Richard W. Taylor (1950)

By Abraham Thomas, Graduate Student, BUST

“YOU never think of him as a missionary at all”—was the comment made by a close Indian colleague about the Rev. Richard W. Taylor, usually known as Dick to friends. A tall lanky American with a round face, a short moustache (more Indian than American), crew cut and a benign smile on his face, he does not look the “typical missionary” (that almost extinct species!). He is not the head of any institution and has no administrative tasks. Though a Methodist, he has never worked for any Methodist institutions in India.

Since coming to India in 1955, as a missionary of the Board of Missions of The Methodist Church, Mr. Taylor has worked at Nagpur, Rajpur, Serampore and Bangalore. The Taylors did not come to India as total strangers. Mrs. Taylor was an active Baptist student leader in her college days and connected with the work of the Student Christian Movement in the States and the World Student Christian Federation; Mr. Taylor, too, was active in the WSCF and both had WSCF friends in India including the Rev. F. H. J. Daniel who was then the General Secretary of the Indian SCM and Mr. M. M. Thomas, Associate Director of the Christian Institute for the Study of Society (CISS) and now the Director of the reconstituted Christian Institute for the Study of Religion and Society (CISRS) in Bangalore.

Mr. Taylor was first appointed to Hislop College in Nagpur to help Dr. Ram Singh set up a post-graduate course in sociology at the University of Nagpur. During 1957-58 he was Head of the Department of Sociology at the University. During his stay at Nagpur, Mr. Taylor was also the Honorary Provincial Secretary of Mid-India SCM.

When a suitable Indian professor was found to take his place at Nagpur, Mr. Taylor moved to Rajpur to fill the staff-vacuum at the Christian Retreat and Study Centre and became its Director from 1958 to 1960. The Centre was founded with Presbyterian support and sought to serve the Church in N. India as a place for holding conferences and retreats and for stimulating study and research on regional and local problems.

During this time Mr. Taylor continued his association with the SCM and served as the Honorary Secretary for the University Teachers’ Committee of the SCM of India. This was pioneering work and Mr. Taylor contacted many young Christian University teachers who were estranged from the Church and made them feel that they were worthy representatives of the Church. Through consultations and conferences he has stimulated their thinking and the university Teachers’ wing of the SCM owes much to Mr. Taylor for placing the work on a firm footing.

“To do the timely thing” has been one of the philosophies that has guided Mr. Taylor in his work in India. He does not believe in making a decision for a long period of time and for him there are no “career missionaries”. He would like to discover where he can be of particular use at a given time and then offer his services there and for that particular group. As a missionary, Mr. Taylor sees his role not in initiating new plans and programmes for the Indian Church but in finding some live and real movement developing within the Church and hopping onto the band wagon. In 1961, on his return from furlough (during which time he was a Resident at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard University), he further strengthened his partnership with the CISRS in Bangalore by becoming the Research Secretary, because he felt that his calling was to encourage Indian intellectuals to do research and thinking on the problems of Church, Religion and Society in India. Rather than do major pieces of research himself, this was the “timely” and essential thing to do. Because of this conviction, even when he writes he usually does so for publication outside India so as not to impede the expression by young scholars in India itself. Mr. Taylor’s publications include parts of several books published by the CISRS and articles in Religion and Society and elsewhere. Along with Mr. M. M. Thomas he wrote Mud Walls and Steel Mills published by the Friendship Press in 1963. He has also contributed to Weltkkirchenlexikon (ed. F. Littel and H. H. Walz, Stuttgart), Indische Stimmen zur Theologie (ed. Horst Burble, Stuttgart), and the forthcoming Festschrift for James Luther Adams, Voluntary Associations (ed. D. B. Robertson, John Knox Press).

As Research Secretary of the CISRS, Mr. Taylor shares with other senior members of the staff the responsibility to hold conferences and consultations in different parts of India. One of his major tasks is to help with the editing and publishing of the CISRS quarterly journal Religion and Society and the several books and pamphlets published each year. Mr. Taylor has developed a particular flare for editing which is invaluable for the CISRS. Perhaps the most important task that he performs is to encourage young intellectuals, particularly university teachers, to undertake study and research and to publish their work, often through the CISRS. His work during a recent two-week stay at the CISRS house in Bangalore is not atypical. He attended the meetings of a “Writing Party” assembled to write a forthcoming title of the CISRS, Indian Politics After Nehru. At the same time he was involved in editing (along with Mr. M. M. Thomas) a Yale University doctoral thesis on “Indian Christian Social Thought” for publication by the CISRS. He was also spending hours with two young Christian Economics professors helping them to put in shape a book on India’s Five-Year Plans. Two other professors (present for the “Writing Party”), one from Bengal and another from Kerala, who had done studies on some regional problems (an economic survey in Calcutta and a study on caste in Kerala) under his encouragement and guidance, were also having consultations with him. Being stationed in Bengal Mr. Taylor is able to contact intellectuals in that area and to arrange conferences on topics of regional importance. (For example, a conference on the problems of the tribal people was held sometime back and a book, Tribal Awakening, has been published). Even though on the staff of the CISRS, Mr. Taylor is also doing full-time teaching as Adjunct Professor of Ethics and Christian Social Thought at Serampore College in Serampore, West Bengal.

This “non-missionary missionary” is a Californian who was born in Los Angeles on 8 December 1924. He served as a technical officer in the U.S.A. Air Corps during World War II and graduated from The University of California at Los Angeles in 1947. He took his S.T.B. from Boston University in 1950 and A.M. from the University of California in 1951. Before going to India he was for three years at the University of Chicago.

At Boston, Mr. Taylor, apart from pursuing theological studies, had apparently time for pursuing other interests. He discovered his future wife in Mary Lyon Slasholes of Newton, Mass., then a Radcliffe student. On her graduation in 1948 the couple were married and are now blessed with five sons. Mrs. Taylor has taken courses in New Testament and History of Religions at BUST and at the University of Chicago, respectively. Friends and colleagues vouch for the excellent quality of the coffee that Mrs. Taylor makes and for the warm hospitality accorded to visitors to the Taylor family. The Taylors are on furlough this year and are spending the time at the Missionary Orientation Center at Stony Point, N. Y., where Mr. Taylor will be “Missionary-in-Residence”.

What is it that makes Mr. Taylor such an eminent representative of the still small but growing number of the “new type of missionaries”? We shall let a colleague answer the question. Dr. Herbert Jai Singh, the Acting Director of the CISRS, says that Mr. Taylor is “more the new type of missionary than anybody that I know of ” because “he has learned to work with and under Indians and is willing to take orders and do the unexciting spade work. He is aware of what is happening in the country and knows that the Gospel has to be preached in new ways. He is different from the old missionary in that he does not offer any neat formulas but is ready to learn from the situation.” He is willing and eager to link up with creative Indian thinking and make his contribution in this unassuming but more productive and permanent way. Being free of administrative tasks and involvements, he is free to be creative and to respond to the needs of the changing situations and new calls. Not a “career missionary”, the Rev. Richard W. Taylor is co-worker of Christ and his disciples in India, of whom the BUST can legitimately be proud.

This biography was originally published in Nexus: The Alumni Magazine Boston University School of Theology, Vol. 10, No. 1, November 1966), pp. 18-21.