This week in Christian history: Third Crusade, Indian missionary baptized
Indian missionary baptized – Sept. 3, 1905
This week marks the anniversary of when Sadhu Sundar Singh, a traveling Indian evangelist known for his humble living, was baptized on his birthday at an English church in Simla, India.
Born into a Sikh family, Singh first encountered Christianity as a child when enrolled at a primary school overseen by the American Presbyterian Mission.
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“Despite his family's pleas, bribes, and threats, Sundar wanted to be baptized in the Christian faith,” explained the Christian Classics Ethereal Library.
“After his father spoke words of official rejection over him, Sundar became an outcast from his people. He cut off the hair he had worn long like every Sikh man.”
As an itinerant preacher, Singh traveled a good deal of India and Sri Lanka, but also evangelized in China, Japan, and, by the 1920s, Australia and Western Europe.
As part of his mission work, Singh would travel to Tibet every summer. In 1929, while making the annual journey, he disappeared and was never heard from again.
