Podcast Episode 80
Sadhu Sundar Singh
with Rev. Dr. Richard Howell & host Nick Walters
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Sadhu Sundar Singh became one of the most distinctive Christian missionaries of the early twentieth century because he challenged the assumption that Christianity in India had to look Western. Born into a Sikh family in Punjab in 1889, Sundar Singh encountered Christianity while growing up under British colonial rule. As a teenager he strongly opposed the Christian faith and later recalled burning a Bible. After a period of intense spiritual crisis, however, he testified that a vision of Jesus Christ led to his conversion. He was baptized in 1905, shortly after turning sixteen.
His conversion did not mean exchanging Indian culture for European customs. In 1906, Sundar Singh adopted the life and saffron robe of a sadhu, the familiar Indian figure of a wandering religious holy man. He traveled largely on foot, preaching Christianity while deliberately presenting himself in a form Indians would recognize as culturally their own. At a time when Christianity in India was often closely associated with European missionaries, colonial institutions, and Western culture, Singh demonstrated that an Indian Christian did not have to become culturally European.
That choice raised questions that remain important in Christian missions: What belongs to Christianity itself, and what merely reflects the culture of the missionary? Sundar Singh became a powerful example of an indigenous Christian witness seeking to separate the Gospel from unnecessary Western cultural forms.
He became known for difficult missionary journeys through India and toward Tibet and the Himalayan regions. Stories of persecution, imprisonment, physical hardship, and long journeys on foot helped produce the description “Apostle of the Bleeding Feet.” His reputation eventually extended far beyond India. Sundar Singh traveled internationally and spoke to Western Christian audiences at a time when missions were still commonly imagined as moving from Europe and North America toward Asia and Africa.
His writings and teachings emphasized communion with Christ, prayer, sacrifice, suffering, and discipleship. Works such as At the Master’s Feet introduced readers outside India to a distinctly Indian expression of Christian spirituality. His life also became surrounded by accounts of visions, miracles, extraordinary escapes, and supernatural experiences. Christians and historians have not always interpreted those claims in the same way, making it important to distinguish the historical Sundar Singh from the devotional literature that grew around him.
The mystery surrounding his life deepened in 1929. Sundar Singh departed on another journey toward Tibet and disappeared. His fate was never conclusively established, leaving one of the best-known Indian Christians of his generation with an ending that remains unresolved.
For the Deep Dive, host Nick Walters explores Sundar Singh’s life, theology, missionary work, and legacy with Rev. Dr. Richard Howell, President of the Caleb Institute and Vice-Chairperson of the Sadhu Sundar Singh Global Forum. Howell brings both an Indian Christian perspective and direct involvement in preserving and examining Singh’s legacy. The discussion considers his conversion, his decision to live as a Christian sadhu, his missionary journeys, his theology of suffering and discipleship, and his place in modern Indian and global Christianity.
Also this week in Christian history, the only Englishman ever elected pope died on September 1, 1159. Born Nicholas Breakspear, Adrian IV became pope in 1154 during a period of intense struggle among the papacy, the Holy Roman Empire, Italian political powers, and the Norman kingdom in southern Italy. His relationship with Emperor Frederick Barbarossa became especially important as papal and imperial claims to authority collided.
The episode also remembers the rebuilding of St. Paul’s Cathedral after the Great Fire of London. The fire of 1666 devastated much of the city and destroyed the old medieval cathedral. Its destruction created the opportunity for Christopher Wren to design the new St. Paul’s, whose construction began in the 1670s. The cathedral became one of the defining landmarks of London and part of a broader rebuilding program that reshaped the Church of England’s physical presence in the capital.
This Week in Christian History is produced by the Center for Christian History and hosted by Nick Walters.
Photo citation: Sadhu Sundar Singh, c. 1922. Contemporary photograph, reproduced in Friedrich Heiler, Sadhu Sundar Singh: Ein Apostel des Ostens und Westens (Munich, 1924). Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.