Last missionaries in the Punjab - end of an era

Morgan and Dorothy McKelvey were the last western missionaries to leave the Punjab in the Indian sub-continent in 1971.


This was witnessed by  Mark Juergensmeyer and the impact of what he saw in the Punjab was the subject of an article in The Christian Century journal in December 1976.

He wrote, “Several years ago, I witnessed the farewell to the last evangelistic missionaries in the north Indian state of Punjab. I had been doing research in the Punjab on the social movements of the oppressed untouchables, many of whom had joined the Christian church during the great missionary era; so it was an event of sociological interest to me and to the lower-caste community of converts. But perhaps it was a historical event as well: a moment of meaning for a community in transition, a world church in change.”

He visited a missionary compound and recalled, “Morgan and Dorothy McKelvey, a missionary couple, were retiring, leaving the next night on the Frontier Mail. Mr. Mall (an Indian pastor) suggested that we visit them. I didn’t know the McKelveys very well, but I did remember being struck by the fact that they were doing adult education and rural evangelism in the villages. Few missionaries did that sort of thing anymore. The roles of missionaries had changed. In fact, they were the only ones I could think of who were doing strictly church work, as opposed to work with Christian institutions -- schools and hospitals -- in the whole of the Punjab.”

Mark Juergensmeyer calculated that the missionary work in the Punjab had spanned 137 years - from October 1834 and on April 26, 1971, the last missionaries were to leave.

He recorded, “The McKelveys were sitting in the middle of the high-vaulted room of their mission house, a bit of packing clutter strewn about, the walls naked. They did not seem quite fit for their roles. She was round-faced, motherly, and seemed suited for baking pies on the Colorado plains -- where, in fact, they intended to live when they returned to the States. He had full white hair and trim features; one imagined him as a sweet-faced, athletic lad 60 years ago when he was growing up in the Punjab, the son of missionary parents, and when he joined the mission himself in 1944. Nor did they act as if they were performing a scene in history. Rather, they seemed tired and pensive.

“Mr. Mall and I mentioned our discovery that they were the last of their kind, and that tomorrow would be the closing of an era. If that was true, they said, they were not too happy about it. They had seen their colleagues, good ones, retired early, shipped off to bureaucratic roles; they felt that the newcomers -- teachers and doctors -- had time only for their institutions, and none for the church. The principle of shifting the leadership of the church to indigenous hands was undoubtedly a good one, they said, but if that meant shoving out all the church-related missionaries, that was pushing principle to a fault.

“The McKelveys did not say so, but the implication seemed to be that the local church needed the soothing hands of at least a few missionaries before it could ride totally alone. And in fact, the stories of the past couple of years -- the fights over church property rights, the factional struggles among the leadership -- had given an unpleasant air to the church’s reputation. McKelvey was apparently one of the few remaining missionaries who had the courage, or the interest, to wade into these messes and try to straighten them out. The missionaries in the institutions just didn’t have the time.

“Mrs. McKelvey looked at me sternly and said, "The only true missionary is an evangelistic missionary, you know. Once the Punjab had hundreds. And after tomorrow, there’ll be none.”