St. Thomas Evangelical Fellowship of India - Anti-Reformists

Anti-Reformists

While the Church was making rapid progress in all spheres of its life, there was an Anti-Reformists group silently working its way up from the early decades of last century. A band of young educated men, who were opposed to the Open Bible and the evangelical tradition, slowly started to undo the work of the reformers and return to the orthodox doctrines of the former church.

The endeavours of the Anti-reformists group to shake the evangelical faith and doctrines of the Mar Thoma Church yielded results. With the consecration of one from the anti-reformist group as Bishop in 1937, it gained considerable momentum. Abraham Mar Thoma Metropolitan (Mar Thoma XVII) died in 1947 and Juhanon Mar Timotheos episcopa was enthroned as Juhanon Mar Thoma Metropolitan (Mar Thoma XVIII). After this, the Anti-reformists gained the upper hand in the Church. Steadily and enthusiastically they went ahead with their programme of bringing the Church back to sacerdotalism. The reformists, a minority, felt that the essence of evangelism and the teachings of the bible were being set aside because of the newly adopted theological and hierarchical ways. The new ways included the adoption of new treatises put forth by the hierarchy in addition to the 66 books of the Bible as the foundation of the church. The Church was abandoning its core fundamental principles and the reason for its splitting away from its parent church almost a century earlier. Discontent, protests, and disenchantments developed among the followers of Metropolitan and the followers of the reform powers.