Dr E Stanley Jones, the Billy Graham of India -HIRD

by Rev Dr. Ed & Janice Hird,
What if we told you that in his lifetime, Dr. E. Stanley Jones was the most-widely read spiritual author in the entire world, with 28 books, some selling millions of copies?   Born in Clarksville, Maryland, in 1884, Time Magazine called him the world’s greatest missionary.   In 1964, Time stated that Jones’ “fame overseas as an evangelist is matched only by Billy Graham.”  Many see him as the Billy Graham of India.   Billy Graham spent ten minutes in his 1963 Los Angeles Crusade, commending Jones's missionary work, calling him his “good friend and trusted advisor.”  Billy Graham wrote in his final book that Jones “made a profound impact on all those around him because of his extraordinary faith and service to others…His is a worthy testimony of living a meaningful life during the journey to eternal life.”
Jones initiated “round table conferences” at which Christian and non-Christian sat down as equals to share how their spiritual experiences enabled them to live better.  Tom Albin said that “everyone was asked to share only their religious experience and specifically ‘how religion was working, what it was doing for us, and how we could find deeper reality.’”    Serving in India for over 50 years, Jones was personal friends with Mahatma Gandhi.   A top spokesman for the Indian government, when Jones received the Gandhi Peace Prize, called him “the greatest interpreter of Indian affairs in our time.”  Who could have imagined that God would use Jones’ book on Gandhi to inspire Martin Luther King Jr to launch the non-violent civil rights movement?  King told Jones: “It was your book on Gandhi that gave me my first inkling of nonviolent noncooperation.”
While in England, Gandhi for the first time read the Bible, finding the New Testament compelling, especially the Sermon on the Mount.  As Gandhi commented, it ‘went straight to my heart’.  Because Gandhi daily read the Sermon on the Mount, Jones said to Gandhi “You know the principles.  Do you know the person yet?” Gandhi confessed that he didn’t but was searching.
Early in his missionary service in India, Jones suffered a physical and emotional collapse.  Telling the Lord that he was done, he surrendered his ministry to Jesus, and the Lord miraculously restored him.   Self-surrender became his theme and song. 
There are many United Christian Ashram retreats across Canada and around the world.  Many members of our family have been powerfully impacted by the past 47 years of the BC Christian Ashram. The first one was started in India by Dr. E. Stanley Jones in 1930, after spending time at Rabindranath Tagore’s and Mahatma Gandhi’s ashrams.   Jones said that only Jesus was good enough to be the leader, the guru of a Christian Ashram.   He was very Christ-centered, teaching that the highest thing we can say about God the Father is that he is Christ-like.  Inscriptions on the original Christian Ashram walls in Sat Tal, India, said, “Here everybody loves everybody”, “East and West are alternate beats of the same heart”, and “Leave behind all race and class distinctions, all ye that enter here.” Jones commented that in the Christian Ashram, barriers of class and cash disappear completely.  A black man shared, “This has been the first week of my life in an unsegregated world. I have lost my resentment against white people.” 
Jones was exiled by the British government during World War II because of his stand for racial equality and independence for India. Experiencing reverse-culture shock, Jones spoke out against American racism on NBC radio:
“When I landed on the shores of my native land on September 7th, had I obeyed my impulses I should have taken the first boat back to India … I must confess I came to America with deep questionings and concern. From a distance your civilization seemed superficial and your Christianity inadequate.“ 
He told a critic: “If I should be kept back from India permanently, God forbid, then I should consider seriously giving the balance of my working days to help the (Afro-Americans) of America to an equal status in our democracy and to their fullest development as a people. For the color question has become a world question.”  This time of exile also enabled him to transplant the Christian Ashram movement to Canada and the United States.  For many years, Stanley Jones spent six months in North America conducting city-wide missions and Christian Ashrams, and the other six months overseas.
Because of his global impact, Jones the peacemaker was invited to periodically meet with Presidents Roosevelt and Eisenhower, General Douglas MacArthur, John Foster Dulles, and Japanese Emperor Hirohito.   Jones saw everything through the eyes of the Kingdom, seeing inequality and racism as violation of Kingdom principles.  He called the caste system “India’s curse”, similarly rejecting the curse of racism in his own American homeland.  In a 1947 article “India's Caste System and Ours,” Jones commented. “The caste systems of India and America are fundamentally alike – they are both founded on blood.”  For Jones, the sin of racism had set back the cause of missions and democracy, saying
“There are no local or national problems any longer. Our treatment of the (Afro-American) is a part of a world racial problem and should be treated as such … You and I know that the central problem of Missions in the East is the white man’s domination. It haunts every gathering, public and private, we have in the East.” 
He was one of the first in the States to have desegregated meetings, causing some people to gossip about Jones as a communist agitator.  Jones also served on the Advisory Committee for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), which organized the Freedom Rides of the early 1960’s.  Reader’s Digest published an article entitled “Methodism’s Pink Fringe” (February 1950), portraying Jones as a Communist sympathizer, or worse. Jones responded ironically “Breathes there a man with soul so dead, who never has been called a Red?”   Because of his connection with Gandhi, Edgar Hoover had a 117-page FBI file on Jones.  Since he led so many communists to Christ, the communist leaders were not very happy about him either.  Jones replied, “You say, ‘He tends dangerous towards social equality between the races.’ If this be a crime, then so be it. It is a treason against democracy and against the Christian faith to advocate inequality of treatment between the races.” If the local laws required that blacks sit in the balcony, Jones instructed groups of whites on the main floor to move to the balcony themselves when the service began.   Dr. Bob Tuttle commented “Stanley had the pulse of the world. Who was more global at the time! He was the true renaissance man.” E Stanley Jones was truly a global firestarter for Jesus’ Kingdom. 

Click on this link to learn more about the United Christian Ashrams. www.christianashram.org

Rev. Dr. Ed and Janice Hird
Co-authors of the  Blue Sky novel
-previously published in the Light Magazine