Today’s Leader of Faith
GEORGE SHERWOOD EDDY
Home Call : 04 March 1963
World Missionary, Evangelist, Educator, Administrator, Author, Christian Socialist
George Sherwood Eddy (1871–1963) was an American Protestant missionary, who ministered in India for 15 years as a missionary and evangelist. He worked closely with the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), traveling across India to preach to students, emphasizing social service and evangelism. While attempting to convert people to Christianity, he did not want to offend other communities and chose to become a vegetarian. He preached to large crowds, particularly focusing on university students and intellectuals. He authored numerous works and travelled extensively to promote dialogue and understanding between missionaries and local communities, particularly in Asia and the Middle East. He played a role in establishing networks of Christian intellectuals across different regions. His contributions to Protestant communities in the United States and abroad have been recognized as influential. From the 1930s onwards, he became a Christian socialist.
Eddy was born on 19 Jan 1871, in Leavenworth, Kansas. He studied engineering at Yale but later pursued theological studies after spiritual awakening in 1889. He attended Union and Princeton Theological Seminaries but remained a lay missionary. Financially independent after his father’s death, he joined the Student Volunteer Movement and the YMCA, dedicating his life to global evangelism. He was among the early student volunteers who became missionaries worldwide.
Eddy went to India in 1896, working with the YMCA’s Indian Student Volunteer Movement as secretary for 15 years. In 1897, he took a ship from Madras to Calcutta where he met and debated Swami Vivekananda on Christianity and Hinduism. While in India, he worked among the poor and outcasts, mastered the Tamil language and served as a traveling evangelist among the students and masses of southern India beginning in Palamcottah, now Palayamkottai. In 1911, he became secretary for Asia, leading evangelistic campaigns across Asia and fundraising in North America. He later travelled extensively, including 15 trips to Soviet Russia, where he admired the system despite criticism. From 1915 to 1917, he served with the YMCA in France during World War I. He later trained religious, political, and business leaders and was involved with the Oxford Group. In 1931, he left the YMCA after 35 years and joined the Fellowship of Socialist Christians, later renamed Christian Action, which opposed capitalist individualism while acknowledging Marx’s social philosophy. In the late 1930s, he co-founded cooperative farms in Mississippi to support struggling sharecroppers, promoting economic equality and interracial justice. Despite initial success, the cooperatives ended in 1956 due to political tensions and economic decline. In 1949, he moved to Jacksonville, Illinois, where he taught at Illinois College and MacMurray College. Eddy passed away in Jacksonville, Illinois at the age of 92.