Articles 2 and 3 of the covenant are rooted in good sense and the wisdom born of experience in the field. The need is to converse with [Indian people] in an intelligible manner and to avoid coming across to them either as fanatics or as irrelevant. Sounds familiar? Read any piece about relevant witness in a post-modern (or 'post-Christian') society and the same issues apply. Here is an example.
So Carey, Marshman and Ward commit themselves to several things:
* conversing with sensible natives;
* reading some parts of their works;
* attentively observing their manners and customs.
They stress the need to know Indian modes of thinking, their moral values and their manners. So much is standard missionary training today, of course. But the Serampore missionaries see it as crucial to understand the way they reason about God, sin, holiness, the way of salvation, and [man's] future state. This surely parallels the move in today's 'Emerging Church' to understand where post-modern people are coming from, and then to reach out to them in Facebook evangelism or whatever.
Carey also advocates a commonsense approach to interacting with people of the Hindu majority religion. We must abstain from those things which would increase their prejudices against the gospel - in particular, English colonial haughtiness, and cruelty to animals. There should be no direct confrontations, no defacing of their statues, no disturbance of their worship gatherings. Carey praises the mild-mannered and gracious approach of the Moravian missions (see several of my previous posts) and of the Quakers among the Native American tribes. He was to enlarge on this elsewhere.
He who is too proud to stoop to others, in order to draw them to him..., is ill-qualified to be a missionary , states the Covenant. The Serampore trio pledge to follow the stated aim of the Apostle Paul, to "be all things to all men, that I may by all means win some" (the Bible, 1 Corinthians 9:22). And the section closes with a paraphrase from an unnamed missionary to North America, almost certainly either David Brainerd or John Eliot: "that he would not care if the people trampled him under their feet, if he might become useful to their souls".
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