Graham Staines

Life and Ministry

Graham Staines was born at Palmwoods in Queensland, Australia, in AD 1941, joined the Evangelical Missionary Society of Mayurbhanj as a lay worker in AD 1965, and gave the next thirty-four years of his life to leprosy work in the tribal districts of Odisha in eastern India. With his wife Gladys, an Australian nurse he married in AD 1983, he ran the Mayurbhanj Leprosy Home at Baripada, where he treated patients shunned by their villages, translated portions of Scripture into the Ho tribal language, and held annual jungle camps among the Santhal and Ho peoples for catechesis, vaccinations, and leprosy screening. He worked under the standing permission of the Indian government and the local Lutheran churches, and was a familiar figure throughout the district.

Circumstances of Death

On the night of 22-23 January AD 1999, Staines and his sons Philip (aged ten) and Timothy (aged six) were sleeping in their station-wagon Jeep at Manoharpur village after a jungle camp, his wife and daughter Esther having returned home to Baripada. A mob led by Dara Singh, a Bajrang Dal activist of the Hindutva extremist movement, surrounded the Jeep about midnight, blocked the doors with logs, doused it in straw and kerosene, and set it alight. The three Staines were burned alive inside, the villagers prevented from intervening by the mob with crude weapons. Gladys Staines, on receiving the news the next morning at Baripada, said publicly that she had forgiven the killers as the gospel of her Lord required, and continued the leprosy mission for another five years before retiring to Australia.

Legacy

Staines was awarded the Padma Shri posthumously by the Indian government and Gladys received it for her continued service. The trial that followed convicted Dara Singh under Indian criminal law in AD 2003. The witness of the Staines family is that the gospel makes no demand of self-defense and admits no provocation to retaliation: Gladys's forgiveness, recorded on Indian national television within twenty-four hours of her family's burning, became one of the most-cited Christian testimonies in modern South Asian missions history. The leprosy patients of Mayurbhanj continued to receive their treatment in the name of the Lord who had cleansed lepers in Galilee.