Bakht Singh

On April 6, 1933, Bakht Singh arrived in Bombay, today’s Mumbai. He was twenty-nine. He had spent seven years studying in England and Canada. His parents came to see him. He had become a Christian, and they asked him one thing: keep it secret. Think of the family’s honor.

According to his own account, his father laid his turban at his son’s feet. For a Sikh, the turban is a sign of honor and faith. It was a plea without words. Bakht answered with a question: “Can I live without breathing?” Christ had become his life, he said. How then could he live without Him?

His parents left him behind in Bombay. He no longer had a home. Later he said that the street was his home and the lamppost his light.

This man would grow into one of the best-known evangelists and Bible teachers in India. He founded churches that depended on no one in the West and were led by Indians. When he died, Christianity Today wrote that he had helped start more than six thousand churches and groups in India. When he was buried in Hyderabad in 2000, about a quarter of a million people followed the bier, according to his own movement.

It began in a village in the Punjab, with a boy who tore a Bible to pieces.

A TURBAN AND A MISSION SCHOOL

Bakht Singh Chabra was born on June 6, 1903, in the Punjab, in the northwest of what was then British India. According to most sources he came from the village of Joiya in the Sargodha district. Since 1947 that area has been part of Pakistan. His parents, Jawahar Mal Chabra and Lakshmi Bai, were well-to-do Sikhs.

First, some background. Sikhism arose around 1500 in the Punjab, with Guru Nanak. Sikhs believe in one God, they read from their holy book, the Guru Granth Sahib, and men wear their hair uncut under a turban. In the years Bakht was growing up, the British ruled India. There was a growing movement for independence, and many Indians saw Christianity as the religion of the ruler.

Bakht went to a Christian mission school. He heard little about Jesus there, he said later. According to Christian History Institute, the teachers did not dare to preach Christ strongly, because there was criticism of British rule. The Christians he saw around him were British administrators or people from the lowest castes. Neither attracted him. Christianity seemed to him more a cultural identity than a living faith, as the American organization Renovaré sums up his view as a young man.

After his final exams he was given a Bible. He tore it apart with his hands and kept only the leather cover. He told that story himself, and it is also on the website his co-workers maintained after his death.

ENGLAND, 1926

He graduated from the University of the Punjab in Lahore. In 1926 he left for England to continue his studies in London, at King’s College. The sources disagree about the subject: mechanical engineering or agricultural engineering. Before he left, he promised his mother that he would remain a Sikh.

By then he was already married to a woman his parents had chosen for him. They had a son. How old he was when he married is not certain. One source gives the year 1915, when he was twelve, but I have not seen that confirmed anywhere else.

In England he let go of his faith. He called himself an atheist. Looking back, he said he lived like a playboy, spent his money on drink and wrote to his father claiming higher costs than he actually had. The Dictionary of Christian Biography in Asia relates, based on his own testimony, that he used up seven months’ allowance in one month.

It is striking how honest he was about this. In his story he did not make himself look better than he was.

A KNEE ON THE FLOOR

Then comes the moment he himself saw as the beginning. The sources differ about the place. Christian History Institute says it happened on board a ship bound for Canada. The Dictionary of Christian Biography in Asia places it in 1928, during a summer vacation in Canada. The heart of the story is the same in both versions, and that heart comes from his own testimony.

He went to a church service out of curiosity. During the sermon he fell asleep. He woke up when everyone around him knelt for prayer. He was hemmed in and could not get out. Out of politeness he knelt with them. And as he knelt there, words of praise for the Lord Jesus rose up in his mind. He felt, he said, a strong nearness of God.

A young man who had torn up a Bible was on his knees because he did not want to disturb the people next to him. I find that a beautiful beginning. God used something small, almost accidental.

He was not yet a Christian. But something had happened.

WINNIPEG, DECEMBER 1929

In 1929 he moved to Canada to study agricultural engineering at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg. There friends gave him a New Testament. Christianity Today speaks of two friends. According to Wikipedia and the American Our Daily Bread, they were John and Edith Hayward, a Christian couple who let him live with them and who read from the Bible before dinner. The Dictionary of Christian Biography in Asia mentions a bank manager, Owel Hansen, whom he met at the YMCA. Perhaps all three played a part. The sources do not settle it.

According to his own testimony he received the New Testament on December 14, 1929. He read for three days. On December 16, at half past eleven in the morning, he surrendered to Christ. His craving for tobacco, drink, the cinema and the dance hall disappeared almost at once, he said. The website of his movement also says that in 1929 in Canada he heard God’s voice, confessed his sins and accepted Jesus.

Have you ever read something you had pushed away for years, and discovered that it was about you?

A STAMMERER WITH A CALLING

There was a policeman in Winnipeg, Flynn, a member of the Christian and Missionary Alliance. He asked Bakht why he did not go back to India to preach. Bakht wanted nothing to do with it. He had been trained as an engineer. And he stammered. According to his own account he resisted for about two years. He offered God his money, but heard that God wanted him.

On February 4, 1932, he was baptized in Vancouver, on the west coast of Canada. That date appears in several sources. He was almost thirty.

Two months later, on April 4, 1932, he accepted the call. He did so, he said, with three conditions he received from God. He would make no claim on his father’s property and would make his needs known to no one but God. He would join no mission organization or denomination, but serve all Christians equally. And he would make no plans of his own, but let himself be led day by day.

Those three sentences shaped the rest of his life. They also explain why his work looked so different from that of the mission organizations in India.

THE STREET WAS HIS HOME

This brings us back to Bombay, April 1933, and the turban at his feet. His family disowned him. According to Christian History Institute, his wife left him and took their son with her. After that, the sources say almost nothing more about his wife and son.

He slept in a public night shelter. Then he traveled to Karachi, now in Pakistan, where one of his sisters lived. According to the Dictionary of Christian Biography in Asia, his first listeners were street sweepers. They met at four in the morning for prayer and Bible study, before their work began. In India’s caste system, street sweepers belonged to the lowest groups. The son of a rich Sikh read the Bible with them.

In that period, he said later, a Hindu confronted him about the behavior of Christians. Bakht began to pray for the renewal of God’s people. One verse that guided him in this came from the story of the loaves and the fish. After the meal, Jesus says to His disciples: “Gather up the fragments that remain, so that nothing is lost.” (John 6:12). Bakht read that as a command to waste nothing, no money, no time, no person.

According to the English Wikipedia, he began as an evangelist within the Anglican Church and later continued independently. Other sources say little about this.

MARTINPUR, JUNE 1937

He traveled through Sind, Baluchistan and the Punjab, regions that now lie in Pakistan. In 1935 he preached in Quetta. According to a later tradition he warned there of a coming “shaking,” after which an earthquake followed. The earthquake itself is well documented: in the night of May 31, 1935, it destroyed the city, with tens of thousands dead. For the warning I have found no source from that time.

In June 1937 he came to Martinpur, a village in the Punjab with a Presbyterian congregation. According to the Dictionary, the village was known for its loose morals. Presbyterians are Protestants whose churches are governed by elected elders. According to the Dictionary of Christian Biography in Asia, he preached there for thirteen days without anything seeming to happen. On the fourteenth evening a revival broke out that lasted until three in the morning. After that, all-night prayer meetings and shared meals became normal there.

That there was a revival in Martinpur in which Bakht Singh played a major part is stated in several sources. The historian Jonathan Bonk later called it one of the most remarkable movements in the church history of the Indian subcontinent. The exact days and hours come from Bakht’s own circle.

That same year he spoke at the large Christian convention in Sialkot. The British revival historian J. Edwin Orr later called him an Indian counterpart of the great Western evangelists. According to the Dictionary, seventy young men from Martinpur walked with him to Sialkot, a journey of some hundred and fifty miles, telling people about Jesus along the way.

A BIBLE HELD HIGH

From 1938 he traveled south: to Madras, today’s Chennai, and to Kerala. Large crowds came. Healings were reported. According to the Dictionary of Christian Biography in Asia, he deliberately kept those healings in the background. He is even said to have prayed that they would stop, so that people would come for Christ and not for a miracle. That story comes from the movement itself.

He did not advertise his meetings. He trusted that God would bring people if there was prayer. At the Mukti Mission of Pandita Ramabai, a well-known Indian Christian woman, he led nineteen nights of prayer, according to the same Dictionary. He always prayed on his knees.

He wanted every believer to have a Bible of their own. In his meetings he held his own Bible high. During his campaigns the Bible shops are said to have sold out.

In 1940, according to the Dictionary, some twelve thousand people came to hear him in Madras. Shortly afterwards a number of ministers in that city barred him from their churches, because he criticized the established church. Here a tension begins that would remain throughout his life.

A NIGHT ON THE HILL

Many people who came to faith through his preaching did not feel at home in the existing churches. They asked him to start a church. Bakht had never wanted to found a church of his own. According to the Dictionary, he fasted for twenty-one days before he agreed. Then he and his co-workers spent a night in prayer on a hill near the city, according to Wikipedia at Pallavaram, on the edge of present-day Chennai.

On July 12, 1941, the first church began in Madras. It was called Jehovah Shammah, Hebrew for “the Lord is there.” As its foundation they chose a verse from Acts about the first Christians in Jerusalem: “And they continued steadfastly in the apostles’ doctrine and fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in prayers.” (Acts 2:42).

No Western mission organization was involved. Indians led the church, and the believers regularly shared a common meal, which they called a love feast. In December 1941 the young church held its first Holy Convocation, a gathering of nineteen days. Bakht based it on Leviticus 23, where Israel gathers every year for God’s feasts. Later, thousands of people slept in tents at such convocations.

It was 1941. India was still a British colony. Six years later the country became independent and was partitioned into India and Pakistan. Bakht’s work shows that the gospel in India had already passed into Indian hands before then.

HEBRON

From 1946 he also traveled abroad. According to his movement’s website, in 1946 he spoke in Toronto at a large missions conference for students. In the years that followed came England, the United States and Australia, among other places.

On September 25, 1950, he moved with his co-workers to Hyderabad, in the south of India. In the mid-1950s they acquired a new site there, which he called Hebron. Hebron became the center of the movement, with a Bible school, a church and the grounds for the large convocations. According to Wikipedia, these drew up to twenty-five thousand people in Hyderabad, but I have not found that figure in an independent source.

The churches grew. In 2000 Christianity Today wrote that he had founded more than six thousand churches and groups in India, and that his influence reached some ten thousand churches in India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Australia and the United States. In the same report, Robert Finley was quoted, the president of Christian Aid Mission, an American organization that supports Indian evangelists. I have not found an independent count of those churches anywhere.

THE SHADOW OF A STRONG MAN

An honest chapter about Bakht Singh must also show the difficult side. His biographer T.E. Koshy devoted a separate chapter to it, about his human limitations.

The emphasis on separation from the world sometimes made his churches exclusive and judgmental, writes the Dictionary of Christian Biography in Asia. And because the work rested so heavily on what he heard from God, all major decisions had to go through him. When his health declined, that led to problems in the leadership.

There was criticism from outside his movement too. The church historian Bharathi Nuthalapati writes that many people saw his churches as breakaways from the established churches. Others found his teaching too mixed with Indian religion. She herself comes to a different conclusion. In her view his theology remained orthodox, but he spoke the language of bhakti, the Indian devotion of personal surrender to God. He gave that language a Christian content.

I think both can be true. A man who expects everything from God can build a great deal. The same man sometimes finds it hard to let anything go.

How would you deal with a leader who was so clearly used by God, and yet wanted to keep deciding everything himself?

HYDERABAD, SEPTEMBER 2000

Bakht Singh developed Parkinson’s disease. According to the Dictionary, he spent his last ten years in bed, cared for by a Christian couple.

About his family he later told one more thing. His father eventually became a Christian, he said. We know that only from his own testimony.

He died in Hyderabad at the age of ninety-seven. His movement and most reference works give Sunday, September 17, 2000. Christianity Today wrote September 16. His co-workers even recorded the time: five past six in the morning.

On Friday, September 22, he was buried. The procession went from Hebron to the Christian cemetery in Narayanaguda, a distance of about three kilometers (two miles) that, according to his co-workers, took some three hours. They estimated that a quarter of a million people walked along. Christianity Today reported that about six hundred thousand people attended the memorial services in Hyderabad. That figure also comes from the circle around Hebron. According to the Dictionary, many of the people in the procession held their Bibles high.

A follower told Christianity Today that he had been a father to thousands and thousands of people in India.

The boy from the Punjab had once torn up a Bible and kept only the leather cover. On that September day, thousands of people walked through Hyderabad, and above their heads they carried the book, whole.