ABSTRACT
The Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) provided the institutional base from which Vedanayagam Samuel Azariah emerged as one of Asia’s foremost ecumenical mission leaders. During his career with the YMCA from 1895 to 1909, Azariah’s instinctive sense of the importance of missionary work acquired in the evangelical environment of Tinnevelly crystallized into a more fully developed ecumenical commitment to evangelism. The Young YMCA was created in the nineteenth century from an amalgam of different interdenominational organizations founded by young European and American men in response to changing work and living conditions in the Victorian period. While India’s attention focused increasingly on the unfolding drama of rising nationalism, Azariah’s attention turned to an even broader subject: the increasingly international character of Christianity and its varied cultural expressions in Asia. Azariah’s clarion call to convert Asia was, of course, different from a contemporary Asian nationalist’s clarion call to free Asia from western domination.
