American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. India. 1813-1966.

The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) was founded in 1810, and it was the first organized missionary society in the United States. By the time of its centenary in 1910, the Board was responsible for 102 mission stations and a missionary staff of 600 in India, Ceylon, West Central Africa (Angola), South Africa and Rhodesia, Asiatic and European Turkey, four different regions in China, Japan, Micronesia, the Philippines, and the "Papal lands" of Mexico, Spain and Austria. There were also missions to American Indians, and a mission to Hawaii. The ABCFM began as an inter-denominational society, including Presbyterian and Reformed churches, besides its core of Congregationalists. After some secessions due to the slavery issue and the formation by the Presbyterian Church of its own foreign mission board, the ABCFM was left as a Congregationalist body after 1870. In 1957, the Congregational Christian Churches merged with the Evangelical and Reformed Church to form the United Church of Christ (UCC). On June 29, 1961 the ABCFM was formally concluded, becoming part of the United Church Board for World Ministries (UCBWM), an instrumentality of the new denomination. On July 1, 2000, the UCBWM became Wider Church Ministries, one of the four covenanted ministries of the UCC. (from the finding aid for the ABCFM records at the Houghton Library, Harvard University). The first mission the ABCFM embarked upon was one to India in 1813 to a region in the west of India referred to as the Marathi mission. In 1816 the Ceylon mission was founded, and in 1834 the Madura mission was founded in the southern part of India. The United Church of Northern India was formed in 1924 by the union of the Congregational Churches of the American Marathi mission with the Presbyterian Church in India.