(Università Pontificia Salesiana, Roma) – As the Khasi community of North-East India stepped into the uncertainties of the third millennium, one name continued to resonate with clarity and conviction: father Sylvanus Sngi Lyngdoh SDB (1921–2016).
Affectionately remembered as Fr. Sngi, he was more than a priest, scholar, and legislator—he was a spiritual architect who rooted the Christian Gospel deeply in Khasi cultural soil.
This vision is the subject of Fr. Kenny Nongrum’s doctoral thesis, defended on 11 December 2025 at the Salesian University in Rome. His study highlights how Fr. Sngi became the bridge between Khasi cultural identity and Christian faith, ensuring that evangelisation was not a foreign imposition but a lived dialogue with tradition.
At the heart of Nongrum’s findings is the conviction that Fr. Sngi’s pastoral genius lay in inculturation—expressing the Gospel through the language, symbols, and rhythms of Khasi life. By drawing on myths, oral traditions, and indigenous cosmology, he gave the Khasi people a faith that felt truly their own. Christianity, in his hands, sanctified culture, offering a Khasi-Christian spirituality that resonated deeply in homes, villages, and communities.
Nongrum’s thesis underscores how this inculturated evangelisation prepared the Khasi faithful for the challenges of the third millennium. In an age of globalization and cultural homogenization, Fr. Sngi’s approach safeguarded Khasi identity while opening it to the universality of the Gospel. His writings and sermons became a roadmap for contextual theology, showing that authentic evangelisation must dignify the culture it encounters rather than erase it.
Nongrum also highlights Fr. Sngi’s wider contributions—as a scholar, elevating Khasi heritage into theological discourse; as a pastor, known as “friend of the sick”; and as a public servant, briefly serving in the Meghalaya Legislative Assembly. Together, these roles reveal a man whose evangelisation was inseparable from social transformation, cultural pride, and human dignity.
Fr. Sylvanus Sngi Lyngdoh’s funeral was held on 30 May 2016 at the Cathedral in Laitumkhrah, Shillong, followed by burial at the Laitumkhrah Catholic cemetery. His funeral drew tens of thousands of mourners, including bishops, archbishops from Shillong, Guwahati, Dibrugarh, and Tura, as well as state leaders and members of the Salesian family.
In the wake of the third millennium, his legacy continues to inspire: a Khasi-Christian spirituality that resists cultural erasure, a faith that dignifies identity, and an evangelisation that bridges tradition and modernity.
Fr. Sylvanus Sngi Lyngdoh remains, in the words of his admirers, a genius of inculturation and evangelisation. His life and work remind us that the Gospel, when truly inculturated, does not diminish a people’s heritage—it sanctifies it, making it a vessel of grace for generations to come.
Source: Matters India