A friend from India recently shared with me that he and his family were “Saint Thomas Christians”. At the time I had not known that Saint Thomas had evangelized the nation of India. I had assumed (wrongfully) that all Indians followed the Hindu religion or were perhaps Muslims. The Saint Thomas Christians refer to themselves in this way because their tradition holds that their ancestors, who all came from the high castes of Hindu society, were converted by the Saint Thomas (the Apostle), who landed in India around 52 AD. History tells us that Saint Thomas died a martyr’s death in India. Pilgrimages to his tomb have always been an important element in the religious life of the St Thomas Christian community. So in the first century A.D., from its’ origin in Jerusalem, the gospel had reached the people living in far away India! Saint Thomas was doing his part to spread the gospel of the kingdom throughout the world of his day. Saint Thomas was fulfilling Jesus’ call to preach the gospel of the kingdom “in all the world for a (...)
