Christianity in Mizoram

The Aizawl Theological College, founded in 1907, is one of the oldest institutions of Christian higher learning in Mizoram.

Christian denominations in Mizoram (2024–25)

1. Mizoram Presbyterian Church (58.8%)
2. Baptist Church of Mizoram (16.3%)
3. United Pentecostal Church (North East India) (7.63%)
4. United Pentecostal Church (Mizoram) (6.32%)
5. The Salvation Army (5.74%)
6. Others (5.21%)

Christianity in Mizoram is the religion of the great majority of the state's population and is the dominant influence on its public life, language and culture. According to the 2011 Census of India, Christians numbered 956,331, or about 87.16 per cent of the population of the state, making Mizoram one of three Indian states with a Christian majority, alongside Nagaland and Meghalaya. Among the indigenous Mizo people the proportion is higher still, with the scheduled tribes of the state recorded as more than 90 per cent Christian. The largest single denomination is the Presbyterian church, a legacy of the Welsh Calvinistic Methodist mission, followed by the Baptists in the south.

Christianity is a recent arrival in the region, having taken root only at the very end of the nineteenth century, yet within roughly half a century it had displaced the older Sakhua faith of the hills almost entirely. The faith reached the Lushai Hills as an indirect consequence of the British annexation of the territory, and the first lasting mission work began with the arrival of the pioneer missionaries James Herbert Lorrain and Frederick William Savidge on 11 January 1894, a date now observed in the state as Missionary Day. Because the church accompanied, and in many places preceded, the introduction of a written script, formal schooling and modern medicine, the spread of Christianity is closely bound up with the rise of Mizo literacy, today among the highest in India.

The strong identification between the Mizo and the Christian faith has at times found political expression. In June 2018 several Mizo organisations, including the People's Representation for Identity and Status of Mizoram led by Vanlalruata, publicly described Mizoram as a Christian state, and church bodies have on occasion sought a public role for Christianity within the framework of a secular constitution.

Background

Pre-Christian Mizo society

Fort Aijal in 1889. The British military post that grew into the town of Aizawl became the first base from which the gospel was preached in the northern hills.

Before the mid-nineteenth century the Mizo were almost unknown to the outside world. They lived in small, scattered chiefdoms in the hills between Cachar, Chittagong and Burma, frequently at war with one another, and were governed by hereditary chiefs of the Sailo and other clans. Their religion, known as Sakhua, combined the worship of household and clan spirits with a pervasive fear of malevolent spirits called huai. Ritual life centred on animal sacrifice performed by a village priest, the puithiam, and by diviners and medicine men known as bawlpu. Religious ideas included a paradise called Pialral, reached only by those who had performed the prescribed feasts and acts of valour, and a more ordinary land of the dead called Mitthi Khua.

Mizo social life was organised around the chief's authority, the zawlbuk or communal bachelors' dormitory where boys learned the customs and crafts of the community, and an ethic of tlawmngaihna, an ideal of selfless service and hospitality. Rice beer, called zu, was central to feasting and ritual. Early British officers, encountering the raiding parties of the hills, often described the inhabitants in harshly dismissive terms, a colonial attitude that later shaped the way missionaries framed their work.

British annexation of the Lushai Hills

The opening of the hills to outside influence came through conflict. From about 1850 Mizo raiding parties increasingly attacked tea plantations and settlements in the plains of Cachar. The raids reached a peak in 1871, when a series of attacks left several dead and resulted in the capture of a six-year-old British girl, Mary Winchester, by warriors of the chief Bengkhuaia. In response the colonial government launched the punitive Lushai Expedition of 1871–1872, which recovered the captives and exacted promises of good conduct from the offending chiefs. When the terms were broken later in the decade, the Chin-Lushai Expedition of 1889–90 subdued the remaining chiefdoms and brought the whole of the Lushai Hills under permanent military occupation, with fortified posts at Aijal and Lungleh, the future towns of Aizawl and Lunglei.

It was the story of Mary Winchester's captivity, widely reported in the British press, that first drew the attention of would-be missionaries to the Mizo. James Herbert Lorrain later recalled that a newspaper portrait of the captive child moved him to dedicate himself to work among the hill tribes.

History

Main article: History of Christianity in Mizoram

Arrival of Christianity

William Williams and the first visit

William Williams

The first Christian missionary to set foot in the Lushai Hills was William Williams, a young Welsh Presbyterian working in the neighbouring Khasi Hills. In February 1891 Williams met Mizo chiefs held in the prison at Sylhet and resolved to visit their homeland. Travelling with a small party of Christian companions, he reached the hills and on 15 March 1891 met his first Mizo, distributing scripture pictures to children and recording his observations of village life. Williams wrote to the Welsh mission office urging that missionaries be sent, but he died of typhoid on 21 May 1892 and was buried at Shillong before he could return. On a later review of his journey, the Mizoram Presbyterian Church Synod declared the date of his arrival, 15 March, to be the true Missionary Day at its general assembly in 2012.

Lorrain and Savidge: the Arthington Mission

Rev. F. W. Savidge

Rev. J. H. Lorrain

Mission Veng Church in 1919. The Presbyterian tradition introduced by the Welsh mission remains the largest in Mizoram.

The first lasting work was carried out by two Englishmen sent by the Arthington Aborigines Mission, a society funded by the Leeds philanthropist Robert Arthington for the evangelisation of unreached peoples. James Herbert Lorrain, a former telegraphist from London, reached Calcutta in January 1891, and Frederick William Savidge, a photographer turned missionary, followed in November of that year. After repeated refusals to enter Tripura and a long wait at Silchar, where they began to learn the Mizo language from travellers, the two finally received a permit from the political officer A. W. Davis. They set out by canoe on the Tlawng River on Boxing Day 1893 and arrived in Aizawl on 11 January 1894, the date recorded in Mizoram as the advent of the gospel. The two were given affectionate Mizo names, Lorrain becoming known as Pu Buanga and Savidge as Sap Upa.

Their early years were hard. They built a bamboo house with a thatched roof on Thingpui Huan, later known as MacDonald Hill, in the Zarkawt quarter of Aizawl, and supported themselves partly by trading salt. Their most consequential achievement was the reduction of the Mizo language to writing. Working with the chiefs Lalsuaka of Durtlang and Thangphunga, who acted as their teachers and translators, they devised an alphabet based on the Roman script using a phonetic spelling drawn from the Hunterian system. Savidge opened the first school on 1 April 1894 in Thangphunga's village, enticing reluctant pupils with sweets, and the missionaries also began translating portions of scripture and hymns. Their first published works included translations of the Gospels of Luke and John and the Acts of the Apostles.

The terms of the Arthington Mission required its workers to move on to new peoples after only a few years and discouraged the founding of settled churches. After five years that had produced only two baptisms, Lorrain and Savidge were directed to leave, and they departed Aizawl for England on 31 December 1897.

The Welsh Presbyterian Mission

Rev. David Evan Jones

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Rev. Edwin Rowlands

A dawn view from the Ramhlun Presbyterian Church in Aizawl. Presbyterian congregations multiplied rapidly across the northern hills after 1900.

The Calvinistic Methodist Church, later named the Presbyterian Church of Wales, had agreed to take the Lushai Hills as its mission field, and its first missionary, the Reverend David Evan Jones, reached Aizawl on 31 August 1897, shortly before Lorrain and Savidge left. Jones, given the Mizo name Zosaphluia, took over the pioneers' house and learned the language from them in their last months. On 15 February 1898 he opened a school at his bungalow, which soon served as a place of worship and Sunday school. The organised congregation that gathered there in 1898 is regarded as the origin of the church in Mizoram and the foundation of the Mission Veng congregation in Aizawl, although a separate church building was not erected until 1913.

Jones was joined at the end of 1898 by Edwin Rowlands, known to the Mizo as Sapthara, and the two travelled widely, often taking turns so that one remained in Aizawl while the other preached in the villages with Mizo companions whose schooling they paid for out of their own pockets. Progress was at first very slow. The census of 1901 recorded only 45 Christians in a population of some 82,000.

First converts

Khuma and presumed to be Khara or Duma, who were the first people to get baptized (25.7.1899)

The first Mizo to be received into the faith were two young men, Khuma and Khara, who had been tutored under Lorrain and Savidge and were baptised by Jones on 25 July 1899. Khara soon returned to the old faith on entering government service, but Khuma became a tireless preacher, travelling alone into the remotest parts of the hills despite persecution by chiefs, until his death in 1917. Khuma, Khara and a companion named Phaisama were among the first Mizo to undertake unaided evangelistic tours, reaching as far as the Chin Hills. These early Mizo evangelists were often treated as vagrants and beggars, and social stigma long discouraged non-Christian families from giving their daughters in marriage to converts.

A widely remembered episode concerns Darphawka, a man of the southern hills who was said to have fallen into a trance and foreseen "two great lights" coming from the north and the south. The prophecy was later understood to refer to the Welsh Presbyterian mission in the north and the Baptist mission in the south, and his daughters Tlawmi and Khumi were among the earliest converts in the region.

Division of the mission field

The Baptist mission station at Serkawn, near Lunglei, became the headquarters of the Baptist Church of Mizoram and the site of the first hospital in the territory.

As both missions grew, the danger of duplication in a small territory became clear. In 1901 the Welsh mission agreed to divide the Lushai Hills into two fields and to hand the southern part to the Baptist Missionary Society (BMS) of London. Following the death of Robert Arthington in 1900, the BMS had inherited the resources of the Arthington Mission and was able to take up the work. Lorrain and Savidge were invited back, and they reached Lunglei in March 1903, where they were welcomed by about 125 Mizo Christians already gathered at Sethlun. The first independent church building in the territory had been built at the small village of Sethlun, near Lunglei, in 1902, by Christians who had left their home villages because of their new faith. The missionaries settled at Serkawn, which became the permanent headquarters of the Baptist Church in Mizoram. Despite belonging to two traditions, the four missionaries cooperated closely, holding joint meetings and agreeing on a common form of the written language and a shared set of hymns.

The Lakher (Mara) mission

The BMS field did not extend to the extreme southern corner of the hills, and Lorrain therefore urged his younger brother, Reginald Arthur Lorrain, to take up work among the Mara people, then called Lakher by outsiders. With his wife Maud, Reginald Lorrain founded the Lakher Pioneer Mission in London in 1905 and settled at Serkawr village in Maraland on 26 September 1907. By about 1950 almost the whole Mara community had become Christian. After the partition of the area between India and Burma at independence, the Indian portion of the church became the Evangelical Church of Maraland.

Revival movements

The most powerful engine of conversion was a succession of Christian revival movements that swept the hills in the early twentieth century, an outgrowth of the 1904–1905 Welsh revival carried east through the Khasi Hills.

The revival of 1906

Main article: Mizo Revival of 1906

In March 1906 a delegation of Mizo Christians attended a large assembly in the Khasi Hills at Mairang, where they experienced the emotional fervour of the revival then under way. On returning home they carried the spirit to Aizawl, where, after early failures, an outpouring of prayer, hymn singing and public confession of sin broke out as the southern delegates were about to leave. The movement spread from village to village and brought a wave of new converts, though it also provoked resistance, including the cultural movement known as Puma Zai that arose in opposition to the growing Christian influence.

The revivals of 1913 and 1919

Main articles: Mizo Revival of 1913 and Mizo Revival of 1919

Picture of Rev. Dr. Peter Fraser, who lead the campaign against the bawi system

A second great revival, traditionally dated to 1913, arose independently in the north around Aizawl and in the south around Lunglei, spreading the faith into many more villages and bringing changes in social roles, including the position of women. It was associated with the campaign of the missionary Peter Fraser against the bawi system, which he regarded as a form of slavery. The Mizo Revival of 1919 centred on the theme of the suffering of Christ on the cross and was marked by the introduction of drums into worship and by intense emotional expression. This third revival also saw the emergence of new denominations in the territory, including the Salvation Army and the Catholic Church.

The Kelkang revival of 1937

Main article: Kelkang Revival

A further revival broke out at Kelkang in the eastern hills in 1937, becoming notable for its extreme manifestations. The superintendent Anthony Gilchrist McCall intervened to curb the movement after it caused alarm among the authorities. By the end of the 1930s the Mizo community as a whole was regarded as Christianised, with only a small number of individual dissenters remaining.

Bible translation and literature

The growth of the church and the growth of Mizo literacy were inseparable. Building on the alphabet devised by Lorrain and Savidge, the missionaries and their Mizo helpers steadily translated more of the Bible. The earliest published portions, the Gospels of Luke and John and the Acts of the Apostles, were combined into a single volume that became the most popular book in the hills, bought by Mizo readers in a barter economy with eggs and hairpins. In the course of translation the divine name was rendered first as Jihova and then settled as Pathian, the older Mizo word for the supreme being, while the name of Jesus became Isua, since the Mizo alphabet has no letter j. The complete New Testament in Mizo appeared in 1916 and the full Bible in 1959.

Lorrain continued to expand his Dictionary of the Lushai Language, which by his death in 1944 recorded some 33,000 words and remains a standard reference. Mizo Christians soon produced their own literature, including the foundational vernacular histories of Liangkhaia, whose Mizo Chanchin became a classic account of the people's past, and later the theological reflections of writers such as Zairema. The first Mizo newspaper, Mizo Chanchin Laisuih, appeared in 1898, within a few years of the creation of the script.

Denominations

Solomon's Temple at Chawlhhmun, Aizawl, built by the indigenous Kohhran Thianghlim church, is among the largest church buildings in the state.

Mizoram's Christian community is divided among a large number of denominations, the great majority of them Protestant. The two pioneer churches remain the largest.

The Mizoram Presbyterian Church Synod, descended from the Welsh Calvinistic Methodist mission, is the largest denomination in the state and a constituent body of the Presbyterian Church of India, whose general assembly has its headquarters at Shillong in Meghalaya. The administration of the Presbyterian church is highly centralised, with the synod office at Mission Veng in Aizawl exercising wide authority over finance, personnel and policy. The synod reported about 627,719 members in some 1,139 local churches in its statistics for 2023–24.

The Baptist Church of Mizoram, with its headquarters at Serkawn near Lunglei, is the dominant church in the southern districts and is affiliated with the Baptist World Alliance. It reported around 122,000 members in some 663 congregations.

Other significant churches include the United Pentecostal Church, the Salvation Army, which was established among the Mizo in 1917 by the preacher Kawl Khuma, the Roman Catholic Church, the Seventh-day Adventist Church, and the Evangelical Church of Maraland in the south. A number of churches are wholly indigenous in origin, the largest being Kohhran Thianghlim, the Holy Church, founded by L. B. Sailo in 1984 and known for the great Solomon's Temple at Chawlhhmun. Smaller bodies include the Evangelical Baptist Convention Church, the Lairam Jesus Christ Baptist Church, the Evangelical Free Church of India and the Independent Church of India.

Indigenous churches: Kohhran Thianghlim

An angel statue and tower at Solomon's Temple, the headquarters church of Kohhran Thianghlim at Chawlhhmun, Aizawl.

Among the churches that originated entirely within Mizoram, the best known is Kohhran Thianghlim, whose name is rendered in English as the Holy Church. It was founded in 1984 by Lalbiakmawia Sailo, generally known as Dr L. B. Sailo, a veterinary surgeon who served as Director of the Animal Husbandry and Veterinary Department of the Government of Mizoram. The church describes itself as non-denominational and regards its members as "the elects". In its own account the founding is attributed to the Holy Spirit working through Sailo, and the body is governed by an Executive Committee with subordinate boards, organised into seven administrative divisions across the state, with its general headquarters at Chawlhhmun on the western edge of Aizawl. The church draws heavily on imagery from the Hebrew Bible, using the Star of David as its emblem and presenting Aizawl as a spiritual Jerusalem for its members. It publishes a Mizo-language fortnightly bulletin, Zanlai Au Aw (Midnight Herald), which has appeared since 20 September 1998.

The church is best known for the Solomon's Temple at Chawlhhmun, conceived by Sailo, who said the design had been revealed to him in a dream in 1991. The foundation stone was laid on 23 December 1996 in a valley named after the biblical Kidron Valley, about ten kilometres from the centre of Aizawl, and the structure took about twenty years to complete, being opened with a Christmas service in 2017. Built of white marble, the temple is among the largest church buildings in the state, with a main hall said to seat about 3,000 people and a courtyard able to hold several times that number. Worship at the temple incorporates indigenous Mizo practice, including lengkhawm singing accompanied by drums, and the building has also been used for community events such as voluntary blood donation drives organised by the church's youth wing. Kohhran Thianghlim is one of several new religious movements of local origin in Mizoram and illustrates how, a century after the arrival of the foreign missions, the Mizo had begun to generate distinctive forms of Christianity of their own.

Education and health

The hospital at Durtlang, founded by the Presbyterian mission, is one of the oldest in Mizoram and reflects the close link between the church and modern medicine.

The mission churches were the founders of formal education in the hills. The first schools were opened by Savidge in 1894 and by Jones in 1898, and the Welsh mission undertook to build a school in every village of more than a hundred households, a programme that continued until 1952. Teaching was conducted in the new Mizo script, and literacy spread informally as those who had learned to read passed the skill to others. The Aizawl Theological College, established in 1907 and now affiliated to the Senate of Serampore College (University), became a major centre of ministerial training. The legacy of mission schooling is widely credited with Mizoram's literacy rate, one of the highest among Indian states.

Medical work followed closely. The Presbyterian mission established a hospital at Durtlang, near Aizawl, and the Baptist mission opened the Christian Hospital Serkawn in 1919, the first hospital and nursing school in the territory. The high regard in which Mizo came to hold mission medicine was, in the early years, one of the few things that overcame their suspicion of the missionaries.

Impact on Mizo society and culture

The arrival of Christianity transformed Mizo society more thoroughly than perhaps any comparable change elsewhere in India. The new faith displaced the sacrificial religion of Sakhua, and with it the authority of the village priest, while the spread of schooling and the decline of the zawlbuk dormitory undermined the older channels of social training. The educated Christian generation that emerged went on to found bodies such as the Young Mizo Association, which became a central institution of modern Mizo life.

Under the influence of the church the consumption of rice beer zu was discouraged and largely replaced by tea, which had the effect of reducing widespread drunkenness, and missionary pressure contributed to the abolition of the bawi system. The traditional festivals of the agricultural year, Chapchar Kut, Mim Kut and Pawl Kut, fell into disuse for a time, and Christmas became the principal festival of the Mizo calendar. From the 1960s and 1970s, however, the churches themselves took a leading part in reviving Chapchar Kut and other elements of Mizo heritage, so that it is today celebrated as a major cultural festival alongside Christmas.

Christianity also took on a distinctly Mizo form in worship. The hymn tradition known as lengkhawm zai, sung to indigenous tunes and accompanied by the Mizo drum khuang, grew out of the revivals and blends Christian devotion with older communal singing. This practice continues even in modern congregations, including the services held at Solomon's Temple.

Statistics

Religion in Mizoram (2011)

Religion			Percent
Christianity			87.16%
Buddhism			8.51%
Hinduism			2.75%
Islam			1.35%
Others/not stated			0.23%

Christians in Mizoram

Year	Number	Percentage
2001	772,809	86.97
2011	956,331	87.16

Historical Christian population in Mizoram

Year	Pop.	±%
1901	45	—
1911	2,461	+5368.9%
1921	27,720	+1026.4%
1931	59,123	+113.3%
1951	177,563	+200.3%
1961	230,509	+29.8%
1971	286,141	+24.1%
1981	413,840	+44.6%
1991	591,342	+42.9%
2001	772,809	+30.7%
2011	956,331	+23.7%
Source: Census of India

Growth by decade

The proportion of Christians in the population rose from a negligible figure at the start of the twentieth century to an overwhelming majority within fifty years. The figures below are drawn from successive censuses and from analyses of census data; the early decades show very rapid growth following the revivals, while the later decades reflect the near-saturation of the indigenous population.

Year	Percent	Change
1901	0.05%	–
1911	2.7%	+2.65%
1921	28.17%	+25.47%
1931	47.52%	+19.35%
1951	90.5%	high
1961	86.64%	−3.86%
1971	86.09%	−0.55%
1981	83.81%	−2.28%
1991	85.73%	+1.92%
2001	86.97%	+1.24%
2011	87.16%	+0.19%

By tribe

Christianity is virtually universal among the indigenous tribes of the state, with the notable exception of the largely Buddhist Chakma. The figures below derive from analysis of the 2011 census.

Tribe	Christians	Percent
Mizo (Lusei)	726,999	98.92%
Pawi	51,039	99.29%
Kuki	43,075	94.14%
Lakher (Mara)	42,586	99.37%
Hmar	29,289	98.99%
Paite	22,950	98.99%
Chakma	7,121	7.34%

Other religious communities

Religious minorities in Mizoram are concentrated among non-Mizo communities and in particular districts. Buddhists, who formed about 8.51 per cent of the population in 2011, are predominantly Chakma settlers of Arakan origin living in the southern districts of Lawngtlai and Lunglei. Hindus, about 2.75 per cent, are mainly Gorkhas and Reang (Bru) people, many of the latter having left the state after the displacement of 1997. Muslims make up a little over one per cent of the population. A community of several thousand ethnic Mizo, the Bnei Menashe, practise a form of Judaism and claim descent from the biblical tribe of Manasseh.

See also

• History of Christianity in Mizoram
• Religion in Mizoram
• List of Christian denominations in North East India
• Mizoram Presbyterian Church Synod
• Baptist Church of Mizoram
• Mizo Revival of 1919

Further reading

• Lloyd, J. Meirion (1991). History of the Church in Mizoram: Harvest in the Hills. Aizawl: Synod Publication Board.
• Vanlalchhuanawma (2007). Christianity and Subaltern Culture: Revival Movement as a Cultural Response to Westernisation in Mizoram (1906–1940). Delhi: ISPCK.
• Pachuau, Joy L. K. (2014). Being Mizo: Identity and Belonging in Northeast India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
• Jackson, Kyle (2023). The Mizo Discovery of the British Raj: Empire and Religion in Northeast India, 1890–1920. Cambridge University Press.
• Liangkhaia (1938). Mizo Chanchin (in Mizo). Aizawl: L. T. L. Press.
• Zairema (1978). Pi Pute Biak Hi (in Mizo). Aizawl: Synod Press.

External links

• Mizoram Presbyterian Church Synod (in Lushai and English)
• Baptist Church of Mizoram (in Lushai and English)