This week in Christian history: YMCA’s first world conference, pioneering Indian bishop born
Vedanayagam Samuel Azariah born — Aug. 17, 1874
This week marks the anniversary of the birth of Vedanayagam Samuel Azariah, the first East Indian bishop in the Anglican Communion, in the village of Vellalanvilai, Tirunelveli.
Educated at Anglican missionary schools and later at Madras Christian College, Azariah served as a YMCA secretary and helped form two missionary societies aimed at evangelizing India.
He became an ordained Anglican missionary in 1909 and, in 1912, was promoted to the position of bishop of the newly launched Anglican Diocese of Dornakal.
“In the thirty-two years of his episcopate, the diocese became one of the strongest numerically in the entire Anglican communion, with a church population of more than 200,000,” according to Azariah’s 1945 obituary in The New York Times.
“Outside his diocese Bishop Azariah had been chairman of the interdenominational Christian Council of India, and had worked constantly for church unity. He took prominent part in the Conferences on Faith and Order, Lausanne, 1927, and Edinburgh, 1937; on Church, Community and State in Oxford, 1937, and two Lambeth Conferences of all Anglican Bishops in 1920 and 1930.”
