World-changers do not appear out of a vacuum. They follow the path lit by those who walk before them. E. Stanley Jones was a man who spent his life lighting the path. A missionary evangelist to India, Jones became friends with Mahatma Gandhi. Upon the assassination of Gandhi, Jones penned biography on his life. It is this biography that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr credited with having inspired his non-violent resistance philosophy that would change the course of United States history, placing E. Stanley Jones as the link between these 20th century world-changers.
E. Stanley Jones lived in and wrote for a complicated time. The 20th century saw not only the death, destruction, and horror of wars but also saw good resisting evil and the dignity of people standing together. In these complicated times of our own, these words still resonate with today. Perhaps these words can once again light the path for the world-changers of the 21st century.
Abingdon Press is releasing a new compilation of E. Stanley Jones writings. Beginning with Christ: Timeless Wisdom for Complicated TimesBeginning with Christ: Timeless Wisdom for Complicated Times features selections from Jones's writings complied by his granddaughter Anne Mathews-Younes. With a foreword from Adam Hamilton, this book offers you the companionship of the man who shared the table of fellowship with Gandhi and inspired world-changers such as Martin Luther King, Jr. and Billy Graham. This collection is timely because these reflections are timeless.
Beginning with ChristBeginning with Christ offers you the opportunity to discover these writings for the first time or sit again at the feet of E. Stanley Jones.
E. Stanley Jones (1884 - 1973)
Was a 20th-century Methodist Christian missionary and theologian. He is remembered chiefly for his interreligious lectures to the educated classes in India, thousands of which were held across the Indian subcontinent during the first decades of the 20th century. According to his and other contemporary reports, his friendship for the cause of Indian self-determination allowed him to become a friend of leaders of the up-and-coming Indian National Congress party. He spent much time with Mohandas K. Gandhi, and the Nehru family. Gandhi challenged Jones and, through Jones' writing, the thousands of Western missionaries working there during the last decades of the British Raj, to include greater respect for the mindset and strengths of the Indian character in their work.His work became interdenominational and world-wide. 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. In 1930, along with a British missionary and Indian pastor and using the sound Christian missionary principle of indigenization. (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 called "indigenization") Dr. Jones reconstituted the “Ashram” with Christian disciplines. This institution became known as the ”Christian Ashram.”
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