The Mizo Revival of 1906

In 1905 the Lushai Christians held nightly prayer meetings for a time, and Dyer writes that “the fire died down”. At the end of 1904 the Welsh mission had one church in its field, with 32 communicants.

Nine went to the Assembly at Mairang the next March, four men and two women from the north and three men from the south. J. Edwin Orr prints ten and gives their names. J. Hughes Morris, the mission's historian, says the road took a fortnight. At the Sunday service the crowd prayed for them to carry the fire back. A quarrel broke out among them on the way home, and Dyer blames Satan for it.

They reached the first Christian community in Lushai on 4 April and held a meeting that night, and the others “seemed harder than ever”. On 9 April a farewell was held for those going on to the south. As they shook hands to part, Dyer writes, “the power of the Spirit was felt”.

A young woman began to confess her sins, and others followed until a large number lay on the ground crying for mercy. The meeting began at eight in the morning and closed at two, with people swaying and keeping time with their feet.

A schoolboy carried the fire to his village and came back with forty-four names. Morris counts 89 baptised within a few months and 400 enrolled as adherents.

Chiefs fined those who went to hear, and Morris says converts who would not join the village dances were beaten. Then a movement called Puma Zai swept the Hills for two years. Orr calls it an anti-revival that mimicked the revival in form. Heath reports that most scholars now take a kinder view of it.

The bamboos seeded in 1911 and 1912, and rats ate almost the whole rice crop. Morris counts 4,832 adherents soon after and 7,886 in 1915, and bands of young men calling themselves “Kraws Sipai,” Soldiers of the Cross, went preaching.

The Presbytery organised a campaign in the spring of 1918, and Morris's count reached 17,838 in 1919. Joanna Heath has three far-apart villages breaking out on the same day that July, and she dates the drum in worship from that wave. Heath gives the usual count as four waves, this first one and those of 1913 to 1915, 1919 to 1923 and 1930.

Dyer says the Hills opened to mission work in 1891. J. H. Lorrain and Savidge began at Aijal in December 1893 by Morris's date and in 1894 by B. C. Allen's. Before they had to leave in 1897 they had translated Luke, John and Acts and made a grammar and a dictionary. They had also put the language into writing.

D. E. Jones of the Welsh mission arrived on the last day of August 1897 with Rai Bhajur, a Khasi evangelist. He baptised the first two, Khuma and Khara, on 25 June 1899. He retired in 1927 after thirty years.

G. T. Lloyd, who wrote the report for Assam, had suggested that “zealous Christian enumerators” might have entered their wishes. Mr. Scott, the Superintendent of the Hills, tested many entries himself. Scott also told him of a mad woman of an Animist family entered as a Christian because she joined in the hymns.

Lloyd wrote that only here in the province had “mass or group conversion” taken place. The Census of 1951 repeats a report that some Christians in the Hills had gone back to their old sacrifices. It says the extent was not examined.

The last figure covers the whole state, including people who are not Mizo. Heath writes that the Mizo people claim to be wholly Christian.