E. Stanley Jones tells how he gathered people from various religions and viewpoints into a series of round table conferences. These persons were brought together not to discuss creeds or to argue positions but to share what they have learned of God through personal experience. This is an important book for our time because our world has become a small community. We must learn to listen to one another in mutual respect but at the same time be prepared to be open about what God means to us personally. In these Roundtable settings, Jones found that the person of Jesus easily stood out as the only One in whom we find Reality. In our time when persons are longing for ultimate truth, Jones makes it clear: “We never become more universal by being less Christian. Truth, by its very nature is narrow and God has only once revealed Himself in a person. Jesus in the ultimate truth available to every age.”
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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