includes index and biblioraphy

This is a book first published as one of fifteen studies comprising World Studies of Churches in Mission. The fieldwork was done in 1959 by the Rev. P. Y. Luke, a presbyter of the Medak Diocese, Church of South India, with the help of his wife, Mrs. Devapala Luke. The study focused on the nine village congregations in one section of the Wadiaram pastorate, 45 miles north of Hyderabad. The Rev. John B. Carman, then an American Baptist missionary and a Research Fellow of the Christian Institute for the Study of Religion and Society in Bangalore, was a consultant and co-author. The study revealed much participation by Christians in village Hindu rituals, but it also reported a number of cases of Hindus becoming Christians because of miraculous healing by Lord Jesus. By the end of the study, the future of these congregations seemed uncertain. Now a restudy is underway to discover what has happend to them, this time conducted by another presbyter of the Medak Diocese, the Rev. Dr. Chilkuri Vasantha Rao, who is also a professor in the Department of Biblical Studies of the Andhra Christian Theological College in Hyderabad. He is joining Dr. John Carman, now professor of Comparative Religion, Emeritus, to teach a course at Harvard Divinity School in the 2009 spring term, discussing the old and new studies. Thus this second edition is appearing and will first be used in a clasroom just fifty years after the original began - a golden jubilee.