In 1897, Sherwood Eddy experienced a personal and spiritual crisis that profoundly changed his vision of missionary work. He understood that his argumentative, apologetic approach could not be very successful because it created a defensive attitude among his listeners; he wrote: "we were not sent to win debates but to win people"; he understood that the elites were not the right way in but that he had to address the ordinary people and, in 1900, he took almost two years off to learn Tamil; he understood that the local people and those who had come as missionaries had to be treated on a strictly equal footing: he was among the first to understand the aspirations of colonized peoples for self-determination and the need to appoint local leaders to lead local churches. In doing so, he anticipated by nearly 50 years, and initiated, the reflection that would lead the American Presbyterian Mission to thoroughly review its concepts, mainly after 1945.