I recently had the privilege of visiting Meignanapuram. I went to the CSI church, St. Paul’s, and to the graves of John Thomas and his wife Mary. I was struck by the beauty of the building and wanted to know how it came to be there. This is what I found.
— the author of thinkask.ai
The short answer
- The church in this region began with Indian Christians. A widow from Tanjore, baptised as Clorinda in 1778, built the first Protestant church at Palayamkottai about 1783. A Tamil catechist, Sattianadhan, was ordained in 1790. Whole families of palmyra climbers asked for teaching from 1797.
- A German named the village. C. T. E. Rhenius, a Lutheran working for the English Church Missionary Society, founded Christian villages from 1820. By April 1831 his journal calls Neduvilai “Menyanapuram”: meiññãnam, true wisdom.
- A Welshman built it up. John Thomas took charge in 1838 and stayed until he died on 28 March 1870. He dug wells, laid out the village, trained catechists every month, and left 125 villages with Christians in them.
- The church took forty-two years. Foundation stone 1843; opened 1847; spire finished before the Governor of Madras in October 1868; roof finished and the church reopened on 22 January 1885, Mary Thomas’s birthday.
- Mary Thomas ran the girls’ school for sixty years. “Elliott Tuxford” is not a person: the school was paid for by the Rev. E. B. Elliott and his parish of Tuxford in England, and named for his late wife.
- What they taught was plain. The Lord’s Prayer, the Ten Commandments and the Creed, learned by heart over about two years before baptism; Christ crucified for sinners; prayer every morning and evening. Nobody was promised health or wealth.
Before the mission, and Rhenius
The land. South-east of the Tambraparni river lies the teri, red sand and palmyra palms. The people who climbed the palms, then called Shanars and now Nadars, made jaggery from the sap. Most of the families who became Christian here came from this community. Cholera and drought were frequent.
Before any missionary lived here. The Protestant mission in India began at Tranquebar in 1706. Its greatest missionary, Schwartz, baptised Clorinda at Palayamkottai in 1778. For forty years the Tinnevelly Christians were cared for mainly by Tamil catechists. Mudalur (1799) and Nazareth (1803) were founded as Christian villages.
Rhenius. Born in Prussia in 1790, he came to Palamcottah in 1820. He preached in the villages, wrote Tamil books and a Tamil grammar, revised the Tamil New Testament, opened schools, trained catechists and, from 1830, bought land for Christian villages through a “Philanthropic Society.” Meignanapuram was one.
The break of 1835. Rhenius wanted to ordain Tamil catechists by the Lutheran rite. The Society said no, because an Anglican bishop was now available. Rhenius then published pamphlets against the Prayer Book, and in 1835 the Society parted with him. For three years the congregations were divided. Both sides praised his zeal; he died in 1838, and the division healed. The full dossier sets the two accounts side by side.
John Thomas, and the church
The man. Born in Wales in 1807, John Thomas landed at Madras on Christmas Day 1836 and preached his first Tamil sermon at Meignanapuram a year later. He was a singer, a builder and a planner. The village was then “in the midst of a desert of sand.” He dug wells, and soon a visitor described an oasis where “every thing grows abundantly, including even grapes and pine-apples.”
The district. He began with eighteen catechists. By 1868 there were 125 villages with Christians, about 11,000 people, fifty-four catechists, and prayer-houses and schools in every large village. Every month his catechists came in: they worshipped, preached practice sermons that he corrected, were examined on the Bible, and went home on Thursday. In 1869 he presented twelve of them for ordination.
The church. The foundation stone was laid in June 1843, as a thank-offering for the healing of the division after Rhenius. That evening two thousand Christians shared a meal of curry and rice in a field. The church opened in 1847. In October 1868 the top stone of the spire was set while the Governor of Madras, Lord Napier, looked on and four thousand people shouted “Glory be to God!” But the roof was still thatch. In 1885 the people carried sand to protect the floor and gave palmyra trees for scaffolding; the finished church reopened on 22 January 1885.
A question for visitors
The CMS’s own historian, in 1899, says Thomas named the church St. David’s, after the patron saint of Wales. It is St. Paul’s today. No record of a change was found. The inscriptions in the church may answer it.
His death. He died on 28 March 1870 and was buried at the church. “Round his grave gathered the twelve Tamil clergymen, and a host of the people.” His son succeeded him; the college of education and the village’s sports clubs bear his name.
Put them in order
Six moments in the story of the village and its church. Arrange them from earliest to latest, then check.
Mary Thomas, and the Tamil workers
Mary Thomas married John at Madras in October 1838 and lived at Meignanapuram for about sixty years, until about 1900. With Miss Hobbs she started the girls’ boarding school around 1841. Girls chosen from the village schools lived and studied there and went home as teachers and wives of catechists. By 1846 the mission employed forty-six schoolmistresses. Bishop Spencer, testing schoolchildren nearby in 1845, found the girls knew more than the boys. After Mary, her daughter ran the school for nearly fifty years. It is today’s Elliott Tuxford Girls’ Higher Secondary School.
The Tamil workers did the daily teaching. Some names survive: John Devasagayam, the first Tamil ordained in the Church of England in South India (1830); the old catechist Thomas, a poet who died in 1844 with his arms crossed to show his trust in Christ’s death; Paul Daniel, a gifted preacher ordained in the Meignanapuram church in 1856, who died of cholera caught visiting a poor woman; Devanayagam Viravagu, who came to lead the whole district’s pastors. In 1877, after a great famine, 162 men and 7 women of Meignanapuram stood up in church to give one day a week to teaching newcomers. Most of the schoolmistresses and Bible women are not named in the records.
“In times of Cholera, I have never known them forsake the villages where it has broken out, or refuse to visit those attacked by it.”
George Pettitt, on the catechists, The Tinnevelly Mission (1851).
How the church grew, and what changed
Slowly, by families. Families or whole villages asked to be taught. A catechist came, led prayers every morning and evening, and taught the Lord’s Prayer, the Commandments and a catechism by heart. The missionary examined candidates and often sent them back to learn more. “It is seldom … less than two years that adults are admitted to Baptism.” The district counted 5,500 Christians in 1857 and 18,000 in 1880.
What changed. Daily prayer and Sunday worship; schools for girls as well as boys; a church that paid its own Tamil pastors from earthen pots broken once a year; wells and gardens; later a dispensary and embroidery work. The village had under a thousand people in the 1880s and 2,502 in 2011.
The festival. Each January the Asana Pandigai brings tens of thousands home for Communion at dawn and a great free meal, the asanam. No record explains its date. Its count of years starts in 1847, when the church opened; its meal echoes the feast of 1843; and its late-January date sits beside the 1885 reopening on Mary Thomas’s birthday and St. Paul’s day on 25 January.
Read the census correctly
The 2011 census for Meignanapuram gives: 2,502 people, of whom 1,311 are women; 109 girls under seven; and 1,124 women who can read. What share of the village’s women can read? (The census counts literacy among people aged seven and over.)
What they preached, and what is heard now
The converts learned the Creed, the Commandments and the Lord’s Prayer, and worshipped from the Tamil Prayer Book. Every Communion included the words “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.” The Prayer Book prayed for the sick to recover “if it shall be thy good pleasure,” and buried the dead “in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection.” The reports are full of cholera, famine and death, and full of people dying in faith. They promise no one health, money or success. Catechists’ sermons were checked against Scripture every month, and even the founder was answerable to a committee.
Many claims heard in the region today are different: healing for anyone with enough faith, money returned for money given, private revelations that may not be questioned, founders whose word is final. This page names no church or preacher. It only asks the reader to compare.
Is it in the record?
Eight sentences, all written by this page. Does something like each one appear in the nineteenth-century Meignanapuram records?
0 of 8 sorted.
Check it yourself
- 1. George Pettitt, The Tinnevelly Mission (1851), free on archive.org. Letters IX and XV.
- 2. Bishop G. T. Spencer, Journal of a Visitation Tour (1846), pp. 76–82: the church rising in 1845.
- 3. Eugene Stock, The History of the Church Missionary Society, vol. 2, pp. 179–183 and 542–543; vol. 3, pp. 171–176 and 471.
- 4. Go there. Read the inscriptions, find the graves, and ask the oldest people you meet for the names of the catechists, teachers and Bible women their grandparents knew.
Want the whole story?
The full dossier has the timeline from 1706, the map of the mission villages, twenty-five profile cards, the evidence on the festival, and the catechism the converts learned.
Full dossier → Simple English →