The Universalism of the Greatest Methodist Evangelist

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Special to United Methodist Insight

E. Stanley Jones (January 3, 1884 – January 25, 1973) may have been the greatest Christian evangelist since the Apostle Paul. He was certainly the greatest Methodist evangelist since John Wesley. In 1938 Time Magazine featured him in a cover story and called him the greatest Christian Missionary. He was a confidant of Mahatma Gandhi and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and a mentor to Martin Luther King, Jr. In the days leading up to World War II he was dispatched by Roosevelt to meet with the Japanese in a last minute effort to avoid war. And yet sadly, today most people have never heard of his work.

In a short biographical essay, Dr. Anne Mathews-Younes, President of the E. Stanley Jones Foundation and Rev. Jones’s granddaughter writes:

“He went to India in 1907 as a missionary when he was just 23 years old. It is amazing to learn how casually mission boards treated new missionaries in those days. No orientation was given – for the country, its customs or climate, or even tips on how to get around. He was given a one-way ship passage from New York City to Bombay and the voyage took six weeks. While he was given the name of his ultimate destination, getting there was up to him.”

Mathews-Younes tells how on the twenty hour train ride from his port of entry to his first parish in Lucknow, he shared a compartment with a well-educated Muslim. She writes, “Full of enthusiasm for his missionary work, he read this gentleman the Sermon on the Mount, expecting the man to be overwhelmed and eager to learn more. Instead the man said, ‘We have the same thing in our Sacred Book.’ This was the first time my grandfather had come up against the very familiar, ‘all religions are the same – only the paths are different,’ attitude so widely held by many in the non-Christian world.”

He was shocked by that response because he was expecting the Muslim to see Christianity as a completely new and unique approach to life. He had expected to he would be debating with non-Christians to prove that they were wrong rather than listening to them to find areas of common belief and understanding.

Years later, in what I believe was his most important book, “The Christ of the Mount,” he re-framed the issue in terms of his understanding of the teachings of Jesus. Commenting on Jesus’s pronouncement that he did not come to abolish the Torah, but rather to fulfill it, Jones argued that the teaching should be understood as having universal application. The goal of Christianity should not be to abolish other religions or philosophies, but to fulfill them.

Jones observed that other missionaries in India (and around the world). Mathews-Younes writes that “often in changing their faith, the new converts were also encouraged to reject their identification with their Indian culture. This was British India and a time of political unrest. Some Indian Christians were becoming aliens in their own country.”

In contrast to many of his colleagues, Jones encouraged Indian Christians to maintain their customs within their Indian culture. “He was convinced that Christianity could be truly indigenous in India, as well as anywhere else in the world.” His appreciation for Indian culture was one reason why Jones formed close relationships with the independence movement generally and Gandhi specifically.

Jones reported a discussion with Gandhi in which he asked his friend for his opinion of Christianity. Gandhi replied, “I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians.”

In his early ministry Jones focused on the lowest castes in Indian society, those who were most oppressed or ignored. But that changed when a Hindu judge challenged him to bring the message of Christianity to the educated classes. In order to do that he had to decide what was truly essential to Christian faith and what was just a product of western culture.

Mathews-Younes notes that soon the young missionary “was speaking constantly to ever growing audiences of educated non-Christians. He presented a disentangled Christ, apart from the trappings of Christianity, apart from Western Civilization. Christ was presented as a universal Christ, belonging to all cultures and races and the answer to ALL human need. His audience was interested in this Christ. His first book, "Christ of the Indian Road," published in 1925, made this point clear. For Jones it was not the superiority of Christianity, but the all-sufficiency of Christ that was the foundation of Christian ministries.”

Jones developed a three-fold method of presentation. First he held lectures in public settings that were religiously neutral. And they were truly lectures rather than sermons, always followed by a time of questions from the audience. Second, he held roundtable discussions with forty or fifty people of different faith traditions sharing what was most important to them in their faith. And third, he founded the Christian ashram system of spiritual retreats for renewal and inspiration.

In “The Christ of the Mount” Jones made a point which has more recently been echoed by Robin Meyers, among others. The Sermon on the Mount says nothing about belief and everything about behavior. When the creeds were written several centuries later, that was reversed. The creeds say nothing about behavior and everything about belief. Jones pointed out that a person could believe every word in the creeds without it making any difference in how they lived. But one could not truly belief in the Sermon on the Mount without being changed by that belief.

Jones believed that “your deed is your creed.” We could use a lot more of that.

The Rev. William C. Trench of East Greenwich, RI, is a retired clergy member of the New England Annual Conference of The United Methodist Church. This post is republished with permission from his Facebook page.