The Early History of the Tinnevelly Church

The Anglican Church in Tinnevelly, as it was untilen it has been part of the united Church of South India, a self-administering diocese, with a membership of 120,000, and a hundred Indian clergy, has a history of a hundred and seventy years. 

The present history has been written chiefly for the members of the Church in the Tinnevelly diocese. Until 1947, the diocese: included, as far as Anglicans were concerned, the adjacent districts of Madura and Ramnad, which now form a separate diocese of the Church of South India: hence this history includes the story of the early years of the Church in these districts also. It attempts to gather all that is known of the beginnings of that Church under the German nissionaries of the S.P.C.K., and to chronicle in considerable detail the early work of the C.M.S. and the S.P.G., so that the memory of pioneer workers, foreign and Indian, may be kept alive, and the fullest information possible may be made available of the beginnings of the congregations in the leading town and village centres of the diocese... In view both of the interest and importance in themselves of the Roman Catholic missions in Tinnevelly of the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, and of their influence on the later Protestant missions, a summary account of the former is prefixed to the main history of this book.