The history of Christianity in Pakistan was, until 1947, necessarily part of the church history in India. However, it looks possible to trace as far as we can, something regarding the early contacts of Christianity within that country which was part of the India provinces, and is now called Pakistan since its independence August 14, 1947.

Even though there is no official denial nor is there any confirmation and/or official recognition, the ancient church of the "Thomas Christians" in south India strongly maintains that the Apostle Thomas himself brought Christianity to India in the 1^st Century. Even though there are no official claims or denials, there is strong evidence that by the 3^rd Century A.D. parts of India had been Christianized. Then, for almost a thousand years, the spreading of Islamic in the North reduced the development of Christianity to the West. The Thomas Christians in South India were largely unknown to the rest of the world, apart from such occasional travelers to the Orient such as Marco Polo, who stated often, not to say always, the presence of long established Syrian or Nestorian Christians in Persia and in India.

When Vasco de Gama sailed into the Indian Ocean around 1498, Catholic, European Christianity found its way to the subcontinent. In the century that followed, the Roman Catholic Portuguese opened enclaves along the Indian coasts while the Muslim Mugbals were spreading over much of the interior. Also, Jesuit missions began early with the arrival of Francis Xavier in Goa (1542). In the Punjab of the northwestern India, that became Pakistan later on, the Portuguese Jesuits built the first Christian church in Lahore in the 1600’s when the Mugbal Emperor Akbar looked with some kind of tolerance upon some of his subjects accepting Jesus into their lives. As for the south, the death of an Augustinian friar was recorded in Sindh in 1598, and by 1618 Portuguese Carmelites arrived from Persia to found a church and a mission at the important trading center of Tbatta (near by Karachi) as a link between their missions in the Persian Gulf and in Goa. By 1672 the mission had come to an unfruitful end as no more trace of Christianity is found in the area until the British conquest of Sindh in the years 1842, 43.

As for the Protestant missions in Pakistan, we believe that upon the initiative of the Church of England, as well as the Presbyterians of the United States, their origin dated back to 1833 where Rev John C. Lowrie and his wife arrived from the United States in the fall of that year. Even though Rev. Lowrie’s wife died from tuberculosis shortly after their arrival in Calcutta bound to the Punjab in order to establish a mission in Sikhs, he decided to move on in his evangelistic mission due to the fact that he believed that the Sikhs discarded the old idolatry of Hinduism and to some extent the system of Caste. Therefore, they represented a strong potential to respond to the Christian message and faith. In 1850, the first resident British missionaries came with the Church missionary Society and settled in Karachi where the first resident Roman Catholic priest preceded them in 1843. In a few years, the Christian Missionary Society had spread across Sindh, Punjab and the northwest frontier.

Because of the Indian Mutiny in 1857, for the years that followed, Christianity was taking a "hit" as its number decreased considerably. It is only in the 1870’s that Christianity started rising again slowly through the extensive but very difficult work of missionaries. In 1873 a change in emphasis came to the Sialkot with the conversion of Ditt, a dark skinned seller of bides from the caste Chuhras (Chuhras: "scavengers"). He had been somewhat instructed in the Christian faith by a weak and rather unsatisfactory Hindu convert before he appeared at the door of the Presbyterian mission house where he requested to be baptized. Even though the missionary insisted for him to stay in order to receive Christian teaching, Ditt decided to go back to his village. Three months later, he brought his wife and his children to be baptized as well but they, too, went back to their village. Since then, his occupation took him from village to village, where he witnessed Christianity to all his relatives. Despite a good deal of persecution, he went on to continue witnessing to others. Ditt stayed illiterate but his strength was that he had the ability to memorize the Word and he preached in his own Tribe, the Chuhras in Sialkot. Under his leadership half of the district was baptized. By 1935 nearly all of Ditt’s people had become Christians and, as of today, 90 percent of the Christians in Pakistan can trace their ancestry to this Chuhras caste.