better. Thirty
years before the United Nations came into being he proposed a
Round Table of Nations.
In
1925, while home on furlough, he wrote a report of his years of
service—what he had taught and what he had learned in India.
It was published in a book titled
"The Christ of the Indian Road and became a best
seller. It sold over
a million copies and has influenced the course of missionary
thinking. Other books
followed and certain books or single chapters became required
reading in various theological seminaries or in degree courses at
government colleges in parts of the world.
They have been read around jungle fires, studied by armies
and governments, quoted in parliaments, and banned and burned by
Communists.
His
work became interdenominational and world-wide. He held before men
the example of God’s reconciliation to mankind through Jesus on
the cross. He made
Him visible as the Universal Son of Man who had come for all
people. This opening
up of nations to receiving Christ within their own framework
marked a new approach in missions.
It came to be known as
“indigenization”. He helped to re-establish the Indian
“Ashram” (or forest retreat) as a means of drawing men and
women together for days at a time to study in depth their own
spiritual natures and quest, and what the different faiths offered
individuals. Many came to refute the Christian Gospel or to extol
their own, but many came to accept Christ’s way of life.
These confrontations of man with man and religion with
religion greatly influenced the thought life of India’s leaders
and the views and activities of its ancient faiths.
Then
in 1930, along with a British missionary and Indian pastor and
using the sound Christian missionary principle of indigenization,
Dr. Jones reconstituted the “Ashram” with Christian
disciplines. This institution became known as the ”Christian
Ashram.” Stranded
in the United States during World War II with his family in India
because the only overseas travel allowed was for the military), he
transplanted the Christian Ashram in the United States and Canada,
where it has become a strong spiritual growth ministry. For many
years Stanley Jones spent six months in North America, conducting
city-wide evangelistic missions, Christian Ashrams, and other
spiritual life missions and the other six months overseas. He
preached and held Christian Ashrams in almost every country of the
world.
Stanley
Jones went to earth’s trouble spots
helping to promote international understanding.
”Peace,” he said, “is a by-product of conditions out
of which peace naturally comes. If reconciliation is God’s chief
business, it is ours—between man and God, between man and
himself, and between man and man.”
In Africa,
he was called the ”Reconciler.” His efforts in Burma,
Korea, and the Belgian Congo, between China and Japan, and between
Japan and the United States, to mention only a few, received wide
attention. In the
months prior to December 7, 1941, he was a constant confident of
Franklin D. Roosevelt and Japanese leaders trying to avert
war. On his first visit after World War II, Japan hailed
him with banners saying ”Welcome to the Apostle of Peace.” He
also won the esteem of all India.
Men in the old British colony and in the new Indian nation,
which came into existence after World War II, counseled with him.
His influence had no small share in establishing religious freedom
in the new constitution of India.
Dr.
Jones became a friend of Mahatma Gandhi and wrote an appreciative
biography of Gandhi. Martin Luther King told the daughter of
Stanley Jones, Eunice Jones Mathews, that it was reading her
father’s biography of Gandhi that convinced him to adopt the
strict non-violent method in the civil rights struggle. The sons
and grandsons of Gandhi remain close friends of Bishop and Mrs.
Mathews.
In
India he supported students of the Mar Thoma Church preparing for
the ministry, students at Leonard Theological Seminary, Indian
students studying in America, and itinerating evangelists and
Christian workers in rural areas.
He subsidized schools for lay leaders and provided
“Church extension gifts” to build churches and schools in
Indian villages and cities. He
had a strong influence in preventing the spread of Communism in
India. One of his books is titled Christ’s Alternative To
Communism. He founded, developed and supported the Christian
Ashram at Sat Tal, India—a year-round, world-wide center for
spiritual development based on the Christian Ashram disciplines.
In
1947 in the United States, he launched the Crusade for a Federal
Union of Churches. He conducted mass meetings from coast to coast
and spoke in almost five hundred cities, towns and churches.
He advocated a system through which denominations could
unite as they were, each preserving its own distinctive emphasis
and heritage, but accepting one another and working together in a
kind of federal union patterned after the United State’s system
of federal union.
In
1950 Dr. Jones provided funds for India’s first Christian
psychiatric center and clinic, the now noted Nur Manzil
Psychiatric Center and Medical Unit at Lucknow. The staff includes
specialists from India, Asia, Africa, Europe, and America who have
given up lucrative practices to serve in this Christian
institution which serves thousands of patients.
In
1959 Stanley Jones was named “Missionary Extraordinary” by the
Methodist missionary publication World Outlook.
A well-known Bishop described him as “the greatest
Christian missionary since Saint Paul.” He traveled among the
peoples of the earth, speaking three or more times daily.
A heavy correspondence, writing a book every other year and
constant personal counseling completed a program that went on
‘round the clock, ‘round the year and ‘round the world—a
miracle of physical achievement.
The years did not weary him, for he was blessed with
physical stamina, mental vigor, and God’s grace to sustain him
in the rugged schedule he imposed upon himself.
In
December 1971, at the age of 88, while leading the Oklahoma
Christian Ashram, Brother Stanley suffered a stroke that seriously
impaired him physically but not mentally and spiritually.
He was severely impaired in his speech, but dictated onto a
tape recorder his last book
The Divine Yes and in June of 1972 gave moving messages
from his wheel chair at the First Christian Ashram World Congress
in Jerusalem. He
died January 25, 1973 in his beloved India.
E. Stanley Jones
was truly a
”Missionary Extraordinary” to the twentieth century!
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